Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
HAVE ECONOMIC REFORMS PAID-OFF? GENDER OCCUPATIONAL INEQUALITY IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM IN EGYPT

This study considers the impact of over a decade of structural adjustment policies in Egypt on gender wage and occupational inequality. Using newly released Labor Force Sample Surveys (LFSS) for the years 2000-2004, a slight drop in public sector employment and a comparable increase in private sector employment for women is observed. Regardless of sector of employment, women still earn less than men, with private sector workers being the worst. Wage discrimination in the private sector in favor of men is evident at three groups of occupations: white collars, blue collars and professionals. Results also indicate occupational segregation and crowding of women in specific job types is a more serious issue in pay differences for blue collars in recent years, while pure discrimination is dictating wage differentials for professionals and white collars. Elements of productivity in terms of human capital endowments are not directly responsible for wage inequality in the private sector. Despite having less education, men receive higher wages for their comparative advantage in years of experience. Contrary to years of education, experience, as a factor endowment and a proxy for productivity, is highly valued and compensated for in favor of men.
Image-Based Remodeling

Imagining what a proposed home remodel might look like without actually performing it is challenging. We present an image-based remodeling methodology that allows real-time photorealistic visualization during both the modeling and remodeling process of a home interior. Large-scale edits, like removing a wall or enlarging a window, are performed easily and in real time, with realistic results. Our interface supports the creation of concise, parameterized, and constrained geometry, as well as remodeling directly from within the photographs. Real-time texturing of modified geometry is made possible by precomputing view-dependent textures for all faces that are potentially visible to each original camera viewpoint, blending multiple viewpoints and hole-filling when necessary. The resulting textures are stored and accessed efficiently enabling intuitive real-time realistic visualization, modeling, and editing of the building interior.
Identifying Time Intervals of Interest to Queries

We investigate how time intervals of interest to a query can be identified automatically based on pseudo-relevant documents, taking into account both their publication dates and temporal expressions from their contents. Our approach is based on a generative model and is able to determine time intervals at different temporal granularities (e.g., day, month, or year). We evaluate our approach on twenty years' worth of newspaper articles from The New York Times using two novel testbeds consisting of temporally unambiguous and temporally ambiguous queries, respectively.
Cellular and Humoral Mechanisms Involved in the Control of Tuberculosis

Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection is a major international public health problem. One-third of the world's population is thought to have latent tuberculosis, a condition where individuals are infected by the intracellular bacteria without active disease but are at risk for reactivation, if their immune system fails. Here, we discuss the role of nonspecific inflammatory responses mediated by cytokines and chemokines induced by interaction of innate receptors expressed in macrophages and dendritic cells (DCs). We also review current information regarding the importance of several cytokines including IL-17/IL-23 in the development of protective cellular and antibody-mediated protective responses against Mtb and their influence in containment of the infection. Finally, in this paper, emphasis is placed on the mechanisms of failure of Mtb control, including the immune dysregulation induced by the treatment with biological drugs in different autoimmune diseases. Further functional studies, focused on the mechanisms involved in the early host-Mtb interactions and the interplay between host innate and acquired immunity against Mtb, may be helpful to improve the understanding of protective responses in the lung and in the development of novel therapeutic and prophylactic tools in TB.
Calculation of Phonon Dispersions on the Grid Using Quantum ESPRESSO

We describe an application of the Grid infrastructure to realistic first-principle calculations of the phonon dispersions of a relatively complex crystal structure. The phonon package in the Quantum ESPRESSO distribution is used as a computational engine. The calculation is split into many subtasks scheduled to the Grid by an interface, written in phython, that uses a client/server approach. The same interface takes care of collecting the results and re-scheduling the subtasks that were not successful. This approach allows the calculation of the complete phonon dispersions in materials described by a relatively large unit cell, that would require a sizable amount of CPU time on a dedicated parallel machine. Our approach decouples the application from the underlying computational platform and can be easily used on different computational infrastructures.
Insights into the structural and functional aspects of rela by molecular modeling and docking calculations.

