Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Weighted Random Walks for Meta-Path Expansion in Heterogeneous Networks

In social networks, users and items are joined in a complex web of relations, which can be modeled as heterogeneous information networks. Such networks include a variety of object types and the rich relations among them. Recent research has shown that a hybrid recommendation approach combining components built from extended meta-paths in the network can improve the accuracy of recommendations in such networks. However most of this recent work is focused on unweighted heterogeneous networks, and simplifying relations by ignoring weight (including user ratings) loses important information. We propose a random walk based model to generate meta-paths in weighted heterogeneous network in which the frequency of edge sampling is a function of edge weight, and demonstrate that performance is improved using this method.
System lag tests for augmented and virtual environments

We describe a simple technique for accurately calibrating the temporal lag in augmented and virtual environments within the Enhanced Virtual Hand Lab (EVHL), a collection of hardware and software to support research on goal-directed human hand motion. Lag is the sum of various delays in the data pipeline associated with sensing, processing, and displaying information from the physical world to produce an augmented or virtual world. Our main calibration technique uses a modified phonograph turntable to provide easily tracked periodic motion, reminiscent of the pendulum-based calibration technique of Liang, Shaw and Green. Measurements show a three-frame (50 ms) lag for the EVHL. A second technique, which uses a specialized analog sensor that is part of the EVHL, provides a “closed loop” calibration capable of sub-frame accuracy. Knowing the lag to sub-frame accuracy enables a predictive tracking scheme to compensate for the end-toend lag in the data pipeline. We describe both techniques and the EVHL environment in which they are used.
Calculation methods for radio pulses from high energy showers

We present an approximation for the numerical calculation of Cherenkov radio pulses in the Fraunhofer limit from very high energy showers in dense media. We compare it to full Montecarlo simulations in ice studying its range of applicability and show how it can be extended with a simple algorithm. The approximation reproduces well the angular distribution of the pulse around the Cherenkov direction. An improved parameterization for the frequency spectrum in the Cherenkov direction is given for phenomenolgical applications. We extend the method to study the pulses produced by showers at distances at which the Fraunhofer limit does not apply, and give the ranges of distances and frequencies in which Fraunhofer approximation is good enough for interpreting future experimental data. Our results are relevant for the detection of very high energy neutrinos with this technique.
A High Capacity Digital Watermarking Scheme for Copyright Protection of Video Data based on YCbCr Color Channels Invariant to Geometric and Non-geometric Attacks

Digital video is becoming popular more than ever due to the widespread of video-based applications. However, a byproduct of such popularity is the worldwide unauthorized copying and distribution of digital video. Digital watermarking has been proposed in the last decade as a solution to prevent unlawful and malicious copying and distribution of digital media by embedding unnoticeable information (called watermark) into the media content. In this study, a robust and heuristic algorithm based on DWT for video watermarking is presented. With the aim of providing the security of the proposed method, the watermark is encrypted first, then the color video is partitioned into units of fixed length. Embedding process is followed by detecting the key-frames in each shot. In order to make the watermark imperceptible, RGB video stream is converted into YCbCr color space. The luminance layers are chosen to embed the watermark and the chrominance layers are left unchanged. Eventually, by using a multiplicative hiding method, watermark image is embedded into frequency components of frames. Using this method a large amount of data can be hidden in a video. Furthermore, the presented method maintains a good transparency of video stream meanwhile resists the watermark against a variety of attacks including geometric attacks such as rescaling, rotation, and nongeometric attacks like Gaussian noise, salt & pepper noise, speckle noise, median & low-pass filtering, blurring, JPEG and MJPEG compression. General Terms Information Security, Digital Rights Management, Multimedia, Encryption.
Aspect-driven, data-reflective and context-aware user interfaces design

The increasing use of Web-based applications continues to broaden the user groups of enterprise applications at large. Since ordinary users often equate the quality of user interface (UI) with the quality of the entire application, the importance of providing easy-to-use UIs has been significantly increasing. Unfortunately, designing a single UI satisfying all end users remains challenging. To address this issue, researchers and developers are looking to Context-aware/Adaptive UIs (CUIs) that aim to provide end users with more personalized user interaction experiences. Although multiple proposals have been made, very few production systems provide such malleable interfaces due to the excessive cost of development and maintenance. In this paper, we propose a technique that aims to reduce development and maintenance efforts of CUI to a level comparable with a single UI. Unlike most of the existing CUI approaches, our technique does not involve an external UI model. Instead, it aims to reflect runtime-information and structures already captured in the application, while extending them to provide an appropriate CUI. With this technique, developers do not design forms or tables directly for each page or panel. Instead they design generic and reusable transformation rules capable of presenting application data instances in the UI while considering the runtime context. To demonstrate our technique and its impact on CUI development and maintenance, we provide a case study. Moreover, we present our experience from its application to an existing production-level enterprise application, with high demands on performance.
P2x Purinergic Receptor Channel Expression and Function in Bovine Aortic Endothelium

