Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Querying aggregate data

1 Introduction We introduce a first-order language with real polynomial arithmetic and aggregation operators (count, iterated sum and multi:ply), which is well suited for the definition of aggregate queries involving complex statistical functions. It offers a good trade-off between expressive power and complexi.ty, with a tractable data complexity. Interestingly, some fundamental properties of first-order with real arithmetic are preserved in the presence of aggregates. In particular, there is an effective quantifier elimination for formulae with aggregation. We consider the problem of querying data that has already been aggregated in aggregate views, and focus on queries with an aggregation over a conjunctive query. Our main conceptual contribution is the introduction of a new equivalence relation among conjunctive queries, the isomorphism modulo a product. We prove that the equivalence of aggregate queries such as for instance averages reduces to it. Deciding if two queries are iso-morphic modulo a product is shown to be NP-complete. We then show that the problem of complete rewriting of count queries using count views is also NP-complete. Finally, we introduce new rewriting techniques based on the isomorphism modulo a product to recover the values of counts by complex arithmetical computation from the views. We conclude by showing how these techniques can be-used to perform automatic aggrega-tion. The manipulation of aggregate data has gained considerable interest in recent years, for its great impact in various applications such as for instance data wareh.ous,-ing. In such applications, queries involve aggregation over evolving data of very large size. The use of ma. -terialized aggregate views, might strongly increase the efficiency of query processing. The modeling and the manipulation of statistical data have been studied with different focus both in the field of statistical databases [Su83, SW85, OOM87, Gho86, RR93, RBT96], and in the field of on-line analytical processing (OLAP) [GBLP96, HRU96, LS97, Sho97]. The real challenge of this sort of data is caused by the rather intricate semantics of summary values, that is not handled by classical database systems. A fundamental problem of statistical databases, is to determine what can be derived from the statistical data. This problem, known as the statistical inference problem is fundamental both for restricting the derivable data for the protection of private data, as well as for deriving new data, by further aggregation of the statistical data, or by automatic aggregation. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal …
Efficient Regret Minimization in Non-Convex Games

We consider regret minimization in repeated games with non-convex loss functions. Minimizing the standard notion of regret is computationally intractable. Thus, we define a natural notion of regret which permits efficient optimization and generalizes offline guarantees for convergence to an approximate local optimum. We give gradient-based methods that achieve optimal regret, which in turn guarantee convergence to equilibrium in this framework.
Towards low-latency and ultra-reliable vehicle-to-vehicle communication

Recently vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication emerged as a key enabling technology to ensure traffic safety and other mission-critical applications. In this paper, a novel proximity and quality-of-service (QoS)-aware resource allocation for V2V communication is proposed. The proposed approach exploits the spatial-temporal aspects of vehicles in terms of their physical proximity and traffic demands, to minimize the total transmission power while considering queuing latency and reliability. Due to the overhead caused by frequent information exchange between vehicles and the roadside unit (RSU), the centralized problem is decoupled into two interrelated subproblems. First, a novel RSU-assisted virtual clustering mechanism is proposed to group vehicles in zones based on their physical proximity. Given the vehicles' traffic demands and their QoS requirements, resource blocks are assigned to each zone. Second, leveraging techniques from Lyapunov stochastic optimization, a power minimization solution is proposed for each V2V pair within each zone. Simulation results for a Manhattan model have shown that the proposed scheme outperforms the baseline in terms of average queuing latency reduction up to 97% and significant improvement in reliability.
Fast Adaptive Algorithms for Active Control of Nonlinear Noise Processes

This correspondence attempts to derive the exact implementation of two nonlinear active noise control (ANC) algorithms, viz. FSLMS and VFXLMS. The concept of reutilizing a part of the computations performed for the first sample while computing the next sample, for a block length of two samples, is exploited here to implement the fast and exact versions of the FSLMS and VFXLMS algorithms which are computationally efficient. Detailed computational complexity analysis for both addition and multiplication requirements is presented to show the advantage of the proposed algorithms. Appropriate simulation experiments are carried out to compare the performance equivalence of the proposed fast algorithms with their original versions.
Faster Translated Binary Execution on Mobile System through Virtualization

