Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multiple description coding based on LDGM codes

This work addresses practical multiple description coding for uniform binary sources in the no excess sum-rate case. For this case Zhang and Berger have shown that the EGC∗ region defined by El Gamal and Cover coincides with a portion of the boundary of the MD rate-distortion region, and proposed a construction of the auxiliary variables U and V to achieve this bound. We introduce a sequential coding technique for the corner points of this EGC∗ region and implement it using low-density generator matrix based codes. Furthermore we use timesharing to approach any point on the dominant face of the EGC∗ region. Our experimental results show very good practical performance.
Identifying e-business readiness factors contributing to IT distribution channel reseller success: a case analysis of two organizations

The purpose of the study is to identify whether certain factors have an impact on the success of organizations in the IT distribution channel to adopt and promote e-business strategic models to their end-user customers. Two reseller organizations participated in an in-depth set of surveys around e-business sales and distribution of IT products and services. A set of working research hypotheses was formulated for investigation. A survey instrument was developed, pre-tested and administered to thirteen executives in two reseller organizations. Managerially the findings were focused around the need to offer a differentiated set of e-business service offerings and to then decide how the organization should best develop partnering relationships and/or outsource the expertise. Outsourcing relationships, it was found, reduce the complexity of delivering overall e-business solutions, while also creating project management challenges. Strategic acquisitioning was a key factor in making e-business initiatives successful in the IT distribution channel.
Examining relationships between athletic department finances, athletic success, and academic success among NCAA Division I FBS institutions

iii LIST OF TABLES . vi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION . 1 Purpose of the Study . 3 Research Questions . 3 Hypotheses . 4 Definition of Terms . 6 Assumptions . 7 Delimitations . 7 Limitations . 7 Significance of the study . 8 CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF LITERATURE . 9 Introduction . 9 The National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) Directors’ Cup . 9 Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) . 11 NCAA Graduation Success Rate (GSR) . 13 Economic Climate of NCAA Division I . 16 Relationships Between Finances and Athletic Success. 20 CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY . 29 Population. 29
Online Role Mining without Over-Fitting for Service Recommendation

Due to the popularity of smartphones, finding and recommending suitable services on mobile devices are increasingly important. Recent research has attempted to use role-based approaches to recommend mobile services to other members among the same group in a context dependent manner. However, the traditional role mining approaches originated from the domain of security control tend to be rigid and may not be able to capture human behaviors adequately. In particular, during the course of role mining process, these approaches easily result in over-fitting, i.e., too many roles with slightly different service consumption patterns are found. As a result, they fail to reveal the true common preferences within the user community. This paper proposes an online role mining algorithm with a residual term that automatically group users according to their interests and habits without losing sight of their individual preferences. Moreover, to resolve the over-fitting problem, we relax the role mining mechanism by introducing quasi-roles based on the concept of quasi-bicliques. Most importantly, the new concept allows us to propose a monitoring framework to detect and correct over-fitting in online role mining such that recommendations can be made based on the latest and genuine common preferences. To the best of our knowledge, this is a new area in service recommendation that is yet to be fully explored.
Recognizing Stewardship Practices as Indicators of Social Resilience: In Living Memorials and in a Community Garden

Resilience theory has received increased attention from researchers across a range of disciplines who have developed frameworks and articulated categories of indicators; however, there has been less discussion of how to recognize, and therefore support, social resilience at the community level, especially in urban areas. The value of urban environmental stewardship for supporting social-ecological functioning and improving quality of life in cities has been documented, but recognizing it as a strategy for strengthening social resilience to respond to future disturbances has not been fully explored. Here we address the question: How can social resilience indicators be operationalized as stewardship practices in an urban context? Using a deductive coding approach drawing upon existing resilience frameworks we analyze qualitative data from community managed-open spaces in the New York City area that have responded to various chronic presses and acute disturbances including a hurricane and a terrorist attack. In each case we identify and characterize the type of grounded, empirically observable stewardship practices that demonstrate the following indicators of social resilience at the community level: place attachment, social cohesion, social networks, and knowledge exchange and diversification. The process of operationalizing abstract indicators of social resilience has important implications for managers to support social (and ecological) resilience in the specific areas where stewardship takes place, as well as potentially having greater effects that bridge beyond the spatial and temporal boundaries of the site. We conclude by suggesting how researchers and practitioners might learn from our examples so they can recognize resilience in other sites in order to both inform research frameworks and strengthen practice and programming, while keeping larger institutional structures and context in mind.
Screen-Space Subsurface Scattering, A Real-time Implementation Using Direct3D 11.1 Rendering API

Context Subsurface scattering - the effect of light scattering within a material. Lots of materials on earth possess translucent properties. It is therefore an important factor to consider when trying to render realistic images. Historically the effect has been used for offline rendering with ray tracers, but is now considered a real-time rendering technique and is done based on approximations off previous models. Early real-time methods approximates the effect in object texture space which does not scale well with real-time applications such as games. A relatively new approach makes it possible to apply the effect as a post processing effect using GPGPU capabilities, making this approach compatible with most modern rendering pipelines.Objectives The aim of this thesis is to explore the possibilities of a dynamic real-time solution to subsurface scattering with a modern rendering API to utilize GPGPU programming and modern data management, combined with previous techniquesMethods The proposed subsurface scattering technique is implemented in a delimited real-time graphics engine using a modern rendering API to evaluate the impact on performance by conducting several experiments with specific properties.Results The result obtained hints that by using a flexible solution to represent materials, execution time lands at an acceptable rate and could be used in real-time. These results shows that the execution time grows nearly linearly with consideration to the number of layers and the strength of the effect. Because the technique is performed in screen space, the performance scales with subsurface scattering screen coverage and screen resolution.Conclusions The technique could be used in real-time and could trivially be integrated to most existing rendering pipelines. Further research and testing should be done in order to determine how the effect scales in a complex 3D-game environment.
Recommendation Projects at Yahoo!

Recommendation is the task of providing content that is likely to interest users and enrich their online experience. At Yahoo! , the variety of user-facing applications and the nature and volume of data raise multiple recommendation opportunities and challenges. In this paper, we provide a brief description of several projects within Yahoo! Labs, in the context of Web Search (Section 2), interpreting users’ clicks and browsing behavior (Section 3), and on the Social Web (Section 4).
The more pieces, the better the puzzle: sperm concentration increases gametic compatibility

Abstract The genetic benefits individuals receive from mate choice have been the focus of numerous studies, with several showing support for both intrinsic genetic benefits and compatibility effects on fertilization success and offspring viability. However, the robustness of these effects have rarely been tested across an ecologically relevant environmental gradient. In particular, sperm environment is a crucial factor determining fertilization success in many species, especially those with external fertilization. Here, we test the importance of sperm environment in mediating compatibility‐based selection on fertilization using a factorial breeding design. We detected a significant intrinsic male effect on fertilization success at only one of four sperm concentrations. Compatibility effects were significant at