Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Discovering the Discriminative Views: Measuring Term Weights for Sentiment Analysis

This paper describes an approach to utilizing term weights for sentiment analysis tasks and shows how various term weighting schemes improve the performance of sentiment analysis systems. Previously, sentiment analysis was mostly studied under data-driven and lexicon-based frameworks. Such work generally exploits textual features for fact-based analysis tasks or lexical indicators from a sentiment lexicon. We propose to model term weighting into a sentiment analysis system utilizing collection statistics, contextual and topic-related characteristics as well as opinion-related properties. Experiments carried out on various datasets show that our approach effectively improves previous methods.
Study of the Cardiotoxicity of Venenum Bufonis in Rats using an 1H NMR-Based Metabolomics Approach

Venenum Bufonis, a well-known traditional Chinese medicine, has been widely used in Asia and has gained popularity in Western countries over the last decade. Venenum Bufonis has obvious side effects that have been observed in clinical settings, but few studies have reported on its cardiotoxicity. In this work, the cardiotoxicity of Venenum Bufonis was investigated using a 11H NMR-based metabolomics approach. The 1H NMR profiles of the serum, myocardial extracts and liver extracts of specific-pathogen-free rats showed that Venenum Bufonis produced significant metabolic perturbations dose-dependently with a distinct time effect, peaking at 2 hr after dosing and attenuating gradually. Clinical chemistry, electrocardiographic recordings, and histopathological evaluation provided additional evidence of Venenum Bufonis-induced cardiac damage that complemented and supported the metabolomics findings. The combined results demonstrated that oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, and energy metabolism perturbations were associated with the cardiac damage that results from Venenum Bufonis.
Inkjet Printing of Ultrawideband (UWB) Antennas on Paper-Based Substrates

For the first time, we demonstrate the feasibility of realizing ultrawideband antennas through ink-jetting of conductive inks on commercially available paper sheets. The characterization of the conductive ink as well as of the electrical properties of the paper substrate are reported for frequencies up to 10 GHz. This letter is one step further toward the development of low-cost, environment-friendly conformal printed antennas/electronics for ad hoc wireless sensor networks operating in rugged environments.
Study-Town: a Game for Cultural Awareness

Games are a convenient method of preparing foreign exchange students for the challenges they are going to encounter living in a foreign country. In this paper, we describe the background, concept, and usage of a game called Study-Town created for the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD. The game prepares the foreign exchange students coming to Germany for typical German peculiarities.
Axial flux, modular, permanent-magnet generator with a toroidal winding for wind turbine applications

Permanent-magnet generators have been used for wind turbines for many years. Many small wind turbine manufacturers use direct-drive permanent-magnet generators. For wind turbine generators, the design philosophy must cover the following characteristics: low cost; light weight; low speed; high torque; and variable speed generation. The generator is easy to manufacture and the design can be scaled up for a larger size without major retooling. A modular permanent-magnet generator with axial flux direction was chosen. The permanent magnet used is NdFeB or ferrite magnet with flux guide to focus flux density in the air gap. Each unit module of the generator may consist of one, two or more phases. Each generator can be expanded to two or more unit modules. Each unit module is built from simple modular poles. The stator winding is formed like a torus. Thus, the assembly process is simplified and the winding insertion in the slot is less tedious. The authors built a prototype of one unit module and performed preliminary tests in their laboratory. Follow up tests will be conducted in the lab to improve the design.
Reliability and concurrent validity of postural asymmetry measurement in adolescent idiopathic scoliosis

AIM To investigate the reliability and concurrent validity of the Baseline® Body Level/Scoliosis meter for adolescent idiopathic scoliosis postural assessment in three anatomical planes. METHODS This is an observational reliability and concurrent validity study of adolescent referrals to the Orthopaedic department for scoliosis screening at Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden between March-May 2012. A total of 31 adolescents with idiopathic scoliosis (13.6 ± 0.6 years old) of mild-moderate curvatures (25° ± 12°) were consecutively recruited. Measurement of cervical, thoracic and lumbar curvatures, pelvic and shoulder tilt, and axial thoracic rotation (ATR) were performed by two trained physiotherapists in one day. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was used to determine the inter-examiner reliability (ICC2,1) and the intra-rater reliability (ICC3,3) of the Baseline® Body Level/Scoliosis meter. Spearman’s correlation analyses were used to estimate concurrent validity between the Baseline® Body Level/Scoliosis meter and Gold Standard Cobb angles from radiographs and the Orthopaedic Systems Inc. Scoliometer. RESULTS There was excellent reliability between examiners for thoracic kyphosis (ICC2,1 = 0.94), ATR (ICC2,1 = 0.92) and lumbar lordosis (ICC2,1 = 0.79). There was adequate reliability between examiners for cervical lordosis (ICC2,1 = 0.51), however poor reliability for pelvic and shoulder tilt. Both devices were reproducible in the measurement of ATR when repeated by one examiner (ICC3,3 0.98-1.00). The device had a good correlation with the Scoliometer (rho = 0.78). When compared with Cobb angle from radiographs, there was a moderate correlation for ATR (rho = 0.627). CONCLUSION The Baseline® Body Level/Scoliosis meter provides reliable transverse and sagittal cervical, thoracic and lumbar measurements and valid transverse plan measurements of mild-moderate scoliosis deformity.
Lossless compression of cloud-cover forecasts for low-overhead distribution in solar-harvesting sensor networks