We examined bovine aortic endothelial cells (BAECs) for the functional expression of P2X receptors, the ATP-gated cation channels. We identified the P2X subtypes present in the BAECs using RT-PCR. mRNA was present for only three of the seven family members, P2X4, P2X5 and P2X7. We then characterized agonist-activated currents in whole cell and outside-out patch recording using 2-methyl-thio-ATP (MeSATP) as a P2X4 and P2X5 receptor agonist and 2'3'-O-(4-benzoylbenzoyl)ATP (BzATP), as a P2X7 receptor agonist. MeSATP (10-20 mM) produced current with characteristics of P2X4 receptors. The current was inwardly rectifying current, reversed near 0 mV, slowly desensitized, was not blocked by suramin (300mM) or reactive blue (60mM) and had a single channel conductance of 36 pS. BzATP (10-100 mM), on the other hand, activated a 9 pS channel with sustained activity in the continued presence of the agonist. BzATP-activated current was blocked by reactive blue (60 mM) and by suramin (~50% block at 300mM). We confirmed, by immunocytochemistry, the presence of P2X4 and P2X7 protein. The agonists failed, however, to induce significant uptake of the large molecule, YO-PRO, indicating the lack of pore development that has been demonstrated for P2X7 and P2X4 in response to agonist in some cell types.
Optical character recognition of typeset Coptic text with neural networks

Digital Humanities (DH) within Coptic Studies, an emerging field of development, will be much aided by the digitization of large quantities of typeset Coptic texts. Until recently, the only Optical Character Recognition (OCR) analysis of printed Coptic texts had been executed by Moheb S. Mekhaiel, who used the Tesseract program to create a text model for liturgical books in the Bohairic dialect of Coptic. However, this model is not suitable for the many scholarly editions of texts in the Sahidic dialect of Coptic which use noticeably different fonts. In the current study, DH and Coptological projects based in Göttingen, Germany, collaborated to develop a new Coptic OCR pipeline suitable for use with all Coptic dialects. The objective of the study was to generate a model which can facilitate digital Coptic Studies and produce Coptic corpora from existing printed texts. First, we compared the two available OCR programs that can recognize Coptic: Tesseract and Ocropy. The results indicated that the neural network model, i.e. Ocropy, performed better at recognizing the letters with supralinear strokes that characterize the published Sahidic texts. After training Ocropy for Coptic using artificial neural networks, the team achieved an accuracy rate of >91% for the OCR analysis of Coptic typeset. We subsequently compared the efficiency of Ocropy to that of manual transcribing and concluded that the use of Ocropy to extract Coptic from digital images of printed texts is highly beneficial to Coptic DH.
How to Use the Potential of Learning Outcomes in IS Courses : Listening to the Voices of Students

This study illustrates how students view the role and meaning of learning outcomes. We have conducted a focus group with students who attended the course “Enterprise (ERP) systems and organizing” within an IS bachelor program in Sweden. Our study shows that students, as a course’s main stakeholder group, regard the multi-functionality of learning outcomes. What they still miss is knowledge about the role and meaning of learning outcomes as control instruments for the entire educational process. When teachers formulate learning outcomes in a transparent and clear way, students will be able to use them actively prior to courses, during courses and after courses. In order to better use the potential of learning outcomes in practice, we need to find ways of not just formulating learning outcomes in a standardized manner, but also practicing them in our courses. When this learning outcome model has been accepted and applied in teachers’ course activities, not just their syllabus writing, we have possibilities to use the full potential of learning outcomes.
Using the Schoolwide Expectations Survey for Specific Settings to Build Expectation Matrices

Schoolwide expectations are a critical component of tiered systems of support, particularly when established with input from faculty and staff and then taught to all students. The expectation matrices depicting these expectations for all key settings serve as important instructional tools when teaching schoolwide expectations. In this study, we examined psychometric properties of the Schoolwide Expectations Survey for Specific Settings (SESSS)—a measure designed to assist school teams in K-12 settings constructing schoolwide expectations for seven school settings with input from all faculty and staff—with results indicating strong internal consistency of items. These settings are classrooms, hallways, cafeterias, playgrounds, restrooms, buses, and arrival/dismissal. In addition, we examined the degree to which adults in elementary, middle, and high school converged and diverged in their expectations for each setting. Using mixed-effects modeling for nested data, we found some expectations varied among school levels in some noninstructional settings. We conclude with limitations and future directions.
Synchronization and Pipelining on Multicore: Shaping Parallelism for a New Generation of Processors

