Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Social Indexing of TV Programs: Detection and Labeling of Significant TV Scenes by Twitter Analysis

Technology to analyze the content of TV programs, especially the extraction and annotation of important scenes and events within a program, is beneficial for users to enjoy recorded programs. In this paper, we propose a method of detecting significant scenes in TV programs and automatically annotating the content of the extracted scenes through Twitter analysis. Experiments conducted on baseball games indicate that the proposed method is capable of detecting major events in a baseball game with an accuracy of 90.6%. Moreover, the names of persons involved in the events were detected with an accuracy of 87.2%, and labels describing the event were applied with an accuracy of 66.8%. The proposed technology is very helpful, because it enables users to skip to the highlights of a recorded program.
Integrating Visual and Linguistic Information to Describe Properties of Objects

Generating sentences from images has historically been performed with standalone Computer Vision systems. The idea of combining visual and linguistic information has been gaining traction in the Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing communities over the past several years. The motivation for a combined system is to generate richer linguistic descriptions of images. Standalone vision systems are typically unable to generate linguistically rich descriptions. This approach combines abundant available language data to clean up noisy results from standalone vision systems. This thesis investigates the performance of several models which integrate information from language and vision systems in order to describe certain attributes of objects. The attributes used were split into two categories: color attributes and other attributes. Our proposed model was found to be statistically significantly more accurate than the vision system alone for both sets of attributes.
The use of zona-free animal ova as a test-system for the assessment of the fertilizing capacity of human spermatozoa.

The zona-free hamster ovum was evaluated as a substitute for human o va in the assessment of the fertilizing capacity of human spermatozoa. Zona-intact ova completely resisted sperm penetration. Using nonpreincu bated spermatozoa sperm penetration of zona-free ova began 4-5 hours after insemination. However when spermatozoa were preincubated in a modified Krebs-Ringer solution for 4 hours sperm penetration began within 1 hour. There is some evidence that this is associated with the completion of sperm capacitation and the acrosome reaction. The results suggest that zona-free hamster ova can be substituted for human ova in the preliminary assessment of the fertilizing capacity of human spermatozoa.
Slip ratio estimation and control of wheeled mobile robot on different terrains

This paper presents a model-based algorithm for estimating the longitudinal velocity and online slip ratio control of wheeled mobile robots (WMR). The adaptive unscented Kalman filter (AUKF) is employed to estimate the vehicle longitudinal velocity and the wheel angular velocity in the presence of parameter variations and disturbances using measurements from wheel encoders. An adaptive adjustment of the noise covariances is implemented using a covariance matching technique in the un-scented Kalman filter context for the estimation process. The loss of velocity due to the wheel slip causes extra power consumption. Due to the presence of model uncertainties, parameter variations, and disturbances in the robot nonlinear dynamic system, a sliding mode controller is designed for desired slip control. Experiments are carried out to verify the effectiveness of the estimation algorithm and the controller. In spite of uncertainties presented in the measurements, the robot/wheel dynamics, and terrain condition variations, the controller is able to provide the desired slip ratio control of the mobile robot. It is also demonstrated that the adaptive concept of AUKF leads to better results than the unscented Kalman filter in the robot states estimation which is difficult to measure in practice.
Conjugate Quadrature Filters

Conjugate quadrature lters (CQF's) have applications to wavelet construction and signal processing. We show that any continuous frequency response (Fourier transform) P of a CQF p can be uniformly approximated by the frequency response Q of CQF q having nite length. Our rst proof uses Hardy space theory and the parametrization of CQF's by the innnite dimensional Lie group of paraunitary matrices. Our second proof uses a diierential equation method to approximate CQF's by CQF's having factorial decay, followed by a phase retreival method to approximate CQF's having factorial decay by CQF's having nite support.
Supplement for Where to Add Actions in Human-inthe-Loop Reinforcement Learning Appendix Details of Optimistic Estimation Methods

UCRL This strongly optimistic approach is based on UCRL2 (Jaksch, Ortner, and Auer 2010), which defines a confidence set over each transition/reward distribution, and takes the maximum valid distribution in the confidence set when planning. Specifically, in a finite-horizon setting it allows the L1 norm of the transition distribution to deviate from the MLE by at most √ 14 log(SA`τ`/δ) max(N,1) , where ` is the number of episodes, N is the number of transition samples, and δ is a user-specified confidence parameter. UCRL’s bound incorporates global uncertainty to ensure that the true MDP is within the confidence set with high probability (Auer and Ortner 2007). We use this bound to quantify the uncertainty over our outcome distribution, setting δ = 0.05 as in Osband et al. 2013.1. The advantage of UCRL2’s constraint on the L1 is that it is easy to calculate the most optimistic distribution that obeys the constraint, as explained in Strehl and Littman 2004. Since we are in a finite horizon setting, we calculate the most optimistic distribution for each (s, t) pair. MBIE Model-based Interval Estimation (MBIE) (Strehl and Littman 2004; 2008) is a very similar idea to UCRL, but simply bounds the local L1 divergence at each state with probability 1− δ. The original MBIE algorithm (Strehl and Littman 2004) used a bound on their transition dy-
The New Political Economy of Russia

