Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
VLSI IMPLEMENTATION OF MDC FFT / IFFT PROCESSOR FOR MIMO-OFDM SYSTEM

The FFT/IFFT processor is widely used in various areas such as 4G telecommunications, speech and image processing, medical electronics and seismic processing, etc. In this paper an efficient implementation of FFT/IFFT processor for multiple input multiple outputorthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MIMOOFDM) systems with variable length is presented. This paper opts memory scheduling and Multipath Delay Commutator (MDC) as the hardware architecture. RadixNs butterflies are used at each stage, where Ns denote the number of data streams, so that there is only one butterfly is used in each stage. For area and time optimization and to reduce power consumption, the Read Only Memories (ROM‟S) which is used to store twiddle factor is replaced by complex multiplier. The design reduces the use of logic elements & 100% utilization rate is achieved. The result shows the advantages of the proposed scheme in terms of area and power consumption
Brain Computer Interface - Application of an Adaptive Bi-stage Classifier based on RBF-HMM

Brain Computer Interface is an emerging technology that allows new output paths to communicate the users intentions without the use of normal output paths, such as muscles or nerves. In order to obtain their objective, BCI devices make use of classifiers which translate inputs from the users brain signals into commands for external devices. This paper describes an adaptive bi-stage classifier. The first stage is based on Radial Basis Function neural networks, which provides sequences of pre-assignations to the second stage, that it is based on three different Hidden Markov Models, each one trained with pre-assignation sequences from the cognitive activities between classifying. The segment of EEG signal is assigned to the HMMwith the highest probability of generating the pre-assignation sequence. The algorithm is tested with real samples of electroencephalografic signal, from five healthy volunteers using the cross-validation method. The results allow to conclude that it is possible to implement this algorithm in an on-line BCI device. The results also shown the huge dependency of the percentage of the correct classification from the user and the setup parameters of the classifier.
Integrated system models for reliable petascale storage systems

The big challenges facing petascale storage systems are not actually those of performanc or traditional fault tolerance schemes, but instead the challenges stem from the inherent complexity of large distributed systems. The best way to address these problems is to build a system model into the system itself, and have the system continuously monitor its current state as compared with the desired state according to the model. Change is applied to the model first, and then the system strives to achieve the new model. The hard part is defining a good model, building good support for introspection, and exploiting these features in the system design. This paper describes this problem in more detail, explains some of the techniques we have used in building the Panasas distributed storage system, and concludes with a summary of the open problems with building petascale storage systems.
Exploring Teachers’ Emotions via Nonverbal Behavior During Video-Based Teacher Professional Development

Increasing research on teacher professional development (TPD) has found teachers’ self-reflection to be key for improving teaching effectiveness. Although video methodology, as often used in TPD, provides crucial insight concerning situated learning, teachers are often reticent to participate in TPD protocols due to discomfort over being videotaped. This longitudinal study explored emotion-related behaviors by assessing the nonverbal expressions exhibited by teachers during a 1-year video-based TPD program highlighting salient contributors to productive classroom dialogue. Six teachers were observed regarding bodily motion, facial expression, and eye contact, with results obtained across four workshops coded according to five types of emotions. The emotions of shame, defensiveness, and distraction appeared more often than did laughter and surprise, with the negative emotions found to decrease over time. This study highlights the importance of longitudinally evaluating teachers’ emotional expressions during video-based TPD activities and continued efforts to encourage teacher participation in these pedagogical training opportunities.
An improved CT to fluoroscopy registration algorithm for the kinematic analysis of knee joints

Understanding the kinematics of the knee joint as it undergoes normal physical activities is an important goal of the orthopaedic research community. The limitations of previous approaches to capturing knee kinematics include the requirement for tantalum beads to be implanted prior to imaging and the use of biplanar X-ray imaging which is not commonly available in hospital imaging departments. A recently proposed alternative approach is to register 3D CT data with individual 2D video frames of the knee captured using single-plane X-ray fluoroscopy. The main limitation of this approach has been the inaccuracy of the registration algorithm for out-of-plane translation. In this paper we propose an improved registration algorithm which uses the relatively new Cross-Cumulative Residual Entropy similarity measure. Experimental results show that the accuracy of our proposed technique is superior to previous approaches particularly for out-of-plane translation.
Exponential Stabilization of the Uncertain Wave Equation via Distributed Dynamic Input Extension

