Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Robust Assignments with Vulnerable Nodes

Various real-life planning problems require making upfront decisions before all parameters of the problem have been disclosed. An important special case of such problem especially arises in scheduling and staff rostering problems, where a set of tasks needs to be assigned to an available set of resources (personnel or machines), in a way that each task is assigned to one resource, while no task is allowed to share a resource with another task. In its nominal form, the resulting computational problem reduces to the well-known assignment problem that can be modeled as matching problems on bipartite graphs. In recent work \cite{adjiashvili_bindewald_michaels_icalp2016}, a new robust model for the assignment problem was introduced that can deal with situations in which certain resources, i.e.\ nodes or edges of the underlying bipartite graph, are vulnerable and may become unavailable after a solution has been chosen. In the original version from \cite{adjiashvili_bindewald_michaels_icalp2016} the resources subject to uncertainty are the edges of the underlying bipartite graph. In this follow-up work, we complement our previous study by considering nodes as being vulnerable, instead of edges. The goal is now to choose a minimum-cost collection of nodes such that, if any vulnerable node becomes unavailable, the remaining part of the solution still contains sufficient nodes to perform all tasks. From a practical point of view, such type of unavailability is interesting as it is typically caused e.g.\ by an employee's sickness, or machine failure. We present algorithms and hardness of approximation results for several variants of the problem.
The hinterland of emotions: Facing the open-microphone challenge

We first depict the challenge to address all non-prototypical varieties of emotional states signalled in speech in an open microphone setting, i. e. using all data recorded. In the remainder of the article, we illustrate promising strategies, using the FAU Aibo emotion corpus, by showing different degrees of classification performance for different degrees of prototypicality, and by elaborating on the use of ROC curves, classification confidences, and the use of correlation-based analyses.
Simulations Of The Potential Yields Of Jenguma Soybean Variety In The Upper West Region Using Aquacrop Model

The potential yields of Jenguma soybean (110 calendars days) a medium maturity variety recommended for northern Ghana were simulated using the AquaCrop model with daily climatic data taken from the Wa Meteorological Station. The climate was delineated to be the only constraint limiting the potential yields with the soil serving only as a reservoir to store the rainfall while other factors affecting the potential yields were assumed non-limiting. The simulations were done in growing degree days (GDD) which is about 2275 °C-days rather than in calendars days. The average potential yields of Jenguma soybean planted in the recommended planting period in mid-June to July on uniformly deep clay loamy were 4.6 tons/ha, 4.4 tons/ha and 4.6 tons/ha for the 2009, 2010 and 2011 farming year respectively. For any of the generated planting dates the yields were more than the yearly averages recorded in the region. The climate of the region is therefore suitable for the production of Jenguma soybean variety and hence with adequate investment and best agronomic practices to provide constraint free environment, the yields will be improved from the current average of about 1.2 tons/ha hence increasing the productivity and improving the livelihoods of soybean farmers in the region.
Profiling of Genes Related to Cross Protection and Competition for NbTOM1 by HLSV and TMV

Cross protection is the phenomenon through which a mild strain virus suppresses symptoms induced by a closely related severe strain virus in infected plants. Hibiscus latent Singapore virus (HLSV) and Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) are species within the genus tobamovirus. HLSV can protect Nicotiana benthamiana against TMV-U1 strain, resulting in mild symptoms instead of severe systemic necrosis. The mechanism of cross protection between HLSV and TMV is unknown. In the past, some researchers suggest that the protecting virus strain might occupy virus-specific replication sites within a cell leaving no room for the challenge virus. Quantitative real-time RT-PCR was performed to detect viral RNA levels during cross protection. HLSV accumulation increased in cross protected plants compared with that of single HLSV infected plants, while TMV decreased in cross protected plants. This suggests that there is a competition for host factors between HLSV and TMV for replication. To investigate the mechanism under the cross protection between HLSV and TMV, microarray analysis was conducted to examine the transcriptional levels of global host genes during cross protection, using Tobacco Gene Expression Microarray, 4x44 k slides. The transcriptional level of some host genes corresponded to accumulation level of TMV. Some host genes were up-regulated only by HLSV. Tobamovirus multiplication gene 1 (TOM1), essential for tobamovirus multiplication, was involved in competition for replication by HLSV and TMV during cross protection. Both HLSV and TMV accumulation decreased when NbTOM1 was silenced. A large quantity of HLSV resulted in decreased TMV accumulation in HLSV+TMV (100:1) co-infection. These results indicate that host genes involved in the plant defense response and virus multiplication are up-regulated by challenge virus TMV but not by protecting virus HLSV during cross protection.
Understanding exergame users' physical activity, motivation and behavior over time