Can Russia's recent burst of economic growth be sustained? Taking a comprehensive look at the economic and political regime shift from Yeltsin to Putin, this book explores the key challenges facing the Russian economy: to narrow the productivity gap between Russian and Western firms and industries; to attract more domestic and foreign investment; and, underlying these goals, to implement the judicial, administrative, social, and banking reforms necessary to future growth.Written by a team of researchers from the Center for Economic and Financial Research--a Moscow-based independent think tank--the book draws on a wealth of new research and data. The authors emphasize the need to strengthen the protection of property rights, restructure the banking sector, and reduce government officials' powers to intervene arbitrarily in private businesses. They also stress the importance of enhancing human capital--through educational reform and by reducing barriers to citizens' geographical and sectoral mobility. Considering political institutions, the authors examine the promise and risks of the centralization of power around President Putin. Finally, they discuss the likely impact of Russia's greater integration into the world economy, notably through its potential membership in the World Trade Organization.
Augmenting transcriptome assembly by combining de novo and genome-guided tools

Researchers interested in studying and constructing transcriptomes, especially for non-model species, face the conundrum of choosing from a number of available de novo and genome-guided assemblers. None of the popular assembly tools in use today achieve requisite sensitivity, specificity or recovery of full-length transcripts on their own. Here, we present a comprehensive comparative study of the performance of various assemblers. Additionally, we present an approach to combinatorially augment transciptome assembly by using both de novo and genome-guided tools. In our study, we obtained the best recovery and most full-length transcripts with Trinity and TopHat1-Cufflinks, respectively. The sensitivity of the assembly and isoform recovery was superior, without compromising much on the specificity, when transcripts from Trinity were augmented with those from TopHat1-Cufflinks.
High performance scalar multiplication for ECC

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN's) are being widely used in various civilian and military applications. In certain WSN applications, the data among the nodes and the Base Station (BS), needs to be exchanged in a secure manner. The encryption and decryption operations over the data involve additional energy overhead. Hence, it is required to use a security model, which offers security with less computational requirements, as WSN nodes have resource constraints. Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), a public key cryptographic system, has lesser key size requirements in comparison with RSA algorithm. ECC has been gaining acceptance as another alternative to RSA. In ECC, scalar multiplication accounts for about 80 % of the key calculation time [1]. This work presents an optimized Sliding Window method with 1's complement technique for scalar multiplication. The same is also compared with two other methods of scalar multiplication, Binary Method and Non-Adjacent Form (NAF) method.
A Hybrid Model for Combining Structural and Semantic Constraints on Analogical Mapping

Mapping is an important process of analogical reasoning, by establishing correspondences between elements of previous solutions and new problem. After recalling potential analogs from a long-term memory based on surface similarities, a subsequent mapping process captures deeper similarities by establishing correspondences between elements based on common relational structures (Falkenhainer et al. 1989). An analogical mapping process is also constrained semantically, where the probability of mapping elements in the two analogs increases if they have similar meaning. In this paper we describe a technique for applying neural networks in the analogical mapping process that includes both structural and semantic constraints. Directed graphs related to reuse of object-oriented speci cations are used in a set of experiments and report promising results.
Transmit power allocation for Gaussian multiple access channels with diversity

Hanly and Tse (see Proc. 33rd Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, IL, 1995), and also Cheng (see Proc. of IEEE Information Theory Workshop (ITW), p.36, Haifa, Israel, 1996) have generalized the results on the Gaussian multiple access channel to the case where flat fading occurs which can be tracked by both the receiver and transmitter. They distinguish two cases which they term Shannon and delay-limited capacity of that channel. With the Shannon capacity they refer to the case where the capacity region expected over the fading statistics is maximized for the constrained averaged sum power of all users. The practically more important so-called delay-limited capacity results from minimizing the sum energy of all users for fixed rates. In the article we focus on the second case. Instead of assuming a single receiver only we study the case of multiple receivers since in implemented systems diversity reception is used often. This can be caused e.g. by multiple receive antennas (receiver antenna diversity) for signal separation, or by multiple cell-site processing in cellular systems. Surprisingly, we show that some results which are valid for the case without diversity do not generalize to the diversity model.
An efficient lossless compression using double Huffman minimum variance encoding technique