One of the challenges of the binary translation on virtual machine(VM) is to make a mapping from registers in emulated architecture to registers in the target architecture. The efficiency on the emulated architecture is best translated into efficiency on the target machine if target instructions also operated on register operands. However, conventional binary translators of popular VMs do not take into account instruction dependency among two or more basic blocks. This results in performance degradation due to inter-translation block dependency. Because binary translation makes use of 1 or 2 registers repeatedly for the majority of translation blocks. The translation block corresponds to a guest(emulated) instruction, which in turn the amount of work is not large. Even though there are no dependencies between translation blocks, false dependencies are generated by the repeated use of the same register usage order. In order to resolve the problem, we propose a novel approach maintaining two different register allocation orders, applying them alternatively. We call this as alternative register allocation in this paper. The experimental results show up to 26.3% better performance to conventional method.
Research of QoC Based Management for Complex Sensor Networks Applications

With rapid development of IOT (Internet of Things), the computing mode of the 21st century is undergoing profound reform. IOT's final goal is fusing the information space composed of computers with the physical space in which the people are working and living in. By this fusion, people can get information service transparently according to their personal needs whenever and wherever they are. However, it will lead to more multiple-dimensional and more numerous information with wide-area and heterogeneous sensor networks. Accordingly, the information from these kinds of networks may be more uncertain, incomplete, inconsistent and inaccurate. Therefore, we propose a context management framework based on research of how to eliminate incomplete, inconsistent and inaccurate contexts. In this framework, we have used quality factors configuration for contexts, regarding methods for inconsistent and inaccurate contexts as well as filling methods for incomplete contexts. Results shows, we can reduce the uncertainty of the contexts and improve the quality of these wireless sensor networks based applications efficiently.
If You Have High Emotional Intelligence (EI), You Must Trust in Your Abilities

Recent research has suggested that the association between emotional intelligence (EI) and depression is dependent on the type of EI measured (ability EI vs. perceived EI) and on gender. Whereas perceived EI is negatively related with depression in both men and women, only men with high levels of ability EI report less of a depressive affect. An intriguing question arises from these results: Is ability EI an important resource to reduce negative moods in women, and if so, when? In this study, we tried to shed light on this by examining the interaction effect of ability EI and perceived EI on depression in women. Participants were 213 female students who completed an ability measure of EI, a self-report measure of EI, and a depression inventory. Results showed that perceived EI moderated the associations between ability EI and depression, with ability EI being negatively related with depression only in women with high levels of perceived EI. We discuss the importance of integrating ability EI and perceived EI in the EI theory, as well as practical implications of their interactive effects.
Learning Top-Down Grouping of Compositional Hierarchies for Recognition

The complexity of real world image categorization and scene analysis requires compositional strategies for object representation. This contribution establishes a compositional hierarchy by first performing a perceptual bottom-up grouping of edge pixels to generate salient contour curves. A subsequent recursive top-down grouping yields a hierarchy of compositions. All entities in the compositional hierarchy are incorporated in a Bayesian network that couples them together by means of a shape model. The probabilistic model underlying top-down grouping as well as the shape model is learned automatically from a set of training images for the given categories. As a consequence, compositionality simplifies the learning of complex category models by building them from simple, frequently used compositions. The architecture is evaluated on the highly challenging Caltech 101 database1 which exhibits large intra-category variations. The proposed compositional approach shows competitive retrieval rates in the range of 53 . 0 ± 0 . 49%.
Motion artifact reduction in photoplethysmography using independent component analysis

Removing the motion artifacts from measured photoplethysmography (PPG) signals is one of the important issues to be tackled for the accurate measurement of arterial oxygen saturation during movement. In this paper, the motion artifacts were reduced by exploiting the quasi-periodicity of the PPG signal and the independence between the PPG and the motion artifact signals. The combination of independent component analysis and block interleaving with low-pass filtering can reduce the motion artifacts under the condition of general dual-wavelength measurement. Experiments with synthetic and real data were performed to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.
Complete Vision-Based Traffic Sign Recognition Supported by an I2V Communication System

This paper presents a complete traffic sign recognition system based on vision sensor onboard a moving vehicle which detects and recognizes up to one hundred of the most important road signs, including circular and triangular signs. A restricted Hough transform is used as detection method from the information extracted in contour images, while the proposed recognition system is based on Support Vector Machines (SVM). A novel solution to the problem of discarding detected signs that do not pertain to the host road is proposed. For that purpose infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) communication and a stereo vision sensor are used. Furthermore, the outputs provided by the vision sensor and the data supplied by the CAN Bus and a GPS sensor are combined to obtain the global position of the detected traffic signs, which is used to identify a traffic sign in the I2V communication. This paper presents plenty of tests in real driving conditions, both day and night, in which an average detection rate over 95% and an average recognition rate around 93% were obtained with an average runtime of 35 ms that allows real-time performance.
Learning From Technical Documents: The Role of Intermodal Referring Expressions