The wave equation is studied under the effect of a persistent external perturbation. A dynamical distributed controller is suggested, based on an infinite-dimensional generalization of second-order sliding-mode control techniques, that provides the exponential attainment of a sufficiently smooth arbitrary reference of the state trajectory. The control system comprises of both feedforward and feedback parts, the latter being a discontinuous term directly connected to the plant input through a dynamical filter that augments the system state smoothing out the discontinuity of the feedback control loop. As a result, a continuous input is applied to the plant. A constructive Lyapunov-based proof of convergence of the proposed control algorithm is carried out and supporting numerical results are presented.
A Relevance Feedback Method in Medical Image Retrieval Based on Bayesian Theory

Earlier researches have proved that the gray co-occurrence matrix representing the texture feature is more effective than many other features in the sternum image retrieval and the relevance feedback technology implementing man-machine interactive retrieval enhance retrieval efficiency. Based on these conclusions, in this paper, a new relevance feedback method based on minimal Bayesian error rate in sternum image retrieval is proposed. The comparison of feedback retrieval result shows the approach is effective.
Addressing usability quality attribute in techno-spiritual mobile application

Technology trending toward mobile devices provide significant medium for the growth of mobile applications. It grants users with advantages of portability and accessibility in the mobile context. Application providers seen this as new marketing opportunities to promote and sell products directly engagement with application users through mobile websites. This influence providers increase application development and productivity for target consumer application markets such as games and lifestyle category with potential of better revenues. This mobilisation creates integrating technology with spirituality content known as techno-spiritual which information technology assist in humans‘ spiritual and religious practices. Currently there is increasing numbers of provider involve translating spirituality content into new mobile application medium and reaching users through mobile websites. This helps any religious devotees such as Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity engage with spiritual information. The techno-spiritual application focus in this paper more on Islamic Quran recitation for Muslims that used for read the Quran in Arabic alongside its translation. The popularity demand for techno-spiritual applications development address challenges and concerns for provider in term quality dimension impacting the success of products. Their expectations for quality products are high in delivering valuable content and useful functionality. It should convenient and simple for prolong the usage of applications. Usability is widely used for quality evaluation and measurement of mobile application usable. It‘s referring the capability of the application to be learned, operated, attract and satisfy users in mobile environment This study aims addressing usability quality attribute in techno-spiritual mobile application which beneficial practitioners in design and develop usable mobile applications in the future.
The Escape of Sisyphus or What “Post NG-PON2” Should Do Apart from Neverending Capacity Upgrades

The primary design goal of (r)evolutionary NG-PON1&2 was the provisioning of an ever increasing capacity to cope with video-dominated traffic and handle the explosion of mobile data traffic by means of offloading. Recently, however, questions on the future of “post NG-PON2” have surfaced whether to shift its research focus to business and operation related aspects and move access technology into a substantially different direction than continued capacity upgrades. In fact, recent studies indicate that ultimately the major factor limiting the performance of 4G mobile networks is latency rather than capacity of the backhaul. In this paper, we review recently proposed low-latency techniques for NG-PONs that require architectural modifications at the remote node or distribution fiber level and highlight advanced network coding and real-time polling based low-latency techniques that can be implemented in software, enable NG-PONs to carry higher traffic loads and thereby extend their lifetime, and maintain the passive nature of existent optical distribution networks. Furthermore, we elaborate on emerging trends and open challenges for future post NG-PON2 research. To better understand their true potential, we put them into a wider non-technical and historical perspective leading up to a sustainable Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) economy and its underlying Energy Internet.
A programmable processing array architecture supporting dynamic task scheduling and module-level prefetching

Massively Parallel Processing Arrays (MPPA) constitute programmable hardware accelerators that excel in the execution of applications exhibiting Data-Level Parallelism (DLP). The concept of employing such programmable accelerators as sidekicks to the more traditional, general-purpose processing cores has very recently entered the mainstream; both Intel and AMD have introduced processor architectures integrating a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) alongside the main CPU cores. These GPU engines are expected to play a pivotal role in the espousal of General-Purpose computing on GPUs (GPGPU). However, the widespread adoption of MPPAs, in general, as hardware accelerators entails the effective tackling of some fundamental obstacles: the expressiveness of the programming model, the debugging capabilities, and the memory hierarchy design. Toward this end, this paper proposes a hardware architecture for MPPA that adopts an event-driven execution model. It supports dynamic task scheduling, which offers better expressiveness to the execution model and improves the utilization of processing elements. Moreover, a novel module-level prefetching mechanism - enabled by the specification of the execution model - hides the access time to memory and the scheduler. The execution model also ensures complete encapsulation of the modules, which greatly facilitates debugging. Finally, the fact that all associated inputs of a module are explicitly known can be exploited by the hardware to hide memory access latency without having to resort to caches and a cache coherence protocol. Results using a cycle-level simulator of the proposed architecture and a variety of real application benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed paradigm.
A MODEL FOR THE BIOECONOMIC EVALUATION OF MARINE PROTECTED AREA SIZE AND PLACEMENT IN THE NORTH SEA

