Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A modified design of trellis-coded MPSK for the fading channel

It is shown that the classical additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel design can be retained for the fading channel with any degree of fading, if carried out with the appropriate signal set size M=M/sub min/. The size of the signal set M/sub min/ is shown to depend upon the number of parallel transitions between a given pair of states and the throughput rate. In the proposed multiple trellis-coded modulation (MTCM) scheme with a modified design (MTCM (MD)), the output bits from a rate m/m+1 trellis encoder are assigned multiple signals from an M/sub min/-PSK signal set. Compared to the MTCM with set partitioning proposed for the fading channel (SPF) design, the MTCM (MD) scheme provides the same signal diversity and the same or increased values of the branch distance product, and always leads to increased value of d/sup 2/(free). As a result, the performance is always improved on the Rician fading channel due to the increased d/sup 2/(free), and is improved on any fading channel when an increase in branch distance produce P takes place. When compared to the MTCM with the set partitioning optimum for the AWGN channel (SPA) design, the MTCM (MD) scheme, under certain conditions, provides the same value of d/sup 2/(free) as the MTCM (SPA) design, and is then asymptotically optimum for both the AWGN channel and the fading channels. >
A model for the kinematical analysis of a six degrees of freedom parallel robot

The paper presents neural model for the kinematical analysis of six dof parallel robot. The modelling consists of two stages. The first stage is choosing a three-layer perceptron type neural network and it will be trained so that it will learn a set of training data well enough. The second stage means testing the model obtained through training, during the generalization phase. Both tasks was carried out using personal software. Key words: neural, model, kinematical, analysis, robot.
Task-oriented inverse kinematics of modular reconfigurable robots

Consisting of a set of modules with the same connection interfaces, different configurations of modular robot can be assembled for different tasks, with high adaptation in complicated environments. Because of the variational task and changeable configuration of modular reconfigurable robots, it is very hard to solve the kinematics of all the configurations by traditional algebraic methods. To solve this problem, we present a method to automatically generate the kinematics of modular reconfigurable robot. We first introduce our modular robot system, including the description of the basic modules, the description of topology and the generation of configuration, we then discuss about the task-oriented inverse kinematics with the mixed iteration method and evaluation method. The configurations of modular robots for biped pole-climbing and for manipulating are implemented, with them inverse kinematics as two examples of application of the presented method. The results confirmed the validity and suitability of the algorithm for serial type modular reconfigurable robots.
Efficacy and safety of bevacizumab plus erlotinib versus bevacizumab or erlotinib alone in the treatment of non-small-cell lung cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Objectives Bevacizumab and erlotinib inhibit different tumour growth pathways, and both exhibit beneficial effects in the treatment of non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). However, the efficacy of bevacizumab in combination with erlotinib remains controversial. Therefore, we conducted a meta-analysis to compare combination treatment with bevacizumab and erlotinib to bevacizumab or erlotinib monotherapy in the treatment of NSCLC. Methods Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) published in PubMed, Web of Science and EMBASE were systematically reviewed. The main outcome measures included overall survival (OS), progression-free survival (PFS), overall response rate (ORR) and adverse events. Results were expressed as HRs or risk ratios (RRs) with 95% CIs. Results 5 RCTs involving a total of 1736 patients were included in this meta-analysis. The combination of bevacizumab and erlotinib significantly improved PFS (HR=0.63, 95% CI 0.53 to 0.75; p=0.000) and the ORR (RR=1.91, 95% CI 1.19 to 3.06; p=0.007) in the second-line treatment of NSCLC compared with bevacizumab or erlotinib alone. However, no significant difference in OS was observed between the combination and monotherapy groups (HR=0.96, 95% CI 0.83 to 1.11; p=0.573). A subgroup analysis has shown that the greatest PFS benefit was associated with an age of <65 years(HR=0.74, 95% CI 0.57 to 0.96; p=0.026), Asian/Pacific Islander ethnicity (HR=0.23, 95% CI 0.10 to 0.54; p=0.001), Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status (ECOG PS) 1 (HR=0.82, 95% CI 0.68 to 0.98; p=0.033), stage IIIB or IV disease (HR=0.68, 95% CI 0.57 to 0.82; p=0.000) and no history of smoking (HR=0.48, 95% CI 0.32 to 0.71; p=0.000). The incidence of grade 3/4 adverse events such as rash and diarrhoea was higher in the combination group than in the monotherapy group. Conclusions The addition of bevacizumab to erlotinib can significantly improve PFS and the ORR in the second-line treatment of NSCLC with an acceptable and manageable risk of rash and diarrhoea. Further well-conducted, large-scale trials are needed to validate these findings.
Workplace Flexibility and the Aging Workforce: How Two Contemporary Workplace Trends Shape the Work/Nonwork Interface

