Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ranking function adaptation with boosting trees

Machine-learned ranking functions have shown successes in Web search engines. With the increasing demands on developing effective ranking functions for different search domains, we have seen a big bottleneck, that is, the problem of insufficient labeled training data, which has significantly slowed the development and deployment of machine-learned ranking functions for different domains. There are two possible approaches to address this problem: (1) combining labeled training data from similar domains with the small target-domain labeled data for training or (2) using pairwise preference data extracted from user clickthrough log for the target domain for training. In this article, we propose a new approach called tree-based ranking function adaptation (Trada) to effectively utilize these data sources for training cross-domain ranking functions. Tree adaptation assumes that ranking functions are trained with the Stochastic Gradient Boosting Trees method—a gradient boosting method on regression trees. It takes such a ranking function from one domain and tunes its tree-based structure with a small amount of training data from the target domain. The unique features include (1) automatic identification of the part of the model that needs adjustment for the new domain and (2) appropriate weighing of training examples considering both local and global distributions. Based on a novel pairwise loss function that we developed for pairwise learning, the basic tree adaptation algorithm is also extended (Pairwise Trada) to utilize the pairwise preference data from the target domain to further improve the effectiveness of adaptation. Experiments are performed on real datasets to show that tree adaptation can provide better-quality ranking functions for a new domain than other methods.
Exploring conflict within multidisciplinary teams in the acute care setting from a nurses perspective

Canadian healthcare organizations are experiencing increasing challenges meeting the evolving health needs of aging and growing populations. The ability to manage conflict between multiple stakeholders with varying priorities, responsibilities and associations relative to the healthcare organization is critical to more effectively meet these challenges. The following qualitative research explores factors that contribute to conflict within a multidisciplinary healthcare teams setting and between regulated health professionals. Four registered nurses from an acute care hospital setting in a large metropolitan center were recruited to share their experiences of multidisciplinary team conflict through the use of facilitated focus group sessions. A thematic analysis revealed four main themes perceived as contributing to conflict: team discordance, professional expectations, relational conflict and communication barriers. These findings expand the current limited body of research while aiding the development of best practice tools and guidelines for healthcare organizations. CONFLICT WITHIN MULTIDISCIPLINARY TEAMS v Table of
Learning to fly in persistent digital worlds: the case of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games

This paper discusses virtual communities' formation and skill development through the process of participation in collective practices in on-line role-playing game environments. The study that follows is mainly based on the participant observation of players acting in two popular Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Data have been collected through participation and observation of players and their unfolding practices in forming and maintaining such communities. The objective was to document these practices and to study virtual game environments in order to understand learning opportunities within and among these communities, and to identify design elements of the game that cultivate community building. The primary unit of analysis is the in-game communities known as 'guilds'. Research findings indicate that in such multicultural and anonymous environments, many learning processes are evolving that affect both players' understanding of the game's state, and their social interaction and communication skills.
Continuum Foam

We consider the simulation of dense foams composed of microscopic bubbles, such as shaving cream and whipped cream. We represent foam not as a collection of discrete bubbles, but instead as a continuum. We employ the material point method (MPM) to discretize a hyperelastic constitutive relation augmented with the Herschel-Bulkley model of non-Newtonian viscoplastic flow, which is known to closely approximate foam behavior. Since large shearing flows in foam can produce poor distributions of material points, a typical MPM implementation can produce non-physical internal holes in the continuum. To address these artifacts, we introduce a particle resampling method for MPM. In addition, we introduce an explicit tearing model to prevent regions from shearing into artificially thin, honey-like threads. We evaluate our method's efficacy by simulating a number of dense foams, and we validate our method by comparing to real-world footage of foam.
Health Care Use and Costs Associated With Use of a Health Club Membership Benefit in Older Adults with Diabetes

