Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Object Predetection Based on Kernel Parametric Distribution Fitting

Multimodal distribution fitting is an important task in pattern recognition. For instance, the predetection which is the preliminary stage that limits image areas to be processed in the detection stage amounts to the modeling of a multimodal distribution. Different techniques are available for such modeling. We propose a pros and cons analysis of multimodal distribution fitting techniques convenient for object predetection in images. This analysis leads us to propose efficient and accurate variants over the previously proposed techniques as shown by our experiments. These variants are based on parametric distribution fitting in the RKHS space induced by a positive definite kernel
Texture Image Retrieval Using Non-separable Wavelets and Local Binary Patterns

This paper proposes a new image retrieval method using non-separable discrete wavelets (NDWT) and local binary patterns (LBP). Compared with the traditional wavelet, the three high frequency sub-images generated by the non-separable wavelets can extract more information and do not extensively focus on the three special directions any more. Further, local image texture and their occurrence histogram called local binary pattern (LBP) are a very powerful texture feature in spatial domain. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm in comparison with the existing related algorithms.
Towards a Dependency Parser for Greek Using a Small Training Data Set

Some experiments have been accomplished in order to determine strate- gies that should be followed to build a small corpus capable to train accurately a dependency parser for Greek, using a Machine Learning tool. Thus, several prob- lems that should be treated such syntactic coverage, e! ect of word order or e! ect of morphology in languages with syntactic roles expressed morphologically, are em- pirically studied. With the results presented we would like to lay the foundations for a systematic and e! ective way to develop dependency parsers when lacking huge training corpora. The ideas outlined could be used not only for Greek but for other languages.
Symptom Management and Adjustment of Patients with Multiple Sclerosis

The researchers studied the effectiveness of a nursing intervention in promoting adjustment and symptom management in individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS). This was a 4-year longitudinal study to determine whether the 4-week intensive outpatient program was effective in increasing adjustment to MS and if the treatment effect would last over time. A sample of 27 individuals with MS participated in the study. Treatment participants had significant improvements in symptom management at the 4-year follow up. This improvement was attributable to significant improvements in sleep and fatigue levels. Although adjustment and self-efficacy scores improved in the treatment group over time, this improvement was not superior to the control group. This was anticipated because the behavioral changes would precede improvement in adjustment to life following the diagnosis of MS.
Application of Helmert Variance Component Based Adaptive Kalman Filter in Multi-GNSS PPP/INS Tightly Coupled Integration

The integration of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the Inertial Navigation System (INS) based on Real-time Kinematic (RTK) and Single Point Positioning (SPP) technology have been applied as a powerful approach in kinematic positioning and attitude determination. However, the accuracy of RTK and SPP based GPS/INS integration mode will degrade visibly along with the increasing user-base distance and the quality of pseudo-range. In order to overcome such weaknesses, the tightly coupled integration between GPS Precise Point Positioning (PPP) and INS was proposed recently. Because of the rapid development of the multi-constellation Global Navigation Satellite System (multi-GNSS), we introduce the multi-GNSS into the tightly coupled integration of PPP and INS in this paper. Meanwhile, in order to weaken the impacts of the GNSS observations with low quality and the inaccurate state model on the performance of the multi-GNSS PPP/INS tightly coupled integration, the Helmert variance component estimation based adaptive Kalman filter is employed in the algorithm implementation. Finally, a set of vehicle-borne GPS + BeiDou + GLONASS and Micro-Electro-Mechanical-Systems (MEMS) INS data is analyzed to evaluate the performance of such algorithm. The statistics indicate that the performance of the multi-GNSS PPP/INS tightly coupled integration can be enhanced significantly in terms of both position accuracy and convergence time.
An investigation of wave-induced momentum flux through phase averaging of open ocean wind and wave fields