The present dissertation investigates how workplace flexibility and the aging workforce shape the work/nonwork interface, i.e., the intersection of work and nonwork lives. Based on three independent samples relying on cross-sectional and experience sampling data, significant contributions to the work/family literature emerge from three empirical chapters. Results demonstrate that workplace flexibility and age impact workers’ work-nonwork boundaries, affective well-being, and work-life balance. Overall, the findings suggest that workplace flexibility regarding start, end, and break times, if used in moderation, helps workers to maintain strong boundaries. Strong boundaries, in turn, were consistently related to better well-being and favorable interactions between work and nonwork lives. Goal completion, individual preferences for boundary strength, and boundary management strategies strengthened workers’ boundaries at work and at home, whereas the need to be available for the employer during nonwork time weakened the boundary at home. Further, older as compared to younger workers seem to be more successful in reconciling competing work and nonwork demands, over and above age-related changes in life contexts. A reason for this seems to be their active boundary management strategy use, which emerged as a mediator in the link of age with boundary strength. Finally, the present research highlights the dynamic nature of the work/nonwork interface and shows the importance of considering both day- and person-level associations when analyzing processes at the work/nonwork interface: Whereas occasional flexibility use positively related to nonwork goal completion and boundary strength, its enduring use constitutes a resource-depleting demand that undermines work goal completion. The dissertation adds to the development of an analytical framework of the work/nonwork interface with implications for research and practice.
Improving bug localization using correlations in crash reports

Nowadays, many software organizations rely on automatic problem reporting tools to collect crash reports directly from users' environments. These crash reports are later grouped together into crash types. Usually, developers prioritize crash types based on the number of crash reports and file bugs for the top crash types. Because a bug can trigger a crash in different usage scenarios, different crash types are sometimes related to a same bug. Two bugs are correlated when the occurrence of one bug causes the other bug to occur. We refer to a group of crash types related to identical or correlated bugs, as a crash correlation group. In this paper, we propose three rules to identify correlated crash types automatically. We also propose an algorithm to locate and rank buggy files using crash correlation groups. Through an empirical study on Firefox and Eclipse, we show that the three rules can identify crash correlation groups with a precision of 100% and a recall of 90% for Firefox and a precision of 79% and a recall of 65% for Eclipse. On the top three buggy file candidates, the proposed bug localization algorithm achieves a recall of 62% and a precision of 42% for Firefox and a recall of 52% and a precision of 50% for Eclipse. On the top 10 buggy file candidates, the recall increases to 92% for Firefox and 90% for Eclipse. Developers can combine the proposed crash correlation rules with the new bug localization algorithm to identify and fix correlated crash types all together.
Working for an App: Organizational Boundaries, Roles, and Meaning of Work in the “On-demand” Economy

Abstract What happens to nonelite workers’ meaning, belonging, and identity when work is “on-demand”? On-demand organizations, such as Uber and TaskRabbit, have ambiguous boundaries and locations of workers. This qualitative study investigated how organizational and societal boundary discourse and the organization of the work itself, constructed sometimes conflicting worker roles that influenced how ride-hailing workers understood the boundaries of the on-demand organization and their location with respect to it. The roles of app–user and driver–partner constructed ride-hailing workers as outside the boundaries of the organization, while the driver–bot role constructed them as (nonhuman) elements of organizational technology. While the driver–partner role had positive and empowering identity, meaning, and belongingness associations, its conflict with the other roles blocked these positive associations, and led to cynicism and fatalism. We reflect on the possible impacts of the on-demand economy on society, workers, and the practice of work, particularly for nonelite workers.
Determination of corneal asphericity after myopia surgery with the excimer laser: a mathematical model.