Objective: RelA (ppGpp synthetase I) has been reported as an excellent drug target due to its correlation with virulence induction in bacteria. The aim of present investigation is to provide a deeper understanding of the structural and functional aspects of RelA by an in silico -based approach. Methods : Molecular models were proposed for the catalytic domain of RelA in two Gram negative bacteria Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Vibrio vulnificus , in former one, RelA contributes to virulence whereas no such data have published in the second case. These models were subjected to docking calculations using ppGpp synthetic analogues. Results : The binding pocket characteristics in RelA are prone to fluctuations due to changes in some crucial interacting residues and this can have a profound influence on the binding interactions with ligands. GRxKH, a cationic motif, was observed to make consistent interactions with inhibitors, hence, suggested to have role in the charge transfer mechanism during signaling cascades. Conclusion : These functional residues/motifs could be key determinants of pharmacological selectivity and specificity in RelA. At the same time, they also demand comprehensive experimental studies like site-directed mutagenesis to demonstrate their involvement in inducing virulence factors.
Selective Capture of Transcribed Sequences: A Promising Approach for Investigating Bacterium-Insect Interactions

Bacterial interactions with eukaryotic hosts are complex processes which vary from pathogenic to mutualistic. Identification of bacterial genes differentially expressed in the host, promises to unravel molecular mechanisms driving and maintaining such interactions. Several techniques have been developed in the past 20 years to investigate bacterial gene expression within their hosts. The most commonly used techniques include in-vivo expression technology, signature-tagged mutagenesis, differential fluorescence induction, and cDNA microarrays. However, the limitations of these techniques in analyzing bacterial in-vivo gene expression indicate the need to develop alternative tools. With many advantages over the other methods for analyzing bacterial in-vivo gene expression, selective capture of transcribed sequences (SCOTS) technique has the prospect of becoming an elegant tool for discovery of genes involved in the bacterium-host interaction. Here, we summarize the advances in SCOTS technique, including its current and potential applications in bacterial gene expression studies under a variety of conditions from in-vitro to in-vivo and from mammals to insects.
A mapping mobile robot using RP Lidar scanner

The environment mapping in one of the necessary aspects in mobile robotics studies when dealing with localization, positioning, autonomous navigation, as well as search and rescue. Its success depends on the accuracy and reliability of its implementation and may depend on sensors which are used to acquire the environment data. This paper presents work on mapping which uses a low cost laser rangefinder, developed by Robopeak, RP Lidar. This work will be implemented on an autonomous mobile robot for indoor environment applications. Initially, a mobile robot incorporated with the sensor was developed after which a wireless monitoring and control station was established in order to perform data collection of the environments. A research laboratory with tables and equipment is used as a testbed. The collected data were analysed using three methods of pre-processing; i. raw filter, ii. a moving average of smooth filter, and iii. the combination of the raw filter and the moving average. The results show the environment map based on the raw data and the pre-processing performances. The combination of the raw filter and the moving average performs the best result. Besides, the scanning accuracy of the developed system is successful with more than 90% of correctness. As a conclusion, the laser rangefinder and the pre-processing used is capable to map the environment with clear image and hence can be used for a variety of applications.
[Determation of strychnine and brucine in Strychnos by HPLC].

This paper describes the determination of strychnine and brucine in the seeds, root, stem and leaves of Strychnos species by HPLC. The analytical column used was ZY110 YNG-C18. The mobile phase was KH2PO4(0.01 mol.L-1)--MeOH(73:27), pH2.5, regulated by 10% H3PO4. Flow rate was 1.0 ml.min-1. The detection wavelength was 264 nm. The linear ranges of strychmine and brucine were 0.18-7.26 micrograms and 0.11-4.32 micrograms, respectively. The recoveries of strychnine and brucine were 98.27% and 98.04%, respectively. The analytical results showed that the contents of strychnine and brucine in samples showed great difference between different species. The contents of strychnine in the seeds of Strychnos wallichiana and S. ignatii were 5.6% and 3.9%, respectively. These results show that the two Strychnos species may be developed as the resources of strychnine.
Hierarchical Speaker Identification based on Latent Variable Decomposition

paper, a novel hierarchical speaker identification method based on Latent Variable Decomposition (LVD) has been proposed. Firstly, we got a coarse decision by a fast scan all registered speakers using LVD based features and GMM classifier to find R possible target speakers, and then MFCC or PCA based features were used to make final decision. LVD has another advantage: reduction of the feature vectors dimensions, and the noise is removed from speech simultaneity. So, it can reduce the computational complexity and improve the performance of speaker identification. The experimental results showed that the proposed method could improve recognition accuracy of system remarkably and the system has better robustness by comparing with the traditional speaker identification method. General Terms
A unified fairness framework in multi-antenna multi-user channels