Objective: We investigated the impact of two types of intermodal referring expressions on efficiency of instructions for use. Background: User manuals for software or technical devices such as a video recording system frequently combine verbal instructions and illustrations. Much research has shown that the presence of an illustration has a beneficial effect on learning. The present study focuses on a factor that modulates this beneficial effect. The combination of text and an illustration can be effective only if the user integrates the information coming from these two media. This integration depends largely on the intermodal referential expressions, the function of which is to mark explicitly the relations between the text and the illustration. Method: In an experiment (N = 104), we compared the effectiveness of two intermodal referring expressions often used in procedural texts: indexes (numbers introduced in the illustrations and in the instructions to establish cross-references) and icons (visual representations of the components of the device, which are inserted in the verbal instructions). Results: The icons condition led to the most efficient use of the device. Conclusion: This experiment shows that learning from multimedia documents depends on the possibility of effectively connecting the verbal instructions to the illustration. Application: Taking into account the ergonomic properties of the cross-media referring expressions should allow text designers to improve the effectiveness of technical documents.
Do interviewer voice characteristics influence unit response in telephone surveys

Although telephone interviewing is one of the major data collection methods used in survey research and response rates have been declining for years, the effects of the interviewers’ voice characteristics on the cooperation of respondents have hardly been studied. The decision to participate in a telephone survey results from a complex of factors (Dillman, Gallegos, & Rencher, 1976; Groves & Couper, 1998; Groves & McGonnacle, 2001). Yet, the interviewers’ voice characteristics may be particularly important, as visible aspects of communication are absent. Since our aim was to evaluate the impact of the interviewers’ voice characteristics as such, we restricted our study to the first stage of the introduction, namely the interviewer reading the introductory text. The great majority of refusals to participate in a telephone interview occur immediately after this first stage (Dijkstra & Smit, 2002; Maynard & Schaeffer, 1997; Oksenberg & Cannell, 1988). Because no persuasion techniques are applied during this stage, such voice characteristics as pitch or speech rate may therefore affect the first reaction of the recipient. The few studies that have been performed on this matter (Hufken & Schafer, 2003; three studies in Oksenberg & Cannell, 1988) concerned one or two of the following measures: (1) voice characteristics established by objective acoustic measures; (2) judges’ ratings of voice characteristics; and (3) judges’ ratings of the (supposed) recipients’ impression of personal characteristics of the interviewer. Our research project was designed to extend these studies by (a) utilizing each of the three measures jointly; (b) applying the measures to interview introductions from a large-scale household survey, and (c) relating the measures to the interviewers’ cooperation rates (being a specification of response rates, as explained later) actually obtained in that household survey as well as to the rated willingness of judges to grant an interview. Thus, our research question is formulated as follows: Do the (perceived) interviewers’ voice characteristics and personal characteristics relate to cooperation rates in telephone interviews, and if so, is there a plausible theoretical explanation for these relationships?
Does O-GlcNAc play a role in neurodegenerative diseases?

There are several lines of evidence that the modification of proteins by cytosolic- and nuclear-specific O-linked N-acetylglucosamine (O-GlcNAc) glycosylation is closely related to neuropathologies, particularly Alzheimer’s disease. Several neuronal proteins have been identified as being modified with O-GlcNAc; these proteins could form part of the inclusion bodies found, for example, in the most frequently observed neurologic disorder (i.e., Alzheimer’s disease; Tau protein and β-amyloid peptide are the well known aggregated proteins). O-GlcNAc proteins are also implicated in synaptosomal transport (e.g., synapsins and clathrin-assembly proteins). Inclusion bodies are partly characterized by a deficiency in the ubiquitin–proteasome system, avoiding the degradation of aggregated proteins. From this perspective, it appears interesting that substrate proteins could be protected against proteasomal degradation by being covalently modified with single N-acetylglucosamine on serine or threonine, and that the proteasome itself is modified and regulated by O-GlcNAc (in this case the turnover of neuronal proteins correlates with extracellular glucose). Interestingly, glucose uptake and metabolism are impaired in neuronal disorders, and this phenomenon is linked to increased phosphorylation. In view of the existence of the dynamic interplay between O-GlcNAc and phosphorylation, it is tempting to draw a parallel between the use of glucose, O-GlcNAc glycosylation and phosphorylation. Lastly, the two enzymes responsible for O-GlcNAc dynamism (i.e., O-GlcNAc transferase and glucosaminidase) are both enriched in the brain and genes that encode the two enzymes are located in two regions that are found to be frequently mutated in neurologic disorders. The data presented in this review strongly suggest that O-GlcNAc could play an active role in neurodegenerative diseases.
On the Fast Construction of Spatial Hierarchies for Ray Tracing