This thesis presents an investigation of the influence of the dominant, wind-driven, surface waves on the vertical flux of horizontal momentum in the marine surface layer over open ocean conditions. Through a procedure which involves phase averaging the wind fields at the period of the dominant waves, the wave-induced component of the atmospheric fluctuations is isolated and vertical profiles of mean wave-induced momentum flux are computed. Previous investigators have used phase averaging to remove the turbulence from an oscillatory signal, but the absence of a monochromatic wave field in open ocean conditions complicates this approach. This difficulty is overcome by choosing only the time periods characterized by the most monochromatic-like waves present and filtering those sections of wind data with a narrow band-pass filter centered around the dominant wave frequency before beginning the phase averaging process. The analysis is carried a step further by investigating the dependence of wave-induced momentum flux on sea state through bin averaging according to wave age. This results in a set of profiles which express the ratio of wave-induced momentum flux to the total flux as a function of the wave age parameter, c/U 10 . These profiles all tend to zero with height, and remain negligible at all heights over fully developed seas. Over younger seas, this ratio becomes increasingly more positive (corresponding to a positive value for i ) with decreasing wave age; while over older seas, this ratio becomes increasingly more negative with increasing wave age. This provides strong quantitative evidence that there is a significant flux of momentum to the atmosphere from decaying waves, and a transfer of atmospheric momentum to developing waves. Thesis Supervisor: Dr. James B. Edson Title: Associate Scientist, WHOI
QoS-based Late-Binding of Service Invocations in Adaptive Business Processes

Computing has reached the time of distributed applications everywhere. Service-oriented architectures are more and more used to organize such complex and highly dynamic applications into business processes calling services discovered in registries at load-time. In this context, Quality of Service (QoS) and agility in business processes become key issues. Instead of binding business processes to services at load-time, this paper proposes to monitor sets of candidate services for their current QoS and to choose among them at call-time. This new form of late-binding paves the way to more agile and robust applications called adaptive business processes. Besides the conceptual background and implementation of this late-binding in an industrial-strength web service platform, this paper presents the LCP-net formalism introduced to provide programmers with a mean to express qualitatively their preferences among the different QoS properties of services, hence tackling the multi-criteria decision making arising from the run-time choice among candidate services given several unrelated QoS properties.
Truthful Mechanisms For Resource Allocation And Pricing In Clouds

A major challenging problem for cloud providers is designing efficient mechanisms for Virtual Machine (VM) provisioning and allocation. Such mechanisms enable the cloud providers to effectively utilize their available resources and obtain higher profits. Recently, cloud providers have introduced auction-based models for VM provisioning and allocation which allow users to submit bids for their requested VMs. We formulate the dynamic VM provisioning and allocation problem for the auction-based model as an integer program considering multiple types of resources. We then design truthful greedy and optimal mechanisms for the problem such that the cloud provider provisions VMs based on the requests of the winning users and determines their payments. We show that the proposed mechanisms are truthful, that is, the users do not have incentives to manipulate the system by lying about their requested bundles of VM instances and their valuations. We perform extensive experiments using real workload traces in order to investigate the performance of the proposed mechanisms. Our proposed mechanisms achieve promising results in terms of revenue for the cloud provider.
Characteristics of gap-induced aberration in solid immersion lens systems

The induced phase changes are quantified by varying air gap width. Experiment shows the shape of the gap-induced aberration is well predicted by our simulation. The aberration is characterized by three parameters. The analyzed solid immersion lens (SIL) system is composed of SIL, gap, and substrate. The air gap induces instrumental polarization aberration due to vector thin-film effects. For larger air gaps the changes of phase increase. The astigmatic spot is explained by the increased aberration. Experiment confirms simulation at 300 nm air gap for LaSFN9 (SIL/substrate).
STUDENT EVALUATION OF USING SELF-REFLECTION LOGS: THE VALUE OF USING SELF-REFLECTION MATERIALS IN AN EFL UNIVERSITY COURSE IN JAPAN

This study reports on the utilization of a student self-reflection log within a first-year university EFL course to examine the perceived value of self-reflection by the students for their English studies. Through using the log, students reflected on what they did inside of class, what they felt was successful, and what they would like to improve. The objective of the study was to examine what value the students felt the self-reflection logs had for their English studies. A post-course evaluation questionnaire and delayed post-course interviews were carried out to answer the following research questions: Would students regard the self-reflection logs as a valuable tool for learning English? What elements of using the logs would be valuable for the students? The results showed that the participants’ evaluation of using a self-reflection log was positive, and that their motivation and learning behavior had improved through weekly self-reflection and goal setting. It can be claimed that the self-reflection logs were perceived as being of value to the participants for their English learning
On sorts and relations in feature term learning

The purpose of this extended abstract is to summarily discuss several levels of representation expressiveness between propositional and relational learning. We discuss how these representational levels can be represented by a representation formalism based on feature logic and how several ML issues can be addressed in such framework. The structure of this extended abstract is as follows. First we briefly introduce some notions of the formalism of feature terms we needed for exposition purposes. Section 3 describes several levels of representational expressiveness and some of their characteristics. The last section discusses some learning techniques that have been developed for feature terms.
Unique and Shared Functions of Nuclear Lamina LEM Domain Proteins in Drosophila