The potential for higher performance from increasing on-chip transistor densities, on the one hand, and the limitations in instruction-level parallelism of sequential applications and in the scalability of increasingly complicated superscalar and multithreaded architectures, on the other, are leading the microprocessor industry to embrace chip multi-processors as a cost-effective solution for the general-purpose computing market. Multicore processors allow manufacturers to integrate larger numbers of simpler processing cores onto the same chip, thereby shortening design time and costs. They provide higher throughput for multiprogrammed workloads by enabling simultaneous processing of independent jobs, and can improve the performance of parallel applications by exploiting thread-level parallelism. Additionally, the individual cores used might be superscalar or multithreaded, thereby exploiting more finely-grained levels of parallelism as well. While many design alternatives exist for multicore processors, one common choice is sharing the lower levels of the on-chip memory hierarchy among multiple processing cores. Although larger, shared caches cause higher access latencies and more complex logic, they provide a larger aggregate pool and reduce duplicate cache lines, thereby generally reducing capacity misses. However, sharing the cache can also negatively impact performance when the cache use behaviors of concurrent processes interfere with each other. Thus a good balance can be achieved from combining small, private first-level caches for fast, contentionfree access with large, shared lower-level on-chip caches for flexible workload tolerance. Performance on multicore processors is impacted by many of the same factors that impact performance on other shared-memory parallel architectures. However, the tighter coupling of on-chip resources changes some of the cost ratios that influence the design of parallel algorithms. Shared-cache multicore architectures introduce the potential for cheap inter-core communication, synchronization, and data sharing. They also introduce greater potential for cache contention. One alternative to the data-parallel programming model is pipelining a computation across multiple processors, effectively treating the processors as high-level vector units.
Who is bilingual? Snapshots across the lifespan

Building on our earlier analysis of the factorial structure of bilingualism for young adults obtained from the Language and Social Background Questionnaire (LSBQ; Anderson, Mak, Keyvani Chahi & Bialystok, 2018), we analyzed responses from 675 children and 125 older adults to a similar questionnaire. Three factors accounting for 74% of the variance emerged in the analysis of children's responses: Adult Language in the Home, Non-English use for Media, Non-English use with Siblings. There were also three factors that explained the responses of older adults that accounted for 79% of the variance: Non-English Use, Non-English Proficiency, and English Proficiency. Therefore, bilingual experience is captured by different factors at different points in the lifespan. These results are discussed in conjunction with the earlier results from young adults and the implications for understanding bilingualism across the lifespan.
Spectral portraits for matrix pencilsVal

Spectral portraits and pseudospectra have recently attracted the attention of many scientists as a tool of choice for investigating spectral properties of nonnormal matrices. Until now, most of the papers devoted to this topic were generally dealing with the standard eigenproblem Ax = x. However in practice, physical applications often give rise to generalized eigenproblems Ax = Bx. It is therefore natural to extend the notion of "-pseudospectrum and spectral portrait to matrix pencils (A; B). In this paper, we explain how to deene and compute spectral portraits for matrix pencils and we illustrate their importance on and example in Computational Fluid Dynamics.
Digital Image Classification for Malaysian Blooming Flower

Digital image processing is a rapidly growing area of computer science since it was introduced and developed in the 1960’s. In the case of flower classification, image processing is a crucial step for computer-aided plant species identification. Colour of the flower plays very important role in image classification since it gives additional information in terms of segmentation and recognition. On the other hand, Texture can be used to facilitate image-based retrieval system normally and it is encoded by a number of descriptors, which represented by a set of statistical measures such as gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and Law’s Order approach. This study addresses the application of NN and on image processing particularly for understanding flower image features. For predictive analysis, two techniques have been used namely, Neural Network (NN) and Logistic regression. The study shows that NN obtains the higher percentage of accuracy among two techniques. The MLP is trained by 1800 flower's dataset to classify 30 kinds of flower's type.
Implementation of Parameter Space Search for Meta Learning in a Data-Mining Multi-agent System

In this paper an implementation of a multi-agent system designed for solving complex data mining tasks is presented. The system is based on ontologically sound AGR (agents, groups, roles) model and encapsulates Weka library methods in JADE agents. We emphasize the unique intelligent features of the system -- its ability to search the parameter space of the data mining methods to find the optimal configuration, and meta learning -- finding the best possible method for the given data based on the ontological compatibility of datasets.
Multiwavelength diameters of nearby Miras and semiregular variables