A Huffman code is a particular type of optimal prefix code that is commonly used for loss-less data compression. The process of finding such a code is known as Huffman coding. The output from Huffman's algorithm can be viewed as a variable-length code table for encoding a source symbol. The algorithm derives this table from the estimated probability or frequency of occurrence for each possible value of the source symbol. In this paper, we present a new approach to measure the performance and redundancy that work on two methods of coding like Huffman coding and Minimum Variance Huffman Coding. After getting the code-word for each symbol, we compress it on the basis of its binary values like 0 and 1 using binary coding. This is applied to both the approaches; this process is called as Double Huffman Coding. Finally we produce a better result than Huffman coding.
Dynamic Node Distribution in Adaptive Snakes for Road Extraction

In this paper we address the issue of road extraction from digital imagery using deformable contour models (snakes). We present a novel variation of the traditional snakes solution, where additional nodes are inserted, and redundant nodes are deleted, to better describe the complexity of the extracted line. Node insertion and deletion are based on an analysis of the energy terms of the snake solution. This allows us to use more, closely spaced nodes along the high curvature areas of a road, compared to the linear segments of the same road outline. This dynamic manipulation of the number and spacing of nodes within a single snake allows us to better capture the geometry of the road, and to better accommodate its radiometric behavior. Thus it produces more accurate results than the traditional snake solution. Here we present our approach and experimental results to demonstrate its performance for road extraction in geospatial applications.
An e-business chatbot using AIML and LSA

The e-business has completely changed the way of selling products. E-commerce is one of the e-business models which mostly do business over the internet. The major drawback of this field is quality of customer service they provide. In every e-business model, customers have to wait for a long time to get response from the customer service representative. Especially in case of live chat, they talk to multiple customers at a time. The responses may not be relevant as they copy paste pre-written answers. Also, the slow response and the long time wait for the service agent is the biggest headache in this field of online services. As a solution to this problem, we propose a chatbot which automatically gives immediate responses to the users based on the data set of Frequently Answered Questions (FAQs), using Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) and Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA). Template based questions like greetings and general questions will be answered using AIML and other service related questions use LSA to give responses.
Screening Cycles

We demonstrate how endogenous information acquisition in credit markets creates lending cycles when competing banks undertake their screening decisions in an uncoordinated way, thereby highlighting the role of intertemporal screening externalities induced by lending market competition as a structural source of instability. We show that uncoordinated screening behavior of competing banks may be not only the source of an important financial multiplier, but also an independent source of fluctuations inducing business cycles. The screening cycle mechanism is robust to generalizations along many dimensions such as the lending market structure, the lending rate determination and the imperfections in the screening technology.
Design and implementation of Three Phase Commit Protocol (3PC) algorithm

Transaction Management plays the key role in any type of database system. In order to make the Application Query, many protocols have been designed. In this paper, we have developed very efficient and enhanced the Three Phase Commit Protocol (3PC), after studying the drawback of 2PC. In 2PC, we observed that if two side transaction will perform in 2PC(i.e., one side called sender and other side called a receiver). When sender side communicates with the receiver side in the form of performing initial values prepare for commit or abort message. They have the some possibilities both sides that are, case 1- if the sender side sends the commit data to receiver side that may commit both sides. Case 2- if the sender side sends the data but data will abort to the sender side and the receiver side also data will abort. Case 3- if the sender side sends the commit data to receiver side but receiver side data will abort. Case 4- if the sender side sends the commit data but receiver side, will not ensure that at a time data will commit or abort. Overall, according to all possibilities, we have four cases which are applied. We investigated that data is not sure from both side (sender side and receiver side). In this paper we also observed that if 3PC will use such type of cases then it will avoid blocking problems, because after abort/failed the data of 2PC protocol. Data are blocked and reduced the blocking problem through 3PC techniques. It has one active data for backup, if failed/abort the data to both sides. It has stored and adds multiple sites for decision pays for committing not for abort. It is called pre-commit decision process and record of the data are stored in multiple sites (i.e., K sites), and we also implemented 3PC Algorithm in this paper.
Multiple Independent Gate FETs: How many gates do we need?