The nuclear lamina is an extensive protein network that contributes to nuclear structure and function. LEM domain (LAP2, emerin, MAN1 domain, LEM-D) proteins are components of the nuclear lamina, identified by a shared ∼45-amino-acid motif that binds Barrier-to-autointegration factor (BAF), a chromatin-interacting protein. Drosophila melanogaster has three nuclear lamina LEM-D proteins, named Otefin (Ote), Bocksbeutel (Bocks), and dMAN1. Although these LEM-D proteins are globally expressed, loss of either Ote or dMAN1 causes tissue-specific defects in adult flies that differ from each other. The reason for such distinct tissue-restricted defects is unknown. Here, we generated null alleles of bocks, finding that loss of Bocks causes no overt adult phenotypes. Next, we defined phenotypes associated with lem-d double mutants. Although the absence of individual LEM-D proteins does not affect viability, loss of any two proteins causes lethality. Mutant phenotypes displayed by lem-d double mutants differ from baf mutants, suggesting that BAF function is retained in animals with a single nuclear lamina LEM-D protein. Interestingly, lem-d double mutants displayed distinct developmental and cellular mutant phenotypes, suggesting that Drosophila LEM-D proteins have developmental functions that are differentially shared with other LEM-D family members. This conclusion is supported by studies showing that ectopically produced LEM-D proteins have distinct capacities to rescue the tissue-specific phenotypes found in single lem-d mutants. Our findings predict that cell-specific mutant phenotypes caused by loss of LEM-D proteins reflect both the constellation of LEM-D proteins within the nuclear lamina and the capacity of functional compensation of the remaining LEM-D proteins.
ACPC : A Framework for Testing the Access Control Policies

In today’s scenario any multiuser system need to implement access control for protecting its resources from unauthorized access or damage. With the help of separate policy specification language we can specify these access control policies. However, it is challenging to specify a correct access control policy and so, it is common for the security of a system to be compromised because of the incorrect specification of these policies. There are many ways in which a policy can be checked for correctness like, formal verification, analysis and testing. In this paper, a testing framework called ACPC (Access Control Policy Checker) has been introduced; we choose to illustrate the above technique using XACML language. We conduct extensive experiments using nine policy sets to evaluate the effectiveness of the above technique. The experimental result shows that ACPC can effectively generate requests to achieve high structural coverage of policies and outperforms random requests generation in terms of policy structural coverage and fault-detection capability. We have used nine mutation operators to make the mutant policy for mutation testing. We found the better result by classify these mutation operator in to three classes. We got up to 98% of mutant killed by one class of mutation operator, these results shows that, above framework generates better request sets and the classification gives better performance in terms of
Forward symbolic model checking for real time systems

Synchronous languages are widely used in industrial applications for the design and implementation of real-time embedded and reactive systems and are also well-suited for real-time verification purposes, since they have clean formal semantics. In this paper we focus on the real-time temporal logic JCTL, which can directly support the real-time formal verification of synchronous programs for the design of systems in earlier (high-level) as well as in later (low-level) design stages, creating a bridging between industrial real-time descriptions and formal real-time verification. We extend the model-checking capabilities of JCTL, by introducing new forward symbolic model-checking techniques, allowing JCTL to benefit from both, forward-, as well as traditional backward state traversal methods and of course, their combination.
Further investigation into the use of CBR and stepwise regression to predict development effort for Web hypermedia applications

To date studies using CBR for Web hypermedia effort prediction have not applied adaptation rules to adjust effort according to a given criterion. In addition, when applying n-fold cross-validation, their analysis has been limited to a maximum of three training sets, which according to recent studies, may lead to untrustworthy results. This paper has therefore two objectives. The first is to further investigate the use of CBR for Web hypermedia effort prediction by comparing the prediction accuracy of eight CBR techniques, of which three have previously been compared. The second objective is to compare the prediction accuracy of the best CBR technique against stepwise regression, using a twenty-fold cross-validation. All prediction accuracies were measured using Mean Magnitude of Relative Error (MMRE), Median Magnitude of Relative Error, Prediction at level 1 (1=25%), and boxplots of the residuals. One dataset was used in the estimation process and, according to all measures of prediction accuracy, stepwise regression showed the best prediction accuracy.
Practical estimation of adaptive correlation noise model for Distributed Video Coding