ABSTRACT We have used optical interferometry to obtain multi-wavelength visibility curves for eightred giants over the wavelength range 650–1000 nm. The observations consist of wavelength-dispersed fringes recorded with MAPPIT (Masked APerture-Plane Interference Telescope) atthe 3.9-mAnglo-AustralianTelescope.We present results for fourMiras (R Car, oCet, R Hya,R Leo) and four semi-regularvariables (R Dor, W Hya, L 2 Pup, γ Cru). All stars except γ Crushow strong variations of angular size with wavelength. A uniform-disk model was found tobe a poor ﬁt in most cases, with Gaussian (or other more tapere d proﬁles) preferred. This,together with the fact that most stars showed a systematic increase in apparent size towardthe blue and a larger-than-expected linear size, even in thered, all point toward signiﬁcantscattering by dust in the inner circumstellar environment. Some stars showed evidence forasymmetric brightness proﬁles, while L 2 Pup required a two-component model, indicating anasymmetrical circumstellar dust shell.Key words: techniques: interferometry – stars: AGB and post-AGB
Exploring the Social Entrepreneurial Intentions of Senior High School and College Students in a Philippine University: A Pls-Sem Approach

This research explored the social entrepreneurial intentions (SEI) of senior high school and early college students through partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLSSEM). Anchored on the studies of Hockerts (2017) and Mair and Noboa (2006), this research extended their SEI conceptual model by examining grit (Duckworth, Peterson, Matthews & Kelly, 2007), agreeableness (Donnellan, Oswald, Baird & Lucas, 2006), and prior exposure to social action programs as antecedents that are hypothesized to be mediated by empathy, moral obligation, social entrepreneurial self-efficacy and perceived social support. Findings showed that for all respondents, the relationship of SEI with agreeableness are mediated by empathy, self-efficacy and perceived social support. Self-efficacy and social support mediated grit and SEI. To determine the difference between the drivers of SEI among senior high school and early college students, multigroup analysis was conducted. This study is relevant for proposing policies, regulations, and interventions that specifically target nascent social entrepreneurs at the early stages of their student lives.
Competition and Custom in Economic Contracts: A Case Study of Illinois Agriculture

Survey data suggest that cropsharing contracts exhibit a much higher degree of uniformity than is warranted by economic fundamentals. We propose a dynamic model of contract choice to explain this phenomenon. Landowners and tenants recontract periodically, taking into account expected returns as well as conformity with local practice. The resulting stochastic dynamical system is studied using techniques from statistical mechanics. The most likely states consist of patches where contractual terms are nearly uniform, separated by boundaries where the terms shift abruptly. These and other predictions of the model are borne out by survey data on agricultural contracts in Illinois.
A REVIEW ON ELECTROOCULOGRAPHY

Eye tracking based Human Computer Interaction (HCI) systems are becoming more popular day by day. In these systems Electrooculogram (EOG) can serve as primary source of input. The whole process of measurement of EOG is known as Electrooculography. This paper gives a review on Electrooculography and its use in various HCI systems. Detection of eye blinks from EOG signal has also been included in this review work. Finally it gives a light on various issues related to Electrooculography.
Document Clustering using Sequential Information Bottleneck Method

This paper illustrates the Principal Direction Divisive Partitioning (PDDP) algorithm and describes its drawbacks and introduces a combinatorial framework of the Principal Direction Divisive Partitioning (PDDP) algorithm, then describes the simplified version of the EM algorithm called the spherical Gaussian EM (sGEM) algorithm and Information Bottleneck method (IB) is a technique for finding accuracy, complexity and time space. The PDDP algorithm recursively splits the data samples into two sub clusters using the hyper plane normal to the principal direction derived from the covariance matrix, which is the central logic of the algorithm. However, the PDDP algorithm can yield poor results, especially when clusters are not well separated from one another. To improve the quality of the clustering results problem, it is resolved by reallocating new cluster membership using the IB algorithm with different settings. IB Method gives accuracy but time consumption is more. Furthermore, based on the theoretical background of the sGEM algorithm and sequential Information Bottleneck method(sIB), it can be obvious to extend the framework to cover the problem of estimating the number of clusters using the Bayesian Information Criterion. Experimental results are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm with comparison to the existing algorithm.
Tell it like it is: The effects of differing responses to negative online reviews

Negative electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has a notable impact on a consumer's online purchase decisions and attitude toward a company or product. Despite substantial research examining this phenomenon, little attention has been given to the impact of responses to negative eWOM. The authors examine negative eWOM in the form of online reviews to understand how responses may impact a consumer’s product satisfaction and attitude toward the company. Three studies examine specific aspects of responses, including responder type, attribution, and severity of negative review. Consistent findings across the studies reveal while any response is better than no response, a fellow consumer responding to a negative review can produce the most beneficial outcomes. The findings of this study are important for advancing theory in relation to negative eWOM and for helping practitioners develop appropriate response strategies.