OBJECTIVE—The purpose of this study was to determine whether elective use of a health plan–sponsored health club membership had an impact on health care use and costs among older adults with diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—Administrative claims for 2,031 older adults with diabetes enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan were obtained for this retrospective cohort study. Participants (n = 618) in the plan-sponsored health club benefit (Silver Sneakers [SS]) and control subjects (n = 1,413) matched on SS enrollment index date were enrolled in the plan for at least 1 year before the index date. Two-year health care use and costs of SS participants and control subjects were estimated in regressions adjusting for baseline differences. RESULTS—SS participants were more likely to be male, had a lower chronic disease burden, used more preventive services, and had a lower prevalence of arthritis (P ≤ 05). SS participants had lower adjusted total health care costs than control subjects in the first year after enrollment (−$1,633 [95% CI −$2,620 to −$646], P = 0.001), and adjusted total costs in year 2 trended lower (−$1,230 [−$2,494 to $33], P = 0.06). Participants who made on average ≥2 SS visits/week in year 1 had lower total costs in year 2 ($2,141 [−$3,877 to −$405], P = 0.02) than participants who made <2 visits/week. CONCLUSIONS—Use of a health club benefit by older adults with diabetes was associated with slower growth in total health care costs over 2 years; greater use of the benefit was actually associated with declines in total costs.
Improving the data processing in WSNs through combination of a distributed approach and statistical techniques

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have received a lot of attentions from both academic and industrial communities due to the wide range of applications they can provide. In this sort of network, maximizing the lifetime of sensor nodes as well as providing valid data in real-time are essential issues due to the real-time requirement of data and the resource limitation of sensor nodes. The distributed database approach has proven to be an effective approach to manage the large amount of sensed data in an energy-efficient manner and to reduce the response time of data processing. This work proposes a new query processing algorithm, which relies on a combination of a distributed database architecture with statistical techniques for improving the data processing in WSNs. The proposed query processing algorithm and the architecture were evaluated based on the temperature measures of an environment as a case study.
How the stakeholders in two case schools in Cyprus understand shared leadership and the benefits from it

This thesis is concerned with the question of management and leadership with respect to concepts of shared and distributed leadership. The thesis critically discusses these concepts and what appear to be similar notions of leadership, since on the one hand they are difficult to define, while on the other considerable claims have been made as to the benefits of shared leadership. From this discussion key research questions are formulated. A key feature of this study is that it seeks to raise the question of shared leadership with all the stakeholders in a school to see how they understand the concept and what effects, if any, such leadership has in terms of their own practice: this has not been undertaken before in the literature. A further issue addressed is whether, as some papers in the literature suggest, shared leadership is necessary for school performance. The research was undertaken in two private primary schools in Cyprus, school “A” and school “B”, and explores with teachers, students, parents, Council members (in school “A”) the owner (in school “B”), the head teacher (in school “A”) the deputy head (in school “B”) their understanding of the concept of shared leadership. This was done by asking each stakeholder group about how they perceive his or her role, and the roles of other stakeholders in the school organization and how they perceive the school leadership. The thesis contributes to the fields of leadership, shared/distributed leadership and stakeholder involvement. Key factors that underpin the concept are highlighted and the constraints on implementing shared leadership in a practical sense discussed.
A study on Error Correcting Output Codes

Recent work points towards advantages in decomposing multi-class decision problems into multiple binary problems. There are several strategies for this decomposition. The most used and studied are all-vs-all, one-vs-all and the error correction output codes (Ecocs). Ecocs appeared in the scope of telecommunications thanks to the capacity to correct transmission errors. This capacity is due to introducing redundancy when codifying messages. Ecocs are binary words and can be adapted to be used in classifications problems. They must, however, respect some specific constraints. The binary words must be further apart as much as possible. Equal or complementary columns cannot exist and no column can be constant (either 1 or 0). Given two Ecocs satisfying these constrains, which one is more appropriate for classification purposes? In this work we suggest a function for evaluating the quality of Ecocs. This function is used to guide the search in the persecution algorithm, a new method to generate Ecocs for classifications purposes. The binary words that form the Ecocs can have several dimensions for the same number of classes that it intends to represent. The growth of these possible dimensions is exponential with the number of classes of the multi-class problem. In this paper we present a method to choose the dimension of the Ecoc that assure a good tradeoff between redundancy and error correction capacity. The method is evaluated in a set of benchmark classification problems. Experimental results are competitive against standard decomposition methods
Bridging the gap between video data acquisition, compression and transmission under emerging technologies and scenarios

Video data is currently one of the mostly used/desired data that circulates today's digital environment. The paper aims at providing an overview on the emerging trends in the theoretical research that sustains the development of future, more efficient, acquisition, compression and transmission architectures for video. The focus is on delivering a good starting point in what compres-sive sampling and distributed video coding are all about and infer on scenarios that will mostly benefit from their advancement. It is concluded that 3D video and multi-purpose wireless mobile devices are some of the key emerging technologies that are likely to embrace these important theoretical results and transfer them into practice.
Kite: Braided Parallelism for Heterogeneous Systems