PURPOSE To determine the theoretical change of corneal asphericity within the zone of laser ablation after a conventional myopia treatment, which conforms to Munnerlyn's paraxial formula and in which the initial corneal asphericity is not taken into consideration. METHODS The preoperative corneal shape in cross section was modeled as a conic section of apical radius R(1) and shape factor p(1). A myopia treatment was simulated, and the equation of the postoperative corneal section within the optical zone was calculated by subtracting the ablation profile conforming to a general equation published by Munnerlyn et al. The apical radius of curvature r(2) of the postoperative profile was calculated analytically. The postoperative corneal shape was fitted by a conic section, with an apical radius equal to r(2) and a shape factor p(2) equal to the value that induced the lowest sum of horizontal residuals and the lowest sum of squared residuals. These calculations were repeated for a range of different dioptric treatments, initial shape factor values, and radii of curvature to determine the change of corneal asphericity within the optical zone of treatment. RESULTS Analytical calculation of r(2) showed it to be independent of the initial preoperative shape factor p(1). The determination of p(2) was unambiguous, because the same value induced both the lowest sum of residuals and the lowest sum of the squared residuals. For corneas initially prolate (p(1) < 1), prolateness increased (p(2) < p(1) < 1), whereas for oblate corneas (p(1) > 1), oblateness increased (p(2) > p(1) > 1) within the treated zone after myopia treatment. This trend increased with the increasing magnitude of treatment and decreased with increasing initial apical radius of curvature R(1). CONCLUSIONS After conventional myopic excimer laser treatment conforming to Munnerlyn's paraxial formula, the postoperative theoretical corneal asphericity can be accurately approximated by a best-fit conic section. For initially prolate corneas, there is a discrepancy between the clinically reported topographic trend to oblateness after excimer laser surgery for myopia and the results of these theoretical calculations.
Tree Pattern Matching to Subset Matching in Linear Time

In this paper, we show an O(n+m) time Turing reduction from the tree pattern matching problem to another problem called the subset matching problem. Subsequent works have given efficient deterministic and randomized algorithms for the subset matching problem. Together, these works yield an O(nlog2m +m) time deterministic algorithm and an O(n log n+m) time Monte Carlo algorithm for the tree pattern matching problem.
Evaluation of the Saccharoflex 2000 reflectance measuring instrument for refined sugar colour estimation at Huletts refinery.

Due to the successful use of the Saccharoflex 2000 reflectance measurement instrument on the estimation of refined sugar colour elsewhere in the world, it was decided by Tongaat-Hulett Sugar to evaluate the instrument at the refinery in Durban. Tests were carried out on first, second, third and fourth refined sugars, the results of which showed a good correlation between the ICUMSA colour measurement and the reflectance reading obtained from the Saccharoflex 2000. The instrument offers a number of advantages, the main one being that a refined sugar colour value can be obtained in less than a minute. The refinery has therefore purchased one for process control.
Minimizing consistency-control overhead with rollback-recovery for storage class memory

To guarantee system reliability, consistency-control scheme, such as journaling, is widely used in modern computing environments. However, existing consistency-control schemes negatively affect system performance because they frequently issue write commands to the storage device in order to guarantee data consistency and durability. Especially, when a storage class memory (SCM) is attached to memory bus as storage device, existing consistency-control schemes should be revisited because the buffer cache layer can be potentially eliminated. In this paper, we propose a novel consistency-control scheme, called MinL2R, which guarantees system reliability in the systems that have SCM device attached to memory bus. MinL2R significantly reduces the amount of backup data by performing data logging that records the original data related to updates at the granularity of a byte. In addition, MinL2R supports pointer logging in order to further reduce the logging overhead, when the size of updates is larger than the size of half of a block. To evaluate our scheme, we implemented the MinL2R prototype with SCM-aware file systems, such as BPFS and Shortcut-JFS. Then, we compared the performance of MinL2R against different file systems including Ext4, BPFS, and Shortcut-JFS, by using several I/O benchmarks. The experimental results clearly show that MinL2R outperforms by up to 286%, 291%, and 395% on BPFS, Shortcut-JFS, and the Ext4 file system with journal mode, respectively.
A new loading algorithm for discrete multitone transmission

A new loading algorithm for discrete multitone transmission is proposed. Thereby rate is not distributed according to channel capacity, but rate and transmit power are assigned to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio in each carrier. Because closed form expressions can be derived the algorithm is of very low complexity, even lower than the loading algorithm recently proposed by Chow et al. (see IEEE Transactions on Communications, no.2/3/4, p.773-5, 1995). Nevertheless achievable performance is higher or at least the same. Results for a typical high rate transmission over twisted pair lines are presented.
Unsupervised speaker recognition based on competition between self-organizing maps

We present a method for clustering the speakers from unlabeled and unsegmented conversation (with known number of speakers), when no a priori knowledge about the identity of the participants is given. Each speaker was modeled by a self-organizing map (SOM). The SOMs were randomly initiated. An iterative algorithm allows the data move from one model to another and adjust the SOMs. The restriction that the data can move only in small groups but not by moving each and every feature vector separately force the SOMs to adjust to speakers (instead of phonemes or other vocal events). This method was applied to high-quality conversations with two to five participants and to two-speaker telephone-quality conversations. The results for two (both high- and telephone-quality) and three speakers were over 80% correct segmentation. The problem becomes even harder when the number of participants is also unknown. Based on the iterative clustering algorithm a validity criterion was also developed to estimate the number of speakers. In 16 out of 17 conversations of high-quality conversations between two and three participants, the estimation of the number of the participants was correct. In telephone-quality the results were poorer.
Critical assessment of genome-scale metabolic networks: the need for a unified standard