ABSTRACT. The use of marine protected areas (MPAs) as a basic management tool to limit exploitation rates in marine fisheries has been widely suggested. Models are important in predicting the consequences of management decisions and the design of monitoring programs in terms of policy goals. However, few tools are available that consider both multiple fleets and ecosystem scale dynamics. We use a new applied game theory tool, Ecoseed, that operates within a temporally and spatially explicit biomass dynamics model, Ecopath with Ecosim, to evaluate the efficacy of marine protected areas in the North Sea in both ecological and economic terms. The Ecoseed model builds MPAs based on the change in values of predicted economic rents of fisheries and the existence value of biomass pools in the ecosystem. We consider the market values of four fisheries operating in the North Sea: a trawl fishery, a gill net fishery, a seine fishery, and an industrial (reduction) fishery. We apply existence values, scaled such that their aggregate is similar to the total fishery value, to six biomass pools of concern: juvenile cod, haddock, whiting, saithe, seals, and the collective pool ‘Other predators’ that include marine mammals. Four policy options were considered: to maximize the rent only; to maximize the existence values only; to maximize the sum of the rent and existence values; and, finally, to maximize the sum of the rent and the existence values, but excluding only the trawl fleet from the MPA. The Ecoseed model suggests that policy goals that do not include ecological considerations can negatively impact the rents obtained by the different fishing sectors. The existence values will also be negatively impacted unless the MPA is very large. The Ecoseed model also suggests that policy goals based solely on existence values will negatively impact most fisheries. Under policy options that included ecological considerations, maximum benefits were derived from an MPA that covered 25–40% of the North Sea, placed along the southern and eastern coasts. Finally, the Ecoseed model suggests that an exclusion of the trawl fishery only from the MPA can provide small‐to‐substantial positive impacts to most species and fleets; this relative impact depends on level of interaction between the trawl fleet and the other fleets target species (e.g., through bycatch).
Temperature and abundance profiles of hot gas in galaxy groups – II. Implications for feedback and ICM enrichment

We investigate the history of galactic feedback and chemical enrichment within a sample of 15 X-ray bright groups of galaxies, on the basis of the inferred Fe and Si distributions in the hot gas and the associated metal masses produced by core-collapse and Type Ia supernovae (SNe). Most of these cool-core groups show a central Fe and Si excess, which can be explained by prolonged enrichment by SN Ia and stellar winds in the central early-type galaxy alone, but with tentative evidence for additional processes contributing to core enrichment in hotter groups. Inferred metal mass-to-light ratios inside r 500 show a positive correlation with total group mass but are generally significantly lower than in clusters, due to a combination of lower global intracluster medium (ICM) abundances and gas-to-light ratios in groups. This metal deficiency is present for products from both SN Ia and SN II, and suggests that metals were either synthesized, released from galaxies or retained within the ICM less efficiently in lower mass systems. We explore possible causes, including variations in galaxy formation and metal release efficiency, cooling out of metals, and gas and metal loss via active galactic nuclei (AGN) - or starburst-driven galactic winds from groups or their precursor filaments. Loss of enriched material from filaments coupled with post-collapse AGN feedback emerges as viable explanations, but we also find evidence for metals to have been released less efficiently from galaxies in cooler groups and for the ICM in these to appear chemically less evolved, possibly reflecting more extended star formation histories in less massive systems. Some implications for the hierarchical growth of clusters from groups are briefly discussed.
Path Selection Based on Single Direction Delay Difference

Because of the asymmetry of paths, the single direction delay becomes more important in network measurement and applications design. We proposed a method to select path for packet sending based on Single Direction Delay Difference (S3D). It can get the shortest single direction delay on the send and receive direction path. This method doesn't need clock synchronization or the exact value of single direction delay. We make use of the modified HEARTBEAT mechanism in SCTP to probe delay which won't increase the additional overhead. We also implement our method in Linux. Under the test topology, the performance of our method is compared with SCTP by changing the parameters of single direction delay, packet loss, receive buffer and bandwidth. The results show that the S3D method can bring better throughput when the send and receive direction delay are quite different.
Multidimensional self-construals : testing the model and refining measurement

