Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Re-thinking Enrolment in Identity Card Schemes

Many countries around the world have initiated national ID card programs in the last decade. These programs are considered of strategic value to governments due to its contribution in enhancing existing identity management systems. Considering the total cost of such programs which goes up to billions of dollars, the success in attaining their objectives is a crucial element in the agendas of political systems in countries worldwide. Our experience in the field shows that many of such projects have been challenged to deliver their primary objectives of population enrolment, and therefore resulted in failing to meet deadlines and keeping up with budgetary constraints. The purpose of this paper is to explain the finding of a case study action research aimed to introduce a new approach to how population are enrolled in national ID programs. This is achieved through presenting a case study of a business process reengineering initiative undertaken in the UAE national ID program. The scope of this research is limited to the enrolment process within the program. This article also intends to explore the possibilities of significant results with the new proposed enrolment approach with the application of BPR. An overview of the ROI study has been developed to illustrate such efficiencies.
Extracting Lexico-conceptual Knowledge for Developing Persian WordNet

Semantic lexicons and lexical ontologies are some major resources in natural language processing. Developing such resources are time consuming tasks for which some automatic methods are proposed. This paper describes some methods used in semi-automatic development of FarsNet; a lexical ontology for the Persian language. FarsNet includes the Persian WordNet with more than 10000 synsets of nouns, verbs and adjectives. In this paper we discuss extraction of lexico-conceptual relations such as synonymy, antonymy, hyperonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, holonymy and other lexical or conceptual relations between words and concepts (synsets) from Persian resources. Relations are extracted from different resources like web, corpora, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, dictionaries and WordNet. In the system presented in this paper a variety of approaches are applied in the task of relation extraction to extract ladled or unlabeled relations. They exploit the texts, structures, hyperlinks and statistics of web documents as well as the relations of English WordNet and entries of mono and bi-lingual dictionaries.
SS 433: results of a recent multiwavelength campaign

We conducted a multiwavelength campaign in 2002 September-October, to observe SS 433. We used the Giant Meter Radio Telescope for radio observations, the Physical Research Laboratory Infrared Telescope at Mt Abu for infrared (IR), the ARIES telescope at Nainital for optical photometry, the telescope at the Vainu Bappu observatory for spectral measurements and the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer for X-ray observations. We find sharp variations in intensity on time-scales of a few minutes in the X-ray, IR and radio wavelengths. Differential photometry in the IR observations clearly indicates significant intrinsic variations on short time-scales of minutes throughout the campaign. Combining the results for these wavelengths, we find a signature of delay of about two days between the IR and radio signals. The X-ray spectrum yielded double Fe line profiles which corresponded to red and blue components of the relativistic jet. We also present the broad-band spectrum averaged over the campaign duration.
Performance testing of HBase based on the potential cycle

With the development and wide application of the computing technology, performance testing becomes more and more important. Real simulation of the user behavior becomes a concern of the performance testing. The paper introduces the potential model to establish the model of the visit amount which can be used in the performance testing. Firstly, the paper introduces the role of HBase in the search engine business and then illustrates the specific procedure about how to construct the visit amount model. Lastly, test the reading performance of HBase based on the model of the visit amount with the help of YCSB. At the same time, the paper simply introduces some applications of the potential cycle model in other contexts.
Visualizing Variable-Length Time Series Motifs

The problem of time series motif discovery has received a lot of attention from researchers in the past decade. Most existing work on finding time series motifs require that the length of the motifs be known in advance. However, such information is not always available. In addition, motifs of different lengths may co-exist in a time series dataset. In this work, we develop a motif visualization system based on grammar induction. We demonstrate that grammar induction in time series can effectively identify repeated patterns without prior knowledge of their lengths. The motifs discovered by the visualization system are variablelengths in two ways. Not only can the inter-motif subsequences have variable lengths, the intra-motif subsequences also are not restricted to have identical length—a unique property that is desirable, but has not been seen in the literature.
Barrier option pricing via heston model

The thesis objective is to analyse the valuation of barrier options in the [Heston, S.L. (1993)] model. Following [Griebsch, S.A. , and Pilz, K.F. (2012)] approach up-and-out calls are priced via Heston model. Several introductory topics are included to evidence the similarities in the method and the techniques applied. The numerical implementation is done in Matlab. The price for the option is calculated through three di¤erent methods in a simplest case. For the general case, the algorithm was developed and implemented but it did not present satisfactory results.
I Fixture Failure Diagnosis for D . Ceglarek Autobody Assembly Using