Effective exergames should increase the proportion of time users regularly spend in moderate to vigorous physical activity. There are currently few studies of exergame systems which evaluate the impact on physical activity over time. Those which do, show increases in light intensity exercise which although valuable, do not increase the proportion of moderate to vigorous activity required for optimal health benefits. Furthermore, longitudinal studies to date have encountered a plateau effect in physical activity as the novelty of the game wears off. This paper suggests how exergame designs based on deeper understandings of player motivations could address these problems. We report on longitudinal patterns of users' physical activity, motivations and behaviour when using exergames, based on case studies from a seven week long school based field trial. These new insights, interpreted through Bandura's theory of self efficacy, are of value to designers in the HCI community who wish to motivate users with a range of attitudes towards exercise to undertake regular moderate to vigorous physical activity.
Effects of the nonlinearity of the common-gate stage on the linearity of CMOS cascode low noise amplifier

This work presents the effects of the common-gate (CG) stage nonlinearity on the linearity of the cascode amplifier. Conventionally, the CG stage is assumed as an ideal current buffer in the CMOS cascode low noise amplifier (LNA) design, but the analysis shows that the CG stage limits the linearity of the cascode LNA as the gain increases, due to the finite output resistance of the CG stage and the parasitic capacitance at the interstage node. Therefore, the simple linearization of the CS stage has difficulties to enhance the gain of LNA as the operating frequency increases. To confirm the analysis, a 2 GHz CMOS LNA was designed and the gain and the nonlinearity were measured. The measurement results show that there exists optimum load impedance to achieve the maximum OIP3 of the LNA as expected by the analysis.
WeBrowse: Mining HTTP logs online for network-based content recommendation

A powerful means to help users discover new content in the overwhelming amount of information available today is sharing in online communities such as social networks or crowdsourced platforms. This means comes short in the case of what we call communities of a place: people who study, live or work at the same place. Such people often share common interests but either do not know each other or fail to actively engage in submitting and relaying information. To counter this effect, we propose passive crowdsourced content discovery, an approach that leverages the passive observation of web-clicks as an indication of users' interest in a piece of content. We design, implement, and evaluate WeBrowse , a passive crowdsourced system which requires no active user engagement to promote interesting content to users of a community of a place. Instead, it extracts the URLs users visit from traffic traversing a network link to identify popular and interesting pieces of information. We first prototype WeBrowse and evaluate it using both ground-truths and real traces from a large European Internet Service Provider. Then, we deploy WeBrowse in a campus of 15,000 users, and in a neighborhood. Evaluation based on our deployments shows the feasibility of our approach. The majority of WeBrowse's users welcome the quality of content it promotes. Finally, our analysis of popular topics across different communities confirms that users in the same community of a place share common interests, compared to users from different communities, thus confirming the promise of WeBrowse's approach.
Naive Drell-Yan and Its Successor

We review the development in the field of lepton pair production since proposing parton-antiparton annihilation as the mechanism of massive lepton pair production. The basic physical picture of the Drell-Yan model has survived the test of QCD, and the predictions from the QCD improved version have been confirmed by the numerous experiments performed in the last three decades. The model has provided an active theoretical arena for studying infrared and collinear divergences in QCD. It is now so well understood theoretically that it has become a powerful tool for new phyiscs information such as precision measurements of the W mass and lepton and quark sizes.
Rotation Invariant Texture Description Using Symmetric Dense Microblock Difference

This letter is devoted to the problem of rotation invariant texture classification. Novel rotation invariant feature, symmetric dense microblock difference (SDMD), is proposed which captures the information at different orientations and scales. N-fold symmetry is introduced in the feature design configuration, while retaining the random structure that provides discriminative power. The symmetry is utilized to achieve a rotation invariance. The SDMD is extracted using an image pyramid and encoded by the Fisher vector approach resulting in a descriptor which captures variations at different resolutions without increasing the dimensionality. The proposed image representation is combined with the linear SVM classifier. Extensive experiments are conducted on four texture data sets [Brodatz, UMD, UIUC, and Flickr material data set (FMD)] using standard protocols. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state of the art in texture classification. The MATLAB code is made available.
Interactive multi-attribute electronic negotiations in the supply chain: design issues and an application prototype

We report on the development of a generic application for interactive electronic negotiations in the supply chain. We introduce the concept of interactive bilateral multi-attribute electronic negotiations and explain its significance. We specify an application architecture for this domain, showing three main components and four interfaces. We apply the ebXML framework to model the negotiation process and negotiation documents. As ebXML does not supply suitable process descriptions for generic, interactive electronic negotiations, we suggest a novel ebXML negotiation process model. Additionally, we develop ebXML document structures for this domain.
Do I live in a flood basin?: synthesizing ten thousand maps