In this paper we address the problem of fast construction of spatial hierarchies for ray tracing with applications in animated environments including non-rigid animations. We discuss the properties of currently used techniques with O(N log N) construction time for kd-trees and bounding volume hierarchies. Further, we propose a hybrid data structure blending a spatial kd-tree with bounding volume primitives. We keep our novel hierarchical data structures algorithmically efficient and comparable with kd-trees by using a cost model based on surface area heuristics. Although the time complexity O(N log N) is a lower bound required for construction of any spatial hierarchy that corresponds to sorting based on comparisons, using approximate method based on space discretization, we propose novel hierarchical data structures with an expected O(N log log N) time complexity. We also discuss constants behind the construction algorithms of spatial hierarchies important in practice. We have documented the performance of our algorithms by results obtained from implementation on nine scenes
Cross‐evaluation of degree programmes in higher education

Purpose – This study seeks to develop and describe the benchmarking approach of enhancement‐led evaluation in higher education and to present a cross‐evaluation process for degree programmes.Design/methodology/approach – The benchmarking approach produces useful information for the development of degree programmes based on self‐evaluation, evaluation visits and analyses.Findings – The cross‐evaluation of degree programmes can result in recommendations not only for the improvement of the degree programme, but also for that of the whole institution and the evaluation process.Originality/value – The results of the study are useful for those who want to improve the quality culture of higher education institutions.
Cylindrical Panorama Using the Tilt of a Camera

We propose a method for extending the vertical field of view when constructing a cylindrical panorama. Cylindrical panorama construction is a simple technique with which we can construct a wide-view and high-resolution panoramic image from a collection of still images taken with a panning camera. This method, however, has a problem in that it lacks a field of view in the vertical direction. To solve this problem, we have to compute the tilting angle that is fixed during the panning. We therefore propose a method of computing the angle from images. Since our method is based on feature correspondence and a linear function, it is fast to compute. We show the effectiveness by experiments both on synthetic data and real images.
Directional selectivity and its use in early visual processing

The construction of directionally selective units, and their use in the processing of visual motion, are considered. The zero crossings of ∇2G(x, y) ∗ I(x, y) are located, as in Marr & Hildreth (1980). That is, the image is filtered through centre-surround receptive fields, and the zero values in the output are found. In addition, the time derivative ∂[∇2G(x, y) ∗ l(x, y)]/∂t is measured at the zero crossings, and serves to constrain the local direction of motion to within 180°. The direction of motion can be determined in a second stage, for example by combining the local constraints. The second part of the paper suggests a specific model of the information processing by the X and Y cells of the retina and lateral geniculate nucleus, and certain classes of cortical simple cells. A number of psychophysical and neurophysiological predictions are derived from the theory.
Connecting Writing and Speaking with Linguistically Diverse Teacher Education Students

The increasing diversity of students and the pedagogical issues that such differences bring to the classroom is a challenge for early childhood teacher education programs today. In the early childhood education classroom, culturally and linguistically diverse teachers are sought after, yet these same diverse teacher candidates find it difficult to negotiate academic writing in English. This qualitative study of the writing processes of 26 linguistically diverse teacher candidates in an early childhood program of a public community college in spring 2007 attempts to provide strategies and elicit information to facilitate academic writing in this population. Two discussion methodologies, Symposium and Freewrite/Case Story, were used as a prelude to the academic essay in two education classes, with positive results. One class served as a control without the intervention. Data sources included essays, surveys, interviews, and observations.
Organizational interlocks between new social movements and traditional elites: the case of the West German peace movement

Abstract. This paper deals with the question of whether the concept of elites is a fruitful category for the analysis of new social movements. It is proposed that mobilizations of new social movements are to be understood as dynamic interaction processes between mass constituencies and movement entrepreneurs, mediated by organizational communication networks. Taking the case of the West German peace movement, it is shown that such leadership roles can be identified as parts of the movement's internal division of labour. Furthermore, it is shbwn that movement entrepreneurs of the peace movement are also linked to established elite sectors.