Combining local harvest patterns and global weather forecasts, e.g., cloud-cover forecasts, makes solar harvest predictions and online duty cycle adaptation more reliable. For this purpose, an energy and bandwidth efficient network-wide distribution of those forecasts is required. To meet this end, we propose compression methods for cloud-cover forecasts, so that they can be piggy-backed on regular network packets. We evaluate compression performance based on data collected from an online weather service for more than 14 months. We find that (i) cloud-cover forecasts can be compressed by up to 76%, (ii) fit into an average of 5 B for a one-day and 21 B for a seven-day forecast horizon, so that (iii) network-wide distribution leveraging, e.g., software acknowledgments used by prominent low-power data collection algorithms is achievable.
On the downscaling of the Jazz platform - Experimenting the Jazz RTC platform in a teaching course

We believe that students should use collaborative and project management tools similar to those they will encounter in their professional life. Moreover, we believe that Universities could promote and encourage the use of best practices supported by efficient tools by teaching students their use. IBM Rational Team Concert (RTC) is a good candidate to be used as industrial tool in University courses, since it supports many best practices in a complete collaborative development environment providing planning, source code management, work item management, and build management and it has been already successfully used in industries and software houses. However, we experienced that RTC is too rich in the features it offers and this makes its adoption very expensive in terms of students and teachers time and effort. For this reason we have studied and present in this paper a simplified use of RTC which consists in reducing the concepts (at ontological level) and the features were offered to the students (at practical level).
Exploring methods of improving speaker accuracy for speaker diarization

The focus of this work is to improve the speaker diarization error rate, and more speciﬁcally the speaker error rate. We investigate two methods of improving the speaker error rate: modifying the minimum duration constraint and incorporating novel puriﬁcation techniques. First, in the ﬁnal step of the speaker diarization algorithm we replace the minimum duration constraint with a simple smoothing algorithm, which averages the log-likelihoods for each of the hypothesized speakers. This method improves the speaker error rate by 12% relative for the MDM condition. Second, we utilize the difference be-tween the largest and second largest log-likelihoods to identify frames which are believed to be correct (or “pure”). The difference value is shown be more effective at separating correct frames from incorrect frames than the previously used maximum log-likelihood value. Using only the “pure” frames, the cluster models are retrained and segmentation is performed us-ing the above mentioned smoothing technique. The proposed puriﬁcation and smoothing reduces the speaker error rate over the baseline; however, it is worse than performing the smoothing step alone.
Fast Drift Approximated Pricing in the Bgm Model

This paper shows that the forward rates process discretized by a single time step together with a separability assumption on the volatility function allows for representation by a low-dimensional Markov process. This in turn leads to e±cient pricing by for example finite differences. We then develop a discretization based on the Brownian bridge especially designed to have high accuracy for single time stepping. The scheme is proven to converge weakly with order 1. We compare the single time step method for pricing on a grid with multi step Monte Carlo simulation for a Bermudan swaption, reporting a computational speed increase of a factor 10, yet pricing sufficiently accurate.
XML-Based Data Preparation for Robust Deep Parsing

We describe the use of XML tokenisation, tagging and mark-up tools to prepare a corpus for parsing. Our techniques are generally applicable but here we focus on parsing Medline abstracts with the ANLT wide-coverage grammar. Hand-crafted grammars inevitably lack coverage but many coverage failures are due to inadequacies of their lexicons. We describe a method of gaining a degree of robustness by interfacing POS tag information with the existing lexicon. We also show that XML tools provide a sophisticated approach to pre-processing, helping to ameliorate the 'messiness' in real language data and improve parse performance.
The initial conditions of isolated star formation — VI. SCUBA mapping of pre-stellar cores