The recent introduction of simple, web-based geographic visualization interfaces has unleashed a tidal wave of new geographic content now available on the Internet. There has been enormous attention on the development of data interchange standards and programming interfaces that make all this content interoperable, but far less thought about how the user experience should change when users have their choice of 10,000 maps. To inform the design of online mapping systems, we investigate the case of queries that require correlation of multiple maps---that is, discovery and synthesis of several map layers. We based our study on interviews with expert users of maps: archivists and librarians. This paper describes our user-task taxonomy distilled from these interviews, and presents MapSynthesizer, a prototype system that allows users to efficiently query, discover, and integrate many maps from a corpus of thousands.
CHANNEL MODELS FOR INDOOR WIRELESS TRANSMISSION

In this paper a procedure is given for obtaining the channel impulse response for a rectangular room in terms of image sources. Exact image source strengths are evaluated using the Laplace transform formulation of the Sommerfeld problem. The coherent component of the impulse response is shown to exhibit significant variation is space. The performance of a decision feedback equalizer is examined in this context. The number of feed-forward and feedback taps required for a prescribed performance level is shown to be strongly influenced by the transmission frequency and source/receiver position.
Automated recognition of bird song elements from continuous recordings using dynamic time warping and hidden Markov models: a comparative study.

The performance of two techniques is compared for automated recognition of bird song units from continuous recordings. The advantages and limitations of dynamic time warping (DTW) and hidden Markov models (HMMs) are evaluated on a large database of male songs of zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) and indigo buntings (Passerina cyanea), which have different types of vocalizations and have been recorded under different laboratory conditions. Depending on the quality of recordings and complexity of song, the DTW-based technique gives excellent to satisfactory performance. Under challenging conditions such as noisy recordings or presence of confusing short-duration calls, good performance of the DTW-based technique requires careful selection of templates that may demand expert knowledge. Because HMMs are trained, equivalent or even better performance of HMMs can be achieved based only on segmentation and labeling of constituent vocalizations, albeit with many more training examples than DTW templates. One weakness in HMM performance is the misclassification of short-duration vocalizations or song units with more variable structure (e.g., some calls, and syllables of plastic songs). To address these and other limitations, new approaches for analyzing bird vocalizations are discussed.
Practice of Epidemiology Sensitivity of Four Psychometric Tests to Measure Cognitive Changes in Brain Aging-Population – based Studies

Choosing the measure of cognition in an epidemiologic study investigating cognitive changes over time is a challenging question. A powerful measure must be able to detect small cognitive changes in all the range of cognition observed in the target population. This work aims at comparing the sensitivity to detect cognitive changes in the observed range of cognition of four widely used psychometric tests in an aging-population–based study through a nonlinear latent process model, assuming that the psychometric tests are nonlinear noisy transformations of their common factor. With data from the French prospective cohort study PAQUID (1989–2001), the authors found that the Mini-Mental State Examination and the Benton Visual Retention Test exhibited a better sensitivity to cognitive changes in low levels of cognition, while the Digit Symbol Substitution Test was more sensitive to changes in high levels of cognition. In contrast, the Isaacs Set Test shortened at 15 seconds appeared to be sensitive to small changes in all the range of cognition and, thus, represents an appropriate measure of cognition in population-based studies including both highly normal and severely impaired subjects.
Animating Highly Viscous Liquids with Particle System and Implicit Surface Modeling

Physically based animations of variety of substances offer s automatic generation of realistic simulations of many natural behavior of the subst ances in real world. Various deformable models, collision detection and responses tech niques are available for simulating behaviors of substances with wide rage of physical pr ope ties which includes non viscous fluids, elastic and viscoelastic solids. We present a technique to simulate the deformations of soft substances by handling large scale defor mation with a particle system and local viscoelasticity with implicit surface layer arou nd each particle. Collisions are handled by either fusion with the collided substances or rep ulsive action and friction with other objects. In simulating highly viscous liquids ,howev er, the ”stickiness” of the substances should be considered to be able to animate the liquid s realistically. It would be almost impossible to accurately simulate this gluing behav ior of viscous liquids. In this paper, we are attempting to approximate this behavior with a relatively simple collision response model and elastic model using implicit surface. Th is raises needs for new formulation of collision detection and its responses which based on the collision history of the substances because the deformation of the viscous liquid de pen s on its collision traces. We extend models based on particles system and present colli sion responses techniques based on implicit surface formulations.
Chapter 5 Integrating and Generalizing Volunteered Geographic Information