Genome-scale metabolic networks have been reconstructed for several organisms. These metabolic networks provide detailed information about the metabolism inside the cells, coupled with the genomic, proteomic and thermodynamic information. These networks are widely simulated using 'constraint-based' modelling techniques and find applications ranging from strain improvement for metabolic engineering to prediction of drug targets in pathogenic organisms. Components of these metabolic networks are represented in multiple file formats and also using different markup languages, with varying levels of annotations; this leads to inconsistencies and increases the complexities in comparing and analysing reconstructions on multiple platforms. In this work, we critically examine nearly 100 published genome-scale metabolic networks and their corresponding constraint-based models and discuss various issues with respect to model quality. One of the major concerns is the lack of annotations using standard identifiers that can uniquely describe several components such as metabolites, genes, proteins and reactions. We also find that many models do not have complete information regarding constraints on reactions fluxes and objective functions for carrying out simulations. Overall, our analysis highlights the need for a widely acceptable standard for representing constraint-based models. A rigorous standard can help in streamlining the process of reconstruction and improve the quality of reconstructed metabolic models.
The Mean Variance Mixing GARCH (1,1) process : a new approach to quantify conditional skewness

This work consists of four articles concerning Gaussian probability laws with stochastic means and variances. The first paper introduces a new way of approximating the probability distribution of a function of random variables. This is done with a Gaussian probability law with stochastic mean and variance. In the second paper an extension of the Generalized Hyperbolic class of probability distributions is presented. The third paper introduces, using a Gaussian probability law with stochastic mean and variance, a GARCH type stochastic process with skewed innovations. In the fourth paper a Levy process with second order stochastic volatility is presented, option pricing under such a process is also considered.
PanDoRA: a large-scale two-way statistical machine translation system for hand-held devices

The statistical machine translation (SMT) approach has taken a lead place in the field of Machine Translation for its better translation quality and lower cost in training compared to other approaches. However, due to the high demand of computing resources, an SMT system can not be directly run on hand-held devices. Most existing hand-held translation systems are either interlingua-based, which require non-trivial human efforts to write grammar rules, or using the client/server architecture, which are constrained by the availability of wireless connections. In this paper we present PanDoRA, a two-way phrase-based statistical machine translation system for stand-alone hand-held devices. Powered by special designs such as integerized computation and compact data structure, PanDoRA can translate dialogue speech on off-the-shelf PDAs in real time. PanDoRA uses 64K words vocabulary and millions of phrase pairs for each translation directions. To our knowledge, PanDoRA is the first large-scale SMT system with build-in reordering models running on hand-held devices. We have successfully developed several speech-to-speech translation systems using PanDoRA and our experiments show that PanDoRA's translation quality is comparable to that of the state-of-the-art phrase-based statistical machine translation systems such as Pharaoh and STTK.
An Extended Target CPHD Filter and a Gamma Gaussian Inverse Wishart Implementation

This paper presents a cardinalized probability hypothesis density (CPHD) filter for extended targets that can result in multiple measurements at each scan. The probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter for such targets has been derived by Mahler, and different implementations have been proposed recently. To achieve better estimation performance this work relaxes the Poisson assumptions of the extended target PHD filter in target and measurement numbers. A gamma Gaussian inverse Wishart mixture implementation, which is capable of estimating the target extents and measurement rates as well as the kinematic state of the target, is proposed, and it is compared to its PHD counterpart in a simulation study. The results clearly show that the CPHD filter has a more robust cardinality estimate leading to smaller OSPA errors, which confirms that the extended target CPHD filter inherits the properties of its point target counterpart.
Whole-body cooperative force control for a two-armed and two-wheeled mobile robot using Generalized Inverse Dynamics and Idealized Joint Units

This paper proposes a control framework for a two-armed and two-wheeled mobile robot that can coordinate all the joint forces to achieve diverse motion objectives such as position, velocity, acceleration, force and impedance at any part of the body. The framework comprises two components: 1) Generalized Inverse Dynamics (GID) that determines joint forces satisfying multiple objectives considering task priorities and various constraints and 2) the Idealized Joint Unit (IJU) that generates accurate torque with assigned apparent inertia and viscosity. GID treats the robot as a single manipulator with multiple branches using a joint model with 2-DOF motion subspace equivalent to two opposing wheels. A 21-DOF mobile robot equipped with IJUs is set up and GID is applied to it. The result shows that GID works well in the examples of physical human-robot interaction and object manipulation where motion objectives are attained coordinating the whole body while keeping passivity due to the redundancy and the assigned impedance property.