Observations have been carried out with the Submillimetre Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) of regions of comparatively isolated star formation in molecular cloud cores. Some 52 starless cores were observed, which are molecular cloud cores that do not contain any sign of protostellar activity such as infrared sources or bipolar outflows. These are all therefore candidate pre-stellar cores, which are believed to represent the stage of star formation that precedes the formation of a protostar. Of the 52 cores, 29 were detected at 850 ? m at varying levels of signal-to-noise ratio greater than 3? at peak, while 23 of the cores were observed but not detected. The mean detection lower limit of the data corresponds roughly to an AV? 15 under typical assumptions. The detected cores were split into ‘bright’ cores and ‘intermediate’ cores, depending on their peak flux density at 850 ? m. Those with peak 850-? m flux densities greater than 170 mJy beam? 1 were designated ‘bright’ cores. Those with peak 850-? m flux densities less than this value were designated ‘intermediate’ cores. This dividing line corresponds to a mean detection limit of 10? at peak, and an approximate AV? 50 under typical assumptions. Of the 29 detected cores, 13 are found to be bright and 16 are intermediate. The data are combined with our previously published ISO data, and the physical parameters of the cores, such as density and temperature, are calculated. The bright cores are detected with sufficiently high signal-to-noise ratio to allow their structure to be mapped. Radial flux density profiles of these show flattened inner regions and sharp boundaries, consistent with previous observations of pre-stellar cores. Detailed fitting of the bright core radial profiles shows that they are not critical Bonnor–Ebert spheres, in agreement with previous findings. However, we find that intermediate cores, such as B68 (which has previously been claimed to be a Bonnor–Ebert sphere), may in fact be consistent with the Bonnor–Ebert criterion, suggesting perhaps that cores pass through such a phase during their evolution. We also find that the masses of the bright cores have a mean value of approximately the same order as their virial masses. We make rough estimates of core lifetimes based on the statistics of detections and find that the lifetime of a pre-stellar core is roughly ? 3 × 105 yr, while that of a bright core is ? 1.5 × 105 yr. Comparisons with some models that regulate collapse using either magnetic fields or turbulence show that no model can match all of the data. Models that are tuned to fit the total pre-stellar core lifetime do not predict the relative numbers of cores seen at each stage.
Clipping: A Semantics-Directed Syntactic Approximation

In this paper we introduce ``clipping,'' a new method of syntactic approximation which is motivated by and works in conjunction with a sound and decidable denotational model for a given programming language. Like slicing, clipping reduces the size of the source code in preparation for automatic verification; but unlike slicing it is an imprecise but computationally inexpensive algorithm which does not require a whole-program analysis. The technique of clipping can be framed into an iterated refinement cycle to arbitrarily improve its precision. We first present this rather simple idea intuitively with some examples, then work out the technical details in the case of an Algol-like programming language and a decidable approximation of its game-semantic model inspired by Hankin and Malacaria's ``lax functor'' approach. We conclude by presenting an experimental model checking tool based on these ideas and some toy programs.
Cryptic Patterning of Avian Skin Confers a Developmental Facility for Loss of Neck Feathering

Vertebrate skin is characterized by its patterned array of appendages, whether feathers, hairs, or scales. In avian skin the distribution of feathers occurs on two distinct spatial levels. Grouping of feathers within discrete tracts, with bare skin lying between the tracts, is termed the macropattern, while the smaller scale periodic spacing between individual feathers is referred to as the micropattern. The degree of integration between the patterning mechanisms that operate on these two scales during development and the mechanisms underlying the remarkable evolvability of skin macropatterns are unknown. A striking example of macropattern variation is the convergent loss of neck feathering in multiple species, a trait associated with heat tolerance in both wild and domestic birds. In chicken, a mutation called Naked neck is characterized by a reduction of body feathering and completely bare neck. Here we perform genetic fine mapping of the causative region and identify a large insertion associated with the Naked neck trait. A strong candidate gene in the critical interval, BMP12/GDF7, displays markedly elevated expression in Naked neck embryonic skin due to a cis-regulatory effect of the causative mutation. BMP family members inhibit embryonic feather formation by acting in a reaction-diffusion mechanism, and we find that selective production of retinoic acid by neck skin potentiates BMP signaling, making neck skin more sensitive than body skin to suppression of feather development. This selective production of retinoic acid by neck skin constitutes a cryptic pattern as its effects on feathering are not revealed until gross BMP levels are altered. This developmental modularity of neck and body skin allows simple quantitative changes in BMP levels to produce a sparsely feathered or bare neck while maintaining robust feather patterning on the body.
A review on accelerating scientific computations using the Conjugate Gradient method

Conjugate Gradient method is a very efficient iterative method for solving large systems of equations arising from real life scientific computing applications. In this paper we present the Conjugate Gradient method and its variants in brief. We also present a comparative analysis of implementations of this method on various platforms like FPGAs, GPUs etc which are suitable for High Performance Computing.
Security in Container-Based Virtualization through vTPM

