Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
L'accession a la reproduction : un processus social d'ontogenese : cas de la mouette tridactyle (rissa tridactyla)

Lors de leur presence dans les colonies, certaines mouettes tridactyles prereproductrices (squatters) occupent des nids de l'annee qu'elles n'ont pas construits. Trois categories de prospecteurs sont distinguees: non-squatters, squatters sur nids et squatters sur poussins. De la premiere a la troisieme, ces categories refletent un gradient croissant de stabilisation, de duree de sejour, de cantonnement, d'appropriation d'un site et d'activite sexuelle traduisant la progression individuelle dans le processus d'ontogenese sociale qu'est l'accession a la reproduction. La prospection est une selection de l'habitat. Frequentant plusieurs colonies, les oiseaux peuvent en estimer la qualite par la production et le contexte social. Pour les squatters assidus, cette phase semble achevee: ils sont fixes sur un groupe de sites plutot productifs. Les changements de nid des adultes en echec sont le plus souvent precedes d'une phase tres similaire. Parallelement, la prospection permet la maturation physiologique, comportementale et sociale. Pour se reproduire, l'individu doit passer par l'appropriation d'un site, l'attraction d'un partenaire, la formation d'un couple, la coordination, la construction d'un nid. La stabilisation s'accompagne d'une augmentation des interactions sociales. Les squatters assidus, surtout des males, sont les plus ages et les plus avances dans ce processus. Ils acquierent une experience vis-a-vis des nids, y developpent des liens de propriete, se familiarisent avec leur environnement social. L'annee suivante, les squatters sur poussins, les plus frequemment recrutes, sont plus precoces que les autres recrues, occupent les meilleurs sites, et ont un succes de reproduction superieur. Des strategies permettant d'acceder a la reproduction, le squatterisme semble la plus contraignante, mais aussi la plus avantageuse a court terme
Problem 1. Measuring the Topology and Policies of Autonomous Systems (ases). Mapping Problem 3. Generating Annotated as Topologies. as Relationships and as Classes Are Link Internet Topology, Internet Routing Traffic Monitoring Traffic Monitoring, Network Security

Research Methodology: I use network measurements, like routing data and trac traces, to understand how complex systems work in practice, which then helps drive my research to building prudent solutions that address key deciencies. I try to distill complex real-world problems into clear formulations and to investigate suitable solutions leveraging when possible on established theory, like data mining and graph theory. In addition, my research often involves designing and building a system. I iteratively test, validate, and rene until I arrive to a good solution. Finally, I consider important and I try to make software as well as useful measurement data available to the community. The Internet inter-domain routing system is based on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is the glue that holds the Internet together. Despite its critical nature, Internet routing suers from a number of persistent problems, like poor scalability, routing policy conicts, and lack of security. Towards addressing these deciencies, in my PhD research I built techniques and tools for measuring and simulating the inter-domain routing system of the Internet. the topology of the Internet at the level of ASes and inferring policies between ASes are essential for evaluating Internet routing schemes. To ferret out the topology and relationships of ASes, in collaboration with Dmitri Krioukov and colleagues from CAIDA I rst introduced the novel approach of exploiting AS links revealed from BGP updates to build AS topologies and showed that BGP updates nd many new AS links [1]. Then, I designed and validated heuristics for inferring AS relationships, i.e., policies between ASes, based on a novel formulation of the inference problem that exploits both the valley-free structure of observed AS paths and AS degrees to infer accurate AS relationships [2]. Finally, I introduced techniques for classifying ASes into a taxonomy based on keywords mined from Internet Routing Registries [3]. These studies led to a publicly-available repository of AS topologies annotated with inferred AS relationships. Problem 2. BGP++ Simulator. Realistic large-scale simulations are essential for studying the large and complex inter-domain routing system of the Internet. For this reason, with George Riley at Georgia Tech, I designed and developed the BGP++ parallel-distributed BGP simulator [4], which was based on the novel approach of integrating the Zebra open source router with the widely-used ns-2 network simulator. BGP++ simulates the various features of BGP in full detail and can run in a parallel-distributed manner. and node annotations. The …
Replicable Evaluation of Recommender Systems

Recommender systems research is by and large based on comparisons of recommendation algorithms' predictive accuracies: the better the evaluation metrics (higher accuracy scores or lower predictive errors), the better the recommendation algorithm. Comparing the evaluation results of two recommendation approaches is however a difficult process as there are very many factors to be considered in the implementation of an algorithm, its evaluation, and how datasets are processed and prepared. This tutorial shows how to present evaluation results in a clear and concise manner, while ensuring that the results are comparable, replicable and unbiased. These insights are not limited to recommender systems research alone, but are also valid for experiments with other types of personalized interactions and contextual information access.
A General Asymptotic Result Useful in Models with Nuisance Parameters