The availability of spatial data on the web has greatly increased through the availability of user-generated community data and geosensor networks. The integration of such multi-source data is providing promising opportunities, as integrated information is richer than only one data source, but also poses new challenges due to the heterogeneity of the data, the differences in quality and regarding the tag-based semantic modelling. The chapter describes approaches for the integration of official and informal sources, and discusses the impact of integrating user-generated data on the automated generalization and visualization.
The international tourists’ destination satisfaction and developmental policy suggestions for Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

ABSTRACT This study attempted to identify the factors affecting tourists’ destination satisfaction in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). Quantitative approach was used with structured questionnaires translated into four languages (English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean) and sent directly to 2073 foreign tourists who were staying in HCMC for at least 3 days. The major statistical techniques applied including factor analysis, multiple regressions, and path analysis. The findings of this study indicated that tourists’ destination satisfaction was directly and indirectly affected by eleven predictors of the research model which included perceived value, perceived service quality, safety and security, perceived price, destination image, objective negative attributes, natural environment, local cuisine, tourist infrastructure, entertainment and recreation activities, and cultural, historical, and art attractions. Based on the empirical results, practical implications were especially provided for local tourism policy makers of HCMC.
NOS2 Gene Deficiency Protects from Sepsis-Induced Long-Term Cognitive Deficits

To date, long-term consequences of septic encephalopathy on cerebral metabolism, cognition, learning, and memory capabilities and factors involved are poorly understood. In this study, we used a murine sepsis model to demonstrate that bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS) causes long-term cognitive deficits in mice. Two months after LPS treatment, wild-type mice committed more working and reference memory errors than controls. The behavioral impairment was independent of the cerebral glucose uptake as evidenced by 18F-Fluordeoxyglucose small animal positron emission tomography. In contrast, mice deficient for the inducible nitric oxide synthase gene (NOS2−/−) did not show any cognitive changes when challenged with LPS. Immunohistochemical analysis demonstrated that LPS did not lead to neuronal cell death but caused sustained microglial activation in wild-type as compared to NOS2−/− mice. Expression analysis showed that LPS-treated NOS2−/− mice had lower brain mRNA levels for proinflammatory factors compared with wild-type mice. Expression analysis demonstrated distinct changes in the content of synaptic proteins in wild-type mice, which were not observed in the NOS2−/− mice. Together, this data set outlines the importance of the NOS2 activation for long-term cerebral changes after severe sepsis.
Analysis of the latency-lifetime tradeoff in wireless sensor networks

Energy conservation is a primary concern in wireless sensor networks due to the limited capacity of the sensor nodes' batteries. In this paper, we study the relationship between sensor networks performance, particularly its lifetime, and the number of reporting nodes N by using both analytical and simulation approaches. We first show that decreasing N increases considerably the network lifetime. Moreover, we demonstrate that the average time required to report an event is a convex function of N. Based on these results, and as a main contribution, we prove that the optimal number of reporting nodes enabling the shortest latency to report reliably an event does not really lead to the most efficient way of energy consumption. In this paper, we analyze the tradeoff between these two requirements. We provide a simple methodology to achieve this tradeoff which is specific to each sensor application, depending on its particular needs.
Freehand gestural text entry for interactive TV

Users increasingly expect more interactive experiences with TV. Combined with the recent development of freehand gestural interaction enabled by inexpensive sensors, interactive television has the potential to offer a highly usable and engaging experience. However, common interaction tasks such as text input are still challenging with such systems. In this paper, we investigate text entry using freehand gestures captured with a low-cost sensor system. Two virtual keyboard layouts and three selection techniques were designed and evaluated. Results show that a text entry method with dual circle layout and an expanding target selection technique offers ease of use and error tolerance, key features if we are to increase the use and enhance the experience of interactive TV in the living room.
Mobile device-to-device (D2D) content delivery networking: A design and optimization framework

We consider a mobile content delivery network (mCDN) in which special mobile devices designated as caching servers (caching-server device: CSD) can provide mobile stations with popular contents on demand via device-to-device (D2D) communication links. On the assumption that mobile CSD's are randomly distributed by a Poisson point process (PPP), an optimization problem is formulated to determine the probability of storing the individual content in each server in a manner that minimizes the average caching failure rate. Further, we present a low-complexity search algorithm, optimum dual-solution searching algorithm (ODSA), for solving this optimization problem. We demonstrate that the proposed ODSA takes fewer iterations, on the order of O (log N) searches, for caching N contents in the system to find the optimal solution, as compared to the number of iterations in the conventional subgradient method, with an acceptable accuracy in practice. Furthermore, we identify the important characteristics of the optimal caching policies in the mobile environment that would serve as a useful aid in designing the mCDN.