Cloud computing is a wide-spread technology that enables the enterprises to provide services to their customers with a lower cost, higher performance, better availability and scalability. However, privacy and security in cloud computing has always been a major challenge to service providers and a concern to its users. Trusted computing has led its way in securing the cloud computing and virtualized environment, during the past decades. In this paper, first we study virtualized trusted platform modules and integration of vTPM in hypervisor-based virtualization. Then we propose two architectural solutions for integrating the vTPM in container-based virtualization model.
Open-vocabulary spoken term detection using graphone-based hybrid recognition systems

We address the problem of retrieving out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words/queries from audio archives for spoken term detection (STD) task. Many STD systems use the output of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system which has a limited and fixed vocabulary, and are not capable of detecting rare words of high information content, such as named entities. Since such words are often of great interest for a retrieval task it is important to index spoken archives in a way that allows a user to search an OOV query/term.1 In this work, we employ hybrid recognition systems which contain both words and subword units (graphones) to generate hybrid lattice indexes. We use a word-based STD system as our baseline, and present improvements by employing our proposed hybrid STD system that uses words plus graphones on the English broadcast news genre of the 2006 NIST STD task.
Harmful devices considered harmless

Attacks on host computers by malicious peripherals are a growing problem; the inexorable advance of powerful, small, cheap peripherals, which attach to plug-and-play buses, has made such attacks easy to mount. At the same time, commodity operating systems lack systematic defenses. We present Cinch, a pragmatic response to this threat. Cinch transforms USB peripherals to untrusted network endpoints, thereby allowing users and administrators to deploy a rich, existing toolbox from network security (firewalls, VPNs, DPIs, etc.) to defend the computer in a systematic way. Cinch uses virtualization technology to place the hardware in a logically separate and untrusted machine, and includes an interposition layer between the untrusted machine and the protected one. This layer accepts or rejects interaction with devices and enforces strict standards-compliant behavior, presenting to the protected machine the abstraction of "well-behaved" peripherals. We show that Cinch can be easily implemented on existing operating systems, concisely expresses policies that thwart many real-world attacks, and has low overhead.
Improving the Readability of Clustered Social Networks using Node Duplication

Exploring communities is an important task in social network analysis. Such communities are currently identified using clustering methods to group actors. This approach often leads to actors belonging to one and only one cluster, whereas in real life a person can belong to several communities. As a solution we propose duplicating actors in social networks and discuss potential impact of such a move. Several visual duplication designs are discussed and a controlled experiment comparing network visualization with and without duplication is performed, using 6 tasks that are important for graph readability and visual interpretation of social networks. We show that in our experiment, duplications significantly improve community-related tasks but sometimes interfere with other graph readability tasks. Finally, we propose a set of guidelines for deciding when to duplicate actors and choosing candidates for duplication, and alternative ways to render them in social network representations.
HIDDEN MARKOV MODEL

In this paper, a new nonparametric Bayesian model called Sticky Multimodal Dual Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Hidden Markov Model (SMD-HDP-HMM) is proposed for mining activities from a collection of time series. An activity is modeled as an HMM where each state corresponds to an atomic activity. By extensively using Dirichlet Process (DP), multiple HMMs sharing a common set of states are learned and the numbers of HMMs and states are both automatically determined. Each time series is modeled to be generated by one of the HMMs such that all time series are clustered into activities. Simultaneously state sequences for time series are learned and each of them is decomposed into a sequence of atomic activities. Experimental results on KTH activity dataset demonstrate the advantage of our method.
Hidden Symmetries and Focal Points

We provide a general formal framework to define and analyze the concepts of focal points and frames for normal form games. The information provided by a frame is captured by a symmetry structure which is consistent with the payoff structure of the game. The set of symmetry structures has itself a clear structure (a lattice). Focal points are strategy profiles which respect the symmetry structure and are chosen according to some meta-norm, which is not particular to the framed game at hand.
Neat vs Scruffy: A survey of Computational Models for Spatial Expressions

This paper attempts a survey of the computational modalities for representing spatial expressions. The focus is on computational or synthetic models, as opposed to cognitive or linguistic aspects. A number of formalisms based on qualitative paradigms such as topology seek to discretize space into regions based on alignment or tangency. This approach may be termed as \neat". Yet a large class of spatial expresssions (e.g. \near", \move away from") do not involve alignments, and even some which do (e.g. \in-front-of") have gradations. These gradations in a continuum are clearly less \neat"; we may view these as \scruuy"; there appears to be a growing trend towards the scruuy in recent times. The distinctions between the diierent models reviewed are demonstrated using the canonical example of \the chair in front of the desk".