In statistical models with nuisance parameters, a general asymptotic result of test statistics obtained by substitution of estimators of the nuisance parameters for their unknown values in quantities whose asymptotic distributions are known is provided. Applications of the main result in obtaining asymptotic distributions of statistics formed from residuals of the classical linear model as well as in goodness-oft testing and model validation for Andersen and Gill's (1982) multiplicative intensity model are illustrated. The asymptotic results can be viewed as further extensions of those by Pierce (1982) in models where the plug-in estimators may not be fully eÆcient.
Arabic Handwritten Words Recognition Based on a Planar Hidden Markov Model

Off-line recognition of handwritten words is a difficult task due to the high variability and uncertainty of human writing. The majority of the recent systems are constrained by the size of the lexicon to deal with and the number of writers. In this paper, we propose an approach for multi-writers Arabic handwritten words recognition. The developed method uses multiple sources of information at the description and the classification levels. A hybrid planar Markovien modelling permitting to follow the horizontal and vertical variations of the writing has been adopted. This modelling is based on different levels of segmentation: horizontal, natural and vertical. The process of segmentation conducts to the decomposition of the writing in a limited set of elementary entities, with simplified morphologies specific to every horizontal band. The choice of different type of primitives is then imposed in order to assure an efficient description. Different architectures of modelling proved also to be indispensable. The classification is finally achieved using a Planar Hidden Markov Model.
Optimal Advertising Campaign Generation for Multiple Brands Using MOGA

The paper proposes a new modified multiobjective genetic algorithm (MOGA) for the problem of optimal television (TV) advertising campaign generation for multiple brands. This NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem with numerous constraints is one of the key issues for an advertising agency when producing the optimal TV mediaplan. The classical approach to the solution of this problem is the greedy heuristic, which relies on the strength of the preceding commercial breaks when selecting the next break to add to the campaign. While the greedy heuristic is capable of generating only a group of solutions that are closely related in the objective space, the proposed modified MOGA produces a Pareto-optimal set of chromosomes that: 1) outperform the greedy heuristic; and 2) let the mediaplanner choose from a variety of uniformly distributed tradeoff solutions. To achieve these results, the special problem-specific solution encoding, genetic operators, and original local optimization routine were developed for the algorithm. These techniques allow the algorithm to manipulate with only feasible individuals, thus, significantly improving its performance that is complicated by the problem constraints. The efficiency of the developed optimization method is verified using the real data sets from the Canadian advertising industry.
Interoperable Control Architecture for Cybercars and Dual-Mode Cars

This work is driven by our vision that cybernetic transport systems (CTSs) based on fully automated urban vehicles (cybercars) will be seen on city roads and new dedicated infrastructures in the near future. These automated vehicles can be heterogeneous systems, such as human-driven traffic, each having different features and functionalities. In our case, we have developed a control architecture that can manage automatic driving of two cars: 1) CyCabs and 2) automated mass-produced cars. This architecture is interoperable and generates humanlike control of vehicles in any situation. Installation and communication with each vehicle are easy. The autonomous route-tracking behaviors are similar, even if the mechanical, electronic, software, and hardware configurations are different for both cars. The results of the developments shown in this paper are part of the European Union (EU) CyberCars-2 Project, which is currently under deployment.
Young people's response to death threat appeals: do they really feel immortal?

Threat appeals are used frequently in health promotion, with threats of (premature) death common in some areas, e.g. 'quit smoking or you'll die'. There is a common notion that young people feel they are immortal. Accordingly, we investigated whether young people would respond less to threats of death than to non-death threats and whether younger people would respond less to death threats than older people. This study was conducted with smokers in two age groups (16-25 and 40-50 years). Each respondent was exposed to one message about the threat of emphysema, either a death or non-death message. Younger smokers did not respond more to non-death threats than death threats and expressed a higher level of response to all threats than older smokers. It would appear that death threats are effective with young people and so we conclude that they do not feel immortal. An additional finding was that older females responded significantly more to non-death threats than older males. Death threats may not be effective with older females and a segmentation approach may be advisable when targeting older people using death threats in health promotion campaigns.
Design and Control Methods of Bidirectional DC-DC Converter for the Optimal DC-Link Voltage of PMSM Drive

This paper shows the design and control methods of the bidirectional DC-DC converter to generate the proper DC-link voltage of a PMSM drive. Conventionally, because the controllable power of the PWM based voltage source inverter is limited by its DC-link voltage, the DC-DC converter is used for boosted DC-link voltage if the inverter source cannot generate enough operating voltage for the PMSM drive. In this paper, to obtain more utilization of this DC-DC converter, optimal DC-link voltage control for PMSM drive will be explained. First, the process and current path of the DC-DC converter will be illustrated, and a control method of this converter for variable DC-link voltage will then be explained. Finally, an improvement analysis of the optimal DC-link voltage control method, especially on the deadtime effect, will be explained. The DC-DC converter of the proposed control method is verified by the experiments by comparing with the conventional constant voltage control method.
Enhancing Stock Price Prediction with a Hybrid Approach Based Extreme Learning Machine