Markus and Kitayama (1991) developed self-construal theory, and proposed that independent and interdependent self-construals would account for cultural variations in cognition, emotion and motivation. Based on this theory and Vignoles and colleagues’ (2016) reconsideration of self-construal measurement, this thesis investigates if a multi-dimensional model of self-construal helps explain cultural differences better than previous studies using the conventional two-dimensional model, as well as reporting the development of a scale that unpacks eight different ways of being independent and interdependent in multiple cultures. The thesis includes three studies. Focusing on the cultures of China and the UK, Study 1 explores if a seven-dimensional self-construal model (Vignoles et al., 2016) helps provide previously missing evidence for the predicted mediation effects of selfconstrual on cultural differences in cognition, emotion and motivation. The results show that Chinese and British participants are significantly different in six dimensions of self-construal, and explicit self-construal significantly mediated cultural differences in certain aspects of cognition, emotion and motivation. In the same two cultures, Study 2 examines individualism and collectivism priming techniques, using the seven-dimensional self-construal model to detect what two commonly used selfconstrual primes actually manipulate. The results indicate that Similarities vs. Differences with Family and Friends task (SDFF) and Sumerian Warrior Story (SWS) cue different aspects of self-construal. Effects of SWS show a similar profile across the two cultures, whereas SDFF has a much stronger effect on Chinese participants than British participants. Study 3 reports the development of a new self-construal scale. By introducing a new factor and extending the participants to 13 countries, the final version is a 48-item eight-dimensional self-construal scale. The importance of the multidimensional model and the new measure are discussed.
Scalable routing overlay networks

Routing overlays have become a viable approach to working around slow BGP convergence and sub-optimal path selection, as well as to deploy novel forwarding architectures. A common sub-component of a routing overlay is a routing mesh: the route-selection algorithm considers only those virtual links inter-node links in an overlay---in the routing mesh rather than all N2 virtual links connecting an N-node overlay. Doing so reduces routing overhead, thereby improving the scalability of the overlay, as long as the process of constructing the mesh doesn't itself introduce overhead.This paper proposes and evaluates a low-cost approach to building a topology-aware routing mesh that eliminates virtual links that contain duplicate physical segments in the underlying network. An evaluation of our method on PlanetLab shows that a conservative link pruning algorithm reduces routing overhead by a factor of two without negatively impacting route selection. Additional analysis quanti es the impact on route selection of defining an even sparser mesh on top of the topology-aware routing mesh, documenting the cost/benefit tradeoff that is intrinsic to routing. It also shows that constructing a sparser routing mesh on the topology-aware routing mesh---rather than directly on the Internet---itself benefit,; from having the reduced number of duplicate physical segments in the underlying network, which improves the resilience of the resulting routing mesh.
Reply to Comment on “Variations in northern vegetation activity inferred from satellite data of vegetation index during 1981–1999” by J. R. Ahlbeck

[1] Ahlbeck [2002] raises an important issue: Is the increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2 [Keeling and Whorf, 2001] partially responsible for the increase in the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), which we report in the work of Zhou et al. [2001]? To demonstrate its effect, Ahlbeck [2002] adds the atmospheric concentration of CO2 (hereinafter referred to as CO2) to equation (11) in the Zhou et al. [2001] article. Ahlbeck [2002] finds that CO2 is correlated with NDVI and concludes that ‘‘fertilizing due to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration also may increase greenness. ’’ As described below, this conclusion, and the results on which it is based, is a statistical artifact. When the regression equation is specified correctly, we find that there is no relation between the NDVI and the atmospheric concentration of CO2. [2] To confirm Ahlbeck’s results, we estimate the following equation:
Greybody factors at large imaginary frequencies

Extending a computation which appeared recently in hep-th/0301173, we compute the transmission and reflection coefficients for massless uncharged scalars and gravitational waves scattered by d>=4 Schwarzschild or d=4 Reissner-Nordstrom black holes, in the limit of large imaginary frequencies. The transmission coefficient has an interpretation as the "greybody factor" which determines the spectrum of Hawking radiation. The result has an interesting structure and we speculate that it may admit a simple dual description; curiously, for Reissner-Nordstrom the result suggests that this dual description should involve both the inner and outer horizons. We also discuss some numerical evidence in favor of the formulas of hep-th/0301173.
Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition Age Differences in the Distractor-ratio Effect as a Function of Contrast Level

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