In contrast with the traditional video compression system, Distributed Video Coding (DVC) architecture dramatically shifts the complexity from the encoder to the decoder. This low-cost encoding concept can be exploited in the emerging applications, e.g. wireless sensor networks. In order to increase the compression efficiency, improvement of side information generation and refinements of Correlation Noise Model (CNM) are main streams to improve DVC. However, most of these schemes are theoretical and expensive for the decoder. In order to retain low-cost and efficient system, a side information refinement with a practical CNM estimation is proposed. While maintaining the video quality, our proposed mechanism totally improves the system compression efficiency about 18% for the bit-rate with a low complexity decoder.
Using watersheds segmentation on ISAR image for automatic target recognition

This paper deals with the processing adopted for shape extraction from the ID-presentation (image) in radar automatic target recognition field. The goal is to provide helpful information to human operator for target recognition. However, extracting the target characteristics from a radar echoes is the rather difficult task. Hence, several kinds of radar signatures can be employed to acquire information about target [10, 11]. In this paper, we present one approach for retrieval system for target recognition bused on ISAR-images in radar experimentation field. Then, we propose efficient features that deals with target shape which are extracted using Watersheds transformation. Of course, the target shape gives a better human interpretation.
Objectively Measured Physical Activity and Fat Mass in a Large Cohort of Children

Background Previous studies have been unable to characterise the association between physical activity and obesity, possibly because most relied on inaccurate measures of physical activity and obesity. Methods and Findings We carried out a cross sectional analysis on 5,500 12-year-old children enrolled in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. Total physical activity and minutes of moderate and vigorous physical activity (MVPA) were measured using the Actigraph accelerometer. Fat mass and obesity (defined as the top decile of fat mass) were measured using the Lunar Prodigy dual x-ray emission absorptiometry scanner. We found strong negative associations between MVPA and fat mass that were unaltered after adjustment for total physical activity. We found a strong negative dose-response association between MVPA and obesity. The odds ratio for obesity in adjusted models between top and the bottom quintiles of minutes of MVPA was 0.03 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.01–0.13, p-value for trend <0.0001) in boys and 0.36 (95% CI 0.17–0.74, p-value for trend = 0.006) in girls. Conclusions We demonstrated a strong graded inverse association between physical activity and obesity that was stronger in boys. Our data suggest that higher intensity physical activity may be more important than total activity.
Spatial Constraints on Learning in Visual Search: Modeling Contextual Cuing

Predictive visual context facilitates visual search, a benefit termed contextual cuing (M. M. Chun & Y. Jiang, 1998). In the original task, search arrays were repeated across blocks such that the spatial configuration (context) of all of the distractors in a display predicted an embedded target location. The authors modeled existing results using a connectionist architecture and then designed new behavioral experiments to test the model's assumptions. The modeling and behavioral results indicate that learning may be restricted to the local context even when the entire configuration is predictive of target location. Local learning constrains how much guidance is produced by contextual cuing. The modeling and new data also demonstrate that local learning requires that the local context maintain its location in the overall global context. The visual world is full of an overwhelming amount of information , and much of this information is not immediately useful to individuals at any given moment. In a given scene, there are dozens or even hundreds of objects and events competing for visual awareness, and yet observers may be looking for only one specific object— or may be trying to ignore all of them. This huge amount of largely irrelevant information would be impossible to process and deal with if one had no way to sort and choose what to attend. Attentional mechanisms help individuals to focus on a specific set of objects and events 1980) and therefore prioritize the scene and attend to only relevant stimuli. Researchers have identified a number of visual cues that attract attention. Visual search tasks, for example, have suggested that some objects enter attention because they simply pop out from a scene if they possess unique or salient features Although such bottom-up cues are very useful when noticing a bright red stop sign on a suburban street, they are less useful when it comes to noticing a red traffic light in the middle of Times Square in Manhattan, New York City. Yet people do somehow reliably detect traffic lights even amidst hundreds of other stimuli that are just as salient. Beyond visual salience, an important cue for attention may be contextual information that informs which objects should appear in a scene and where. Objects and events almost always occur in a rich visual context (Biederman, 1972; Chun, 2000). This context tends to be highly predictable, because one's visual experience is not based on a random sample of …