In this paper, we focus on the problem of how to design a methodology which can improve the prediction accuracy as well as speed up prediction process for stock market prediction. As market news and stock prices are commonly believed as two important market data sources, we present the design of our stock price prediction model based on those two data sources concurrently. Firstly, in order to get the most significant features of the market news documents, we propose a new feature selection algorithm (NRDC), as well as a new feature weighting algorithm (N-TF-IDF) to help improve the prediction accuracy. Then we employ a fast learning model named Extreme Learning Machine(ELM) and use the kernel-based ELM (K-ELM) to improve the prediction speed. Comprehensive experimental comparisons between our hybrid proposal K-ELM with NRDC and N-TF-IDF(N-N-K-ELM) and the state-of-the-art learning algorithms, including Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Back-Propagation Neural Network (BP-NN), have been undertaken on the intra-day tick-by-tick data of the H-share market and contemporaneous news archives. Experimental results show that our N-N-K-ELM model can achieve better performance on the consideration of both prediction accuracy and prediction speed in most cases.
BAYESIAN SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF CHRONIC DISEASES IN ELDERLY CHINESE PEOPLE USING A STAR MODEL

Abstract Chronic diseases have become important factors affecting the health of elderly Chinese people. Because the prevalence of chronic diseases varies among the provinces, it is necessary to understand the spatial effects on these diseases, as well as their relationships with potential risk factors. This study applies a structured additive regression model and the R2BayesX package to conduct a Bayesian analysis. The data are taken from the 2000, 2006, and 2010 Chinese Urban and Rural Elderly Population Surveys. The findings are as follows: (1) the following covariates have considerable effects on chronic diseases in general, and on specific chronic diseases (hypertension and heart disease) (in descending order): census register (rural or urban), gender, smoking, drinking, province, time, age, cultural activities, years of education, and sports activities; (2) the effect of marital status is negligible; (3) province is a critical factor, with the highest spatial effect appearing in two types of provinces: economically developed provinces, and economically backward provinces; and (4) time also has considerable effects. Based on these findings, the government should further strengthen its investment in rural areas and economically backward provinces as a cost-effective intervention, and should educate the population on the harmful effects of smoking and drinking alcohol on health.
Consilience, clinical validation, and global disorders of consciousness

Abstract Behavioral diagnosis of global disorders of consciousness is difficult and errors in diagnosis occur often. Recent advances in neuroimaging may resolve this problem. However, clinical translation of neuroimaging requires clinical validation. Applying the orthodox approach of clinical validation to neuroimaging raises two critical questions: (i) What exactly is being validated? and (ii) what counts as a gold standard? I argue that confusion over these questions leads to systematic errors in the empirical literature. I propose an alternative approach to clinical validation motivated by reasoning by consilience. Consilience is a mode of reasoning that assigns a degree of plausibility to a hypothesis based on its fit with multiple pieces of evidence from independent sources. I argue that this approach resolves the questions raised by the orthodox approach and may be a useful framework for optimizing future clinical validation studies in the science of consciousness.
Acoustic Echo Cancellation Using Frequency-Domain Spline Identification

Low-complexity delayless acoustic echo cancellation techniques based on frequency-domain spline-identification are proposed and investigated. Two methods of approximation of the acoustic frequency response, both using B-splines, are considered: the optimal-spline method and the local-spline method. The optimal-spline method seeks the solution of a least squares problem. The most computationally demanding part of the method, solution of the normal equations, is implemented by using the low-complexity dichotomous coordinate descent algorithm. The local-spline method avoids solving the normal equations, enabling further simplification; this is at the expense of a slight degradation in the cancellation performance. A novel efficient double-talk detector is also proposed, being an inherent feature of the frequency-domain identification. Open-loop and closed-loop identification schemes with cubic splines are studied by simulation and compared with the fast affine projection (FAP) algorithm. The proposed techniques provide cancellation performance better than that of the FAP algorithm, especially in double-talk and noisy environments, with a lower complexity
Cell-based multiwell assays for the detection of substrate accumulation and oxidation1 Published, JLR Papers in Press, January 9, 2007.