S. M. Wu Manufacturing Research Center, Department of Mechanical Engineering I In this paper, a fault diagnostic method is proposed ,for autobody assembly jixtures. and Applied Mechanics, This method uses measurement data to detect and isolate dimensional ,faults of part The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI caused by jkture. The proposed method includes a predetermined variation puttern 481 09-21 25 model and a fault mapping procedure. The variation pattern model is bused on CAD information about the jixture geometry and location of the measurement points. This fault mapping procedure combines Principal Component Analysis with pattern recognition approach. Simulations und one case study illustrate the proposed method.
The effect of information technology investment on firm-level performance in the health care industry

Background: The return on investment for information technology (IT) has been the subject of much debate throughout the history of management information systems research. Often referred to as the productivity paradox, increased IT investments have not been consistently associated with increased productivity. Understanding individual IT factors that directly contribute to business value should provide insight into the productivity paradox. Purpose: The effects of 3 different firm-level IT characteristics on financial performance in the health care industry are studied. Specifically, the effects of IT budget, IT outsourcing, and the relative number of IT personnel on firm-level financial performance are analyzed. Methods: Regression analysis of archival survey data for 914 Integrated Healthcare Delivery Systems is performed. Results: IT budgetary expenditures and the number of IT services outsourced are associated with increases in the profitability of Integrated Healthcare Delivery Systems, whereas increases in IT personnel are not significantly associated with increased profitability. Each one tenth of a percentage increase in IT expenditures is associated with approximately $100,000 in increased profit, and each additional IT service outsourced is associated with approximately $950,000 in increased profit for an average-sized Integrated Healthcare Delivery System. Implications: To increase profitability, IT administrators should increase IT budgetary expenditures along with IT outsourcing levels. IT administrators in the health care industry can use such findings during budgeting cycles to justify increased investments in IT personnel as being budget neutral while increasing organizational capacity.
AN ANALYSIS OF KENTUCKY EQUESTRIAN TRAIL RIDERS: DETERMINING RIDER BEHAVIORS AND VALUING SITE AMENITIES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO REPEAT VISITS

OF THESIS AN ANALYSIS OF KENTUCKY EQUESTRIAN TRAIL RIDERS: DETERMINING RIDER BEHAVIORS AND VALUING SITE AMENITIES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO REPEAT VISITS The purpose of this travel cost study is to determine how rider behaviors and site characteristics influence repeat visits for equestrian trail riding in Kentucky. Primary data was collected via a survey developed and administered to trail riders in person and online. The average surveyed trail rider tends to be female, about 46 years old, with some higher education, and an annual household income of $65,000. She makes 11 trips to a specified site per year, 8 of which are daytrips, usually in the fall, and traveling 132 miles round trip. From other information gathered, an index of trail characteristics was developed to identify positive attributes of trails. To account for overdispersion of the number of visits per year, a negative binomial distribution in the estimation was used. The primary variables significant to explaining repeat visits to a site include distance in miles, the index of characteristics, and gender. Given consumer surplus estimates of $800 per equestrian it is recommended that established trails maximize desired characteristics. For new trail development it is recommended that trail characteristics are maximized and that they are built closer to the urban areas of the state since most riders are coming from these areas.
A mean value performance model for locking in databases: the no-waiting case

A new performance model for dynamic locking is proposed. It is based on a flow diagram and uses only the steady state average values of the variables. It is general enough to handle nonuniform access, shared locks, static locking, multiple transaction classes, and transactions of indeterminate length. The analysis is restricted to the case in which all conflicts are resolved by restarts. It has been shown elsewhere that, under certain conditions, this pure restart policy is as good as, if not better than, a policy that uses both blocking and restarts. The analysis is straightforward, and the computational complexity of the solution, given some nonrestrictive approximations, does not depend on the input parameters. The solution is also well defined and well behaved. The model's predictions agree well with simulation results. The model shows that data contention can cause the throughput to thrash, and gives a limit on the workload that will prevent this. It also shows that systems with a particular kind of nonuniform access and systems in which transactions share locks are equivalent to systems in which there is uniform access and only exclusive locking. Static locking has higher throughput, but longer response time, than dynamic locking. Replacing updates by queries in a multiprogramming mix may degrade performance if the queries are longer than the updates.
Psychometric evaluation of self-report questionnaires: the development of a checklist.