In a multi-antenna broadcast channel, the access point (AP) has several alternatives for distributing the scarce resources among the users. When realistic conditions are taken into account, it is not clear which is the best suited option for the AP, since there exist a trade-off between the global performance and the individual needs. In this paper, we derive an analytical framework to study fairness in a multi-antenna multi-user channel, which is useful in practical situations. Since fairness indexes in the literature usually reflect relative performance among users, we borrow ideas from portfolio selection and propose a mean versus standard deviation analysis that allows us to select a certain technique under practical conditions. We particularize this framework for a multi-antenna AP communicating simultaneously with several single-antenna terminals, and give closed-form expressions for the mean versus standard deviation trade-off for zero forcing beamforming, dirty paper encoding, and the cooperative bound, under the assumption of a uniform power allocation among the active users. This framework can be extended to analyze other types of multi-user communications.
Attentional spatial selection and identity extraction are separable cognitive processes

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS . iv LIST OF TABLES . vi LIST OF FIGURES . vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . viii DEDICATION . ix PREFACE. x CO‐AUTHORSHIP STATEMENT . xi CHAPTER 1 . 1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION . 1 THEORIES OF VISUAL SEARCH . 7 A) Separable functions; temporal order depends on the kind of search . 7 Feature Integration Theory . 8 B) Distinct (though not necessarily independent) functions; spatial selection occurs first . 11 “Where” before “What”. 11 Guided Search . 13 Dimensional Weighting Account . 16 Johnston and Pashler’s Account: Identity and Location Are Closely Bound . 18 C) Separability of search functions is not explicitly addressed . 21 Two‐Stage Model . 21 Resemblance Account . 23 Signal‐Detection‐Theory Based Model . 25 D) Not separable functions . 27 Green’s Account . 27 SUMMARY: SPATIAL SELECTION AND IDENTITY EXTRACTION IN THEORIES OF VISUAL SEARCH . 28 MAGNOCELLULAR VERSUS PARVOCELLULAR . 32 THE HUMAN ATTENTIONAL NETWORK MODEL . 34 THEORIES OF VISUAL SEARCH AND TESTING SEPARABILITY OF SEARCH FUNCTIONS . 37 CONCLUSION . 41 REFERENCES . 43 CHAPTER 2: . 52 SPATIAL SELECTION IS SEPARABLE FROM IDENTITY EXTRACTION IN VISUAL SEARCH . 52 EXPERIMENT 2.1 . 61 Method . 62 Observers . 62 Apparatus and Stimuli . 62 Procedure . 62 Results and Discussion . 64 EXPERIMENT 2.2 . 66 Results and Discussion . 67 EXPERIMENT 2.3 . 69 Method . 70 Results and Discussion . 70 GENERAL DISCUSSION . 72 Comparisons with related studies . 73
Knowledge graph refinement: A survey of approaches and evaluation methods

In the recent years, different Web knowledge graphs, both free and commercial, have been created. While Google coined the term "Knowledge Graph" in 2012, there are also a few openly available knowledge graphs, with DBpedia, YAGO, and Freebase being among the most prominent ones. Those graphs are often constructed from semi-structured knowledge, such as Wikipedia, or harvested from the web with a combination of statistical and linguistic methods. The result are large-scale knowledge graphs that try to make a good trade-off between completeness and correctness. In order to further increase the utility of such knowledge graphs, various refinement methods have been proposed, which try to infer and add missing knowledge to the graph, or identify erroneous pieces of information. In this article, we provide a survey of such knowledge graph refinement approaches, with a dual look at both the methods being proposed as well as the evaluation methodologies used.
Advancements in the Elicitation and Aggregation of Private Information

There are many situations where one might be interested in eliciting and aggregating the private information of a group of agents. For example, a recommendation system might suggest recommendations based on the aggregate opinions of a group of like-minded agents, or a decision maker might take a decision based on the aggregate forecasts from a group of experts. When agents are self-interested, they are not necessarily honest when reporting their private information. For example, agents who have a reputation to protect might tend to produce forecasts near the most likely group consensus, whereas agents who have a reputation to build might tend to overstate the probabilities of outcomes they feel will be understated in a possible consensus. Therefore, economic incentives are necessary to incentivize self-interested agents to honestly report their private information. Our first contribution in this thesis is a scoring method to induce honest reporting of an answer to a multiple-choice question. We formally show that, in the presence of social projection, one can induce honest reporting in this setting by comparing reported answers and rewarding agreements. Our experimental results show that the act of encouraging honest reporting through the proposed scoring method results in more accurate answers than when agents have no direct incentives for expressing their true answers. Our second contribution is about how to incentivize honest reporting when private information are subjective probabilities (beliefs). Proper scoring rules are traditional scoring methods that incentivize honest reporting of subjective probabilities, where the expected score received by an agent is maximized when that agent reports his true belief. An implicit assumption behind proper scoring rules is that agents are risk neutral. In an experiment involving proper scoring rules, we find that human beings fail to be risk neutral. We then start our discussion on how to adapt proper scoring rules to cumulative prospect theory, a modern theory of choice under uncertainty. We explain why a property called comonotonicity is a sufficient condition for proper scoring rules to be indeed proper under cumulative prospect theory. Moreover, we show how to construct a comonotonic proper scoring rule from any traditional proper scoring rule. We also propose a new approach that uses non-deterministic payments based on proper scoring rules to elicit an agent’s true belief when the components that drive the agent’s attitude towards uncertainty are unknown. After agents report their private information, there is still the question on how to aggregate the reported information. Our third contribution in this thesis is an empirical study on the influence of the number of agents on the quality of the aggregate information in
Mobile Context-Aware Systems: Technologies, Resources and Applications