We describe multiwell assays for detecting the accumulation as well as the subsequent oxidation of 14C-labeled substrates in cultured cells. Accumulation is monitored in real time by an established scintillation proximity assay in which the scintillator is embedded in the plate base primarily detecting cell-associated radiolabel. The substrate oxidation assay is a novel variant of previously described experimental approaches aimed at trapping 14CO2 produced by isolated enzymes, organelles, or intact cells. This method uses a standard 96-well tissue culture plate and, on top, an inverted filter plate immersed with NaOH that are clamped into a sandwich sealed with a silicon gasket to obtain gas-tight compartments. 14CO2 is captured in the filter and quantified by conventional scintillation. We demonstrate both the accumulation and subsequent oxidation of 14C-labeled substrates in cultured human myotubes, adipocytes, and hepatocytes. Both methods are adaptable for compound screening; at the same time, these protocols provide easy-to-use and time- saving methods for in vitro studies of cellular fuel handling.
Towards conformal loop quantum gravity

A discussion is given of recent developments in canonical gravity that assimilates the conformal analysis of gravitational degrees of freedom. The work is motivated by the problem of time in quantum gravity and is carried out at the metric and the triad levels. At the metric level, it is shown that by extending the Arnowitt-Deser-Misner (ADM) phase space of general relativity (GR), a conformal form of geometrodynamics can be constructed. In addition to the Hamiltonian and Diffeomorphism constraints, an extra first class constraint is introduced to generate conformal transformations. This phase space consists of York's mean extrinsic curvature time, conformal three-metric and their momenta. At the triad level, the phase space of GR is further enlarged by incorporating spin-gauge as well as conformal symmetries. This leads to a canonical formulation of GR using a new set of real spin connection variables. The resulting gravitational constraints are first class, consisting of the Hamiltonian constraint and the canonical generators for spin-gauge and conformorphism transformations. The formulation has a remarkable feature of being parameter-free. Indeed, it is shown that a conformal parameter of the Barbero-Immirzi type can be absorbed by the conformal symmetry of the extended phase space. This gives rise to an alternative approach to loop quantum gravity that addresses both the conceptual problem of time and the technical problem of functional calculus in quantum gravity.
A hierarchical hybrid model for intelligent cyber-physical systems

Cyber-physical systems are now widespread in applications of paramount importance, from traffic control to healthcare and robotics applications. Modelling cyber-physical systems making use of artificial intelligent methodologies is very difficult, because of unpredictability in AI algorithms timing performances. This paper proposes a methodology to model Intelligent Cyber-Physical Systems, relying on hierarchical hybrid models. The proposed modelling method is used to develop an autonomous robot for face-detection and face-recognition, and some experiments were proposed to validate its performances.
Orchidstra: An Integrated Orchid Functional Genomics Database

A specialized orchid database, named Orchidstra (URL: http://orchidstra.abrc.sinica.edu.tw), has been constructed to collect, annotate and share genomic information for orchid functional genomics studies. The Orchidaceae is a large family of Angiosperms that exhibits extraordinary biodiversity in terms of both the number of species and their distribution worldwide. Orchids exhibit many unique biological features; however, investigation of these traits is currently constrained due to the limited availability of genomic information. Transcriptome information for five orchid species and one commercial hybrid has been included in the Orchidstra database. Altogether, these comprise >380,000 non-redundant orchid transcript sequences, of which >110,000 are protein-coding genes. Sequences from the transcriptome shotgun assembly (TSA) were obtained either from output reads from next-generation sequencing technologies assembled into contigs, or from conventional cDNA library approaches. An annotation pipeline using Gene Ontology, KEGG and Pfam was built to assign gene descriptions and functional annotation to protein-coding genes. Deep sequencing of small RNA was also performed for Phalaenopsis aphrodite to search for microRNAs (miRNAs), extending the information archived for this species to miRNA annotation, precursors and putative target genes. The P. aphrodite transcriptome information was further used to design probes for an oligonucleotide microarray, and expression profiling analysis was carried out. The intensities of hybridized probes derived from microarray assays of various tissues were incorporated into the database as part of the functional evidence. In the future, the content of the Orchidstra database will be expanded with transcriptome data and genomic information from more orchid species.
Continuity and change in governance and decision making in national sport organizations: institutional explanations.

The purpose of this paper was to broaden the discussion and debate about the continuity and change in the governance and decision making of Canada's NSOs and to develop arguments that address why institutional theory provides a strong foundation for advancing our understanding and management of this continuity and change. First, the theoritical contributions of institutional theorists are discussed. This is followed by a critical evaluation of previous institutional perspectives on change in Canada's NSOs. Then a description is given of three aspects of governance and decision making—the institutionalization of volunteer boards, the deinstitutionalization of volunteer control, and the semi-institutionalization of paid executive roles—that provides an alternative institutional explanation of continuity and change in governance and decision making in NSOs. The paper concludes with some suggestions for future research and a consideration of the implications for practice.