In the last decade a large number of self-report questionnaires have been developed, which are designed to assess disease-specific physical functioning (i.e. the performance of daily activities). The choice of which questionnaire to use may be based on the study population, on the purpose of the questionnaire, on practical considerations (e.g. ease of scoring, and time to complete), and on its psychometric performances. Unfortunately, there are only a few publications about the comparison of content and psychometric quality of these questionnaires. Consequently, little evidence is available to guide the clinician and researcher during questionnaire selection. To evaluate the psychometric properties of self-report questionnaires standardized criteria are needed. We developed a checklist to evaluate the psychometric quality of self-report questionnaires in terms of validity, reproducibility, responsiveness, interpretability and practical burden. This checklist was applied in a systematic review of the psychometric properties of shoulder disability questionnaires. For each questionnaire all papers reporting on its psychometric properties were retrieved and submitted to quality assessment using this checklist.
Updating the stationary vector of an irreducible Markov chain

An iterative algorithm based on aggregation/disaggregation principles is presented for updating the stationary distribution of a finite homogeneous irreducible Markov chain. The focus is on largescale problems of the kind that are characterized by Google’s PageRank application, but the algorithm is shown to work well in general contexts. The algorithm is flexible in that it allows for changes to the transition probabilities as well as for the creation or deletion of states. In addition to establishing the rate of convergence, it is proven that the algorithm always converges independent of the starting vector. Results of numerical experimental are presented.
Reinforcement learning model, algorithms and its application

Reinforcement learning comes from the animal learning theory. RL does not need prior knowledge, it can autonomously get optional policy with the knowledge obtained by trial-and-error and continuously interacting with dynamic environment. Its characteristics of self improving and online learning make reinforcement learning become one of intelligent agent's core technologies. In this paper, we firstly survey the model and theory of reinforcement learning. Then, we roundly present the main reinforcement learning algorithms, including Sarsa, temporal difference, Q-learning and function approximation. Finally, we briefly introduce some applications of reinforcement learning and point out some future research directions of reinforcement learning.
A space-variant cubic-spline interpolation

In this paper, a space-variant cubic-spline interpolation (CSI) scheme by the use of the warped distance is developed to improve the performance. Furthermore, a modified overlap-save sub-image method is introduced to solve the boundary condition problems that occur between two neighboring subimages in the actual image. Experimental results show that the proposed improved CSI scheme can actually achieve a better PSNR than the existing interpolation algorithms including the original CSI scheme.
Design of Internet-based teleoperation platform with Brain-Computer Interface

An Internet-based teleoperation application system is introduced, which is designed to connect with Brain-Computer Interface. The hardware and software parts of the system are included. The system is divided into two parts (master-slave) in the hardware and four parts in the software part. Test results of the system to perform a teleoperation through network are recorded. At last, the usability of the system to connect with a BCI interface is proved.
Yet Another Waiting Mechanism Based on Conflict Prediction for Hardware Transactional Memory

Transactional Memory (TM) has been proposed and studied for lock-free synchronization. On TMs, transactions are executed speculatively in parallel as long as they do not encounter any conflicts on shared variables. On general HTMs: hardware implementations of TM, transactions which have conflicted once each other will conflict repeatedly if they will be executed again in parallel, and the performance of HTM will be declined. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a conflict prediction to avoid conflicts in advance based on historical data of conflicts. The result of the experiment shows that the execution time of HTM is reduced 63.5% in maximum, and 19.6% in average with 16 threads.
Approximate reasoning for contextual databases

Contextual reasoning has been proposed as a tool for solving the problem of generality in AI and for effectively handling huge knowledge bases, while approximate reasoning has been developed to overcome the computational barrier of classical deduction. This paper combines these approaches to provide an intuitive representation of knowledge and an effective deduction. Its semantics and a tableau calculus are presented. The key computational features are discussed.
Lecture 11 : Nearest Neighbor Search and the Curse of Dimensionality

Nearest neighbor search is a fundamental computational building block in computer vision, graphics, data mining, machine learning, and many other subfields. As an example, consider a simple k-nearestneighbor-classifier which, for each point predicts its class by the a majority vote over its neighbors’ classes. As simplistic as this classifier sounds, it actually performs very well in many scenarios.
Modeling and Optimal Centralized Control of a Large-Size Robotic Population