Modern processors are evolving into hybrid, heterogeneous processors with both CPU and GPU cores used for general purpose computation. Several languages, such as BrookGPU, CUDA, and more recently OpenCL, have been developed to harness the potential of these processors. These languages typically involve control code running on a host CPU, while performance-critical, massively data-parallel kernel code runs on the GPUs. In this paper we present Kite, a rethinking of the GPGPU programming model for heterogeneous braided parallelism: a mix of task and data-parallelism that executes code from a single source efficiently on CPUs and/or GPUs. The Kite research programming language demonstrates that despite the limitations of today’s GPGPU architectures, it is still possible to move beyond the currently pervasive data-parallel models. We qualitatively demonstrate that opening the GPGPU programming model to braided-parallelism allows the expression of yetunported algorithms, while simultaneously improving programmer productivity by raising the level of abstraction. We further demonstrate Kite’s usefulness as a theoretical foundation for exploring alternative models for GPGPU by deriving task extensions for the C-based data-parallel programming language OpenCL.
Human Microsaccade-Related Visual Brain Responses

Microsaccades are very small, involuntary flicks in eye position that occur on average once or twice per second during attempted visual fixation. Microsaccades give rise to EMG eye muscle spikes that can distort the spectrum of the scalp EEG and mimic increases in gamma band power. Here we demonstrate that microsaccades are also accompanied by genuine and sizeable cortical activity, manifested in the EEG. In three experiments, high-resolution eye movements were corecorded with the EEG: during sustained fixation of checkerboard and face stimuli and in a standard visual oddball task that required the counting of target stimuli. Results show that microsaccades as small as 0.15° generate a field potential over occipital cortex and midcentral scalp sites 100–140 ms after movement onset, which resembles the visual lambda response evoked by larger voluntary saccades. This challenges the standard assumption of human brain imaging studies that saccade-related brain activity is precluded by fixation, even when fully complied with. Instead, additional cortical potentials from microsaccades were present in 86% of the oddball task trials and of similar amplitude as the visual response to stimulus onset. Furthermore, microsaccade probability varied systematically according to the proportion of target stimuli in the oddball task, causing modulations of late stimulus-locked event-related potential (ERP) components. Microsaccades present an unrecognized source of visual brain signal that is of interest for vision research and may have influenced the data of many ERP and neuroimaging studies.
Circular scans for cosmic microwave background anisotropy observation and analysis

A number of experiments for measuring anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) use scanning strategies in which temperature fluctuations are measured along circular scans on the sky. It is possible, from a large number of such intersecting circular scans, to build two-dimensional sky maps for subsequent analysis. However, since instrumental effects — especially the excess low-frequency 1/f noise — project on to such two-dimensional maps in a non-trivial way, we discuss the analysis approach which focuses on information contained in the individual circular scans. This natural way of looking at CMB data from experiments scanning on the circles combines the advantages of elegant simplicity of Fourier series for the computation of statistics useful for constraining cosmological scenarios, and superior efficiency in analysing and quantifying most of the crucial instrumental effects.
Query Translation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval using Multilingual Word Clusters

In Cross-Language Information Retrieval, finding the appropriate translation of the source language query has always been a difficult problem to solve. We propose a technique towards solving this problem with the help of multilingual word clusters obtained from multilingual word embeddings. We use word embeddings of the languages projected to a common vector space on which a community-detection algorithm is applied to find clusters such that words that represent the same concept from different languages fall in the same group. We utilize these multilingual word clusters to perform query translation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval for three languages - English, Hindi and Bengali. We have experimented with the FIRE 2012 and Wikipedia datasets and have shown improvements over several standard methods like dictionary-based method, a transliteration-based model and Google Translate.
Interannual variations in satellite-sensed vegetation index data from 1981 to 1991

Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) data processed from measurements of advanced very high resolution radiometers (AVHRR) onboard the afternoon-viewing NOAA series satellites (NOAA 7, 9, and 11) were analyzed for spatial and temporal patterns comparable to those observed in atmospheric CO2, near-surface air temperature, and sea surface temperature (SST) data during the 1981–1991 time period. Two global data sets of NDVI were analyzed for consistency: (1) the land segment of the joint NOAA/NASA Earth Observing System AVHRR Pathfinder data set and (2) the Global Inventory Monitoring and Modeling Studies AVHRR NDVI data set. The impact of SST events was found to be confined mostly to the tropical latitudes but was generally dominant enough to be manifest in the global NDVI anomaly. The vegetation index anomalies at latitudes north of 45°N were found to exhibit an increasing trend. This linear trend corresponds to a 10% increase in seasonal NDVI amplitude over a 9 year period (1981–1990). During the same time period, annual amplitude in the record of atmosphere CO2 measured at Point Barrow, Alaska, was reported to have increased by about 14%. The increase in vegetation index data between years was especially consistent through the spring and early summer time periods. When this increase was translated into an advance in the timing of spring green-up, the measure (8±3 days) was similar to the recently published estimate of about 7 days in the advance of the midpoint of CO2 drawdown between spring and summer at Point Barrow, Alaska. The geographical distribution of the increase in vegetation activity was consistent with the reported patterns in springtime warming and decline of snow cover extent over the northern hemisphere land area.
Genetic Connectivity of the Moth Pollinated Tree Glionnetia sericea in a Highly Fragmented Habitat

Long-distance gene flow is thought to be one prerequisite for the persistence of plant species in fragmented environments. Human influences have led to severe fragmentation of native habitats in the Seychelles islands, with many species surviving only in small and isolated populations. The endangered Seychelles endemic tree Glionnetia sericea is restricted to altitudes between 450 m and 900 m where the native forest vegetation has been largely lost and replaced with exotic invasives over the last 200 years. This study explores the genetic and ecological consequences of population fragmentation in this species by analysing patterns of genetic diversity in a sample of adults, juveniles and seeds, and by using controlled pollination experiments. Our results show no decrease in genetic diversity and no increase in genetic structuring from adult to juvenile cohorts. Despite significant inbreeding in some populations, there is no evidence of higher inbreeding in juvenile cohorts relative to adults. A Bayesian structure analysis and a tentative paternity analysis indicate extensive historical and contemporary gene flow among remnant populations. Pollination experiments and a paternity analysis show that Glionnetia sericea is self-compatible. Nevertheless, outcrossing is present with 7% of mating events resulting from pollen transfer between populations. Artificial pollination provided no evidence for pollen limitation in isolated populations. The highly mobile and specialized hawkmoth pollinators (Agrius convolvuli and Cenophodes tamsi; Sphingidae) appear to promote extensive gene flow, thus mitigating the potential negative ecological and genetic effects of habitat fragmentation in this species. We conclude that contemporary gene flow is sufficient to maintain genetic connectivity in this rare and restricted Seychelles endemic, in contrast to other island endemic tree species with limited contemporary gene flow.
Design of Compact Ultra Wide Band Antenna for Wireless Communication System

This paper presents the design of printed monopole antenna for various ultra wide band wireless communication applications. Proposed antenna is designed on FR4 substrate of h=1.6mm, relative permittivity 4.4,loss tangent of 0.02, dimension 50 x 50 mm2. The gap between edge of ground plan (back side of antenna) and edge of patch is varied to get different simulated results. The proposed antenna exhibits a 10 dB impedance bandwidth from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz, which constitutes about 109.48%. It has been observed that proposed antennas are small in size and simple in design and fabrication but its performance is very good for UWB applications also radiates omnidirectionally over the UWB band defined by Federal Communication Commission.
A field evaluation of an adaptable two-interface design for feature-rich software

Two approaches for supporting personalization in complex software are system-controlled adaptive menus and user-controlled adaptable menus. We evaluate a novel interface design for feature-rich productivity software based on adaptable menus. The design allows the user to easily customize a personalized interface, and also supports quick access to the default interface with all of the standard features. This design was prototyped as a front-end to a commercial word processor. A field experiment investigated users' personalizing behavior and tested the effects of different interface designs on users' satisfaction and their perceived ability to navigate, control, and learn the software. There were two conditions: a commercial word processor with adaptive menus and our prototype with adaptable menus for the same word processor. Our evaluation shows: (1) when provided with a flexible, easy-to-use and easy-to-understand customization mechanism, the majority of users do effectively personalize their interface; and (2) user-controlled interface adaptation with our adaptable menus results in better navigation and learnability, and allows for the adoption of different personalization strategies, as compared to a particular system-controlled adaptive menu system that implements a single strategy. We report qualitative data obtained from interviews and questionnaires with participants in the evaluation in addition to quantitative data.