Mobile applications often adapt their behavior according to user context, however, they are often limited to consider few sources of contextual information, such as user position or language. This article reviews existing work in context-aware systems (CAS), e.g., how to model context, and discusses further development of CAS and its potential applications by looking at available information, methods and technologies. Social Media seems to be an interesting source of personal information when appropriately exploited. In addition, there are many types of general information, ranging from weather and public transport to information of books and museums. These information sources can be combined in previously unexplored ways, enabling the development of smarter mobile services in different domains. Users are, however, reluctant to provide their personal information to applications; therefore, there is a crave for new regulations and systems that allow applications to use such contextual data without compromising the user privacy.
Segmentation of clustered nuclei based on curvature weighting

Cluster of nuclei are frequently observed in thick tissue section images. It is very important to segment overlapping nuclei in many biomedical applications. Many existing methods tend to produce under segmented results when there is a high overlap rate. In this paper, we present a curvature weighting based algorithm which weights each pixel using the curvature information of its nearby boundaries to extract markers, each of which represents an object, from input images. Then we use marker-controlled watershed to obtain the final segmentation. Test results using both synthetic and real cell images are presented in the paper.
How Visitor and Environmental Characteristics Influence Perceived Crowding

This paper aims to investigate tourists’ perceptions of crowding and factors influencing those perceptions. The effects of visitor socio-demographic characteristics, economic factors, and destination situational characteristics are investigated. Questionnaire data were collected from a sample of 362 tourists at Pantai Cenang Beach, Langkawi Island. The results confirmed the significant effect of visitor socio-demographic characteristics on perceived crowding. Among the economic factors, although the findings did not confirm an effect for level of income, the results showed a positive effect for spending money per day on perceived crowding. Furthermore, the hypothesized effect of situational characteristics on perceived crowding could not be verified. In light of the absence of studies investigating the factors influencing perceived crowding using partial least squares–structural equation modeling, this study contributes theoretically and methodologically to the perceived crowding literature. Moreover, the results can assist the local authorities to understand the perceptions of tourists for future development.
Real-time viewer detection algorithm for smart EPG in the intelligent DTV

In order to provide personalized services in an intelligent digital TV (DTV), a fast and robust viewer detection algorithm is essential. However, conventional face detection algorithms are too costly or not robust for consumer use. Thus, in this paper, we propose a novel viewer detection algorithm for real-time viewer identification in the intelligent DTV. In the proposed algorithm, a viewer is detected by using our proposed modified codebook (MCB) method, and then the face region is extracted by using the normalized horizontal and vertical histogram from the detected person. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm successfully performs at the speed of 20∼25fps, which is suitable for real-time applications in the intelligent DTV.
Hyperbolic-Secant Pulse Propagation in a Single Mode Optical Fiber System

Results of Hyperbolic-Secant pulse propagation in a singlemode optical fiber communication system are presented. Dispersion results in pulse broadening which limits the information carrying capacity of the fiber. Hyperbolic-Secant pulse propagation model is obtained using split-step Fourier Method from nonlinear Schrodinger Equation. It was found that hyperbolic-secant pulse has a much more uniform pulse broadening and also experience less pulse broadening when compared to a Gaussian pulse at same propagation distance.
Comparative study of current control strategy for DC motors

A brushed DC motorist well-known to provide simple control and superior torque dynamic performance. This is mainly due to the fact that the electromagnetic torque can be directly controlled by regulating the armature current using full bridge DC-DC converter. Note that the developed torque is proportionally to the armature current and the use of full bridge converter permits the motor performs into 4-quadrant operation. This paper will present a comparative study of current/torque performances for three different current control strategies which are as follows; 1) hysteresis-based with bipolar switching technique, 2) carrier-based with bipolar switching technique and 3) carrier-based with unipolar switching technique. The comparison performances of the switching techniques will be analyzed through experimental results.