This paper describes an approach to the modeling and control of multiagent populations composed of a large number of agents. The complexity of population modeling is avoided by assuming a stochastic approach, under which the agent distribution over the state space is modeled. The dynamics of the state probability density functions is determined, and a control problem of maximizing the probability of robotic presence in a given region is introduced. The Minimum Principle for the optimal control of partial differential equations is exploited to solve this problem, and it is applied to the mission control of a simulated large robotic population
SOLIST or How to Look for a Needle in a Haystack? A Lightweight Multi-overlay Structure for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we consider sensor database systems. Sensors are attached to objects and queries on the objects are operated at the sensor network level. Although queries to such a system might be extremely complex, ensuring efficiently basic functionalities such as broadcast or anycast without any central element is not trivial. In this paper, we provide a suite of *-cast (anycast, k-cast, broadcast) functionalities in a fully decentralized manner. More specifically, we present the design and evaluation of SOLIST, a multi-layer structure for sensors, largely inspired from structured peer-to-peer systems providing such functionalities. The main goal of SOLIST is to limit the overall energy consumption. A type is associated to each sensor, and the *-cast functionalities are implemented at a type granularity regardless of the number of types and their distribution within the network. A typical use of such a system is sensor-based stock management. We evaluate SOLIST through simulations and show that SOLIST achieves a reasonable trade-off between performance and energy consumption.
Innervation of single fungiform taste buds during development in rat

To determine whether the innervation of taste buds changes during postnatal development, the number of geniculate ganglion cells that innervated single fungiform taste buds were quantified in the tip‐ and midregions of the tongue of adult and developing rats. There was substantial variation in both the size of individual taste buds and number of geniculate ganglion cells that innervated them. Importantly, taste bud morphology and innervation were highly related. Namely, the number of labeled geniculate ganglion cells that innervated a taste bud was highly correlated with the size of the taste bud (r = 0.91, P < .0003): The larger the taste bud, the more geniculate ganglion cells that innervated it.
`Sarcomeres' of smooth muscle: functional characteristics and ultrastructural evidence

Smooth muscle cells line the walls of hollow organs and control the organ dimension and mechanical function by generating force and changing length. Although significant progress has been made in our understanding of the molecular mechanism of actomyosin interaction that produces sliding of actin (thin) and myosin (thick) filaments in smooth muscle, the sarcomeric structure akin to that in striated muscle, which allows the sliding of contractile filaments to be translated into cell shortening has yet to be elucidated. Here we show evidence from porcine airway smooth muscle that supports a model of malleable sarcomeric structure composed of contractile units assembled in series and in parallel. The geometric organization of the basic building blocks (contractile units) within the assembly and the dimension of individual contractile units can be altered when the muscle cells adapt to different lengths. These structural alterations can account for the different length-force relationships of the muscle obtained at different adapted cell lengths. The structural malleability necessary for length adaptation precludes formation of a permanent filament lattice and explains the lack of aligned filament arrays in registers, which also explains why smooth muscle is `smooth'.
Enhanced EMD-Driven PEG Construction for Structured LDPC Codes

A novel algorithm to construct structured LDPC codes based on graph connectivity and cycle quality is proposed. The performance of the constructed QC-LDPC and IRA codes is investigated and a performance improvement in the error floor region is demonstrated. The code constructions provided are flexible in rate and length and demonstrate that the enhanced EMD-driven PEG-based approach proposed may be applied to a number of other structured LDPC code classes, given consideration of correct constraints of the construction.
Citizenship beyond the state

Introduction PART ONE: DEFINITIONS AND DEBATES The State Democracy PART TWO: BARRIERS TO A DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP State and Nationalism Gender and Violence Capitalism, Class and Social Rights Participation Globalization PART THREE: THE FUTURE OF DEMOCRATIC CITIZENSHIP Citizenship, Democracy and Emancipation The Problem of Agency and Realization Conclusion
Modeling and control for UW-Car in rough terrain

There has been an increasing interest in a kind of underactuated mechanical systems, mobile wheeled inverted pendulum (MWIP) models, which are widely used in the field of autonomous robotics and intelligent vehicles. A novel transportation system, UW-Car, which is composed of an MWIP system and a movable seat is proposed. The reduced-order dynamic model of a UW-Car system running in a rough terrain is obtained by applying Lagrangian motion equations. A sliding mode control approach is proposed based on the dynamic model. Comparing with the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) approach, the new method guarantees that a UW-Car system can run in a rough terrain while keeping the body upright and the seat on some fixed position. The theoretical results are finally demonstrated through numerical simulations.