Multiple Independent Gate Field Effect Transistors (MIGFETs) are expected to push FET technology further into the semiconductor roadmap. In a MIGFET, supplementary gates either provide (i) enhanced conduction properties or (ii) more intelligent switching functions. In general, each additional gate also introduces a side implementation cost. To enable more efficient digital systems, MIGFETs must leverage their expressive power to realize complex logic circuits with few physical resources. Researchers face then the question: How many gates do we need? In this paper, we address the logic side of this question. We determine whether or not an increasing number of gates leads to more compact logic implementations. For this purpose, we develop a logic synthesis flow that intrinsically exploits a MIGFET switching function. Using simplified design assumptions and device/interconnect models, we synthesize MCNC benchmarks on 5 promising MIGFET devices, with number of gates ranging from 1 to 7. Experimental results evidence nontrivial area/delay/energy minima, located between 1 and 4 gates, depending on a MIGFET switching function and device/interconnect technology.
Private Foreign Investment in Pakistan

Private foreign investment in Pakistan is regulated by the government's statement of industrial policy issued in 1959 which recognises, welcomes, and facilitates the inflow of priva.te foreign investment in the country. In order to attract foreign investors, the government offers liberal incentives and concessions. In addition all profits are repatriable at the official rate of exchange. An attempt has been made in this note to determine the size and nature of private foreign investment in relation to the rest of the economy and to examine the inflows of private investment and remittances of profits, dividends, etc., made abroad.
What Is Systemic Risk Today?

This paper develops a broad concept of systemic risk, the basic economic concept for the understanding of financial crises. It is claimed that any such concept must integrate systemic events in banking and financial markets as well as in the related payment and settlement systems. At the heart of systemic risk are contagion effects, various forms of external effects. The concept also includes financial instabilities in response to aggregate shocks. The quantitative literature studying systemic risk is surveyed in the light of this concept. Rigorous theoretical models of contagion have only started to be developed, so that a sound theoretical basis of the notion of systemic risk is still lacking. Econometric tests of contagion effects seem to be mainly limited to the United States regarding banking markets, to international spill-over effects during the 1987 stock market crash and to contagious currency crises. Geographical coverage as well as coverage of financial markets and their settlement systems appear to be very incomplete. Moreover, the literature surveyed reflects the general difficulty of developing tests that can make a clear distinction between rational revisions of depositor or investor expectations (“information-based” contagion) and “pure” contagion. It is concluded that, given the importance of systemic risk for the understanding of financial crises and for policies to ensure the stability of financial systems, it would be desirable if additional research could fill the gaps identified. * The authors wish to thank, without implication, Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi, Frank Browne, Pietro Catte, E.P. Davis, Mark Flannery, Charles Goodhart, Mauro Grande, Tim Montgomery, Mar ía Nieto, Daniela Russo, Benjamin Sahel and the participants of the ECB Research Seminar and of the Banking Supervisory Sub-Committee Meeting in Brussels for their comments on an earlier draft of the paper. Any views expressed in this paper are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Central Bank. Both European Central Bank, DG Research. Correspondence: Olivier De Bandt / Philipp Hartmann, European Central Bank, DG Research, Kaiserstrasse 29, 60311 Frankfurt, Germany. 38 Oliver De Bandt and Philipp Hartmann
Autonomous Navigation with Obstacle Avoidance for a Car-Like Robot

This work details the autonomous navigation with obstacle avoidance for a car-like robot. A control architecture is here proposed dealing with a low- and high-level controller, which are responsible for driving the actuators and for guiding the navigation, respectively. In order to minimize the car-like motion constrain effects, a forward/backward maneuver switched controller is proposed and here presented as the main contribution. Simulation and experimental results validate the proposal, i.e., the robot is capable to navigate in a semi-structured environment avoiding collisions in a reactive way.
Relations between ameboid movement and membrane-controlled electrical currents

We have studied the pattern of electrical currents through amebas (mainly Chaos chaos) with an ultrasensitive extracellular vibrating probe. Amebas drive both steady currents and current pulses through themselves. Relatively steady current with an average surface density of 0.1-0.2 muA/cm2 enters the rear quarter of an ameba and leaves its pseudopods. Streaming reversals are preceded by changes in this current pattern and the region with the largest new inward current becomes the new tail. Ion substitution studies suggest that some of the steady inward current is carried by calcium ions. Characteristic stimulated pulses of current sometimes follow the close approach of the vibrating probe to the side of an advancing pseudopod. Such a pulse enters the cytoplasm through a small patch of membrane near the probe (and seems to leave through the adjacent membrane), is usually followed by hyaline cap and then by pseudopod initiation, is calcium dependent, lasts about 5-10 s, and has a peak density of about 0.4 muA/cm2. Spontaneous pulses of similar shape and duration may enter or leave any part of an animal. They are much less localized, tend to have higher peak densities, and occur in physiological salt solutions at about 0.2-4 times per minute. Retraction of a pseudopod is always accompanied or preceded by a spontaneous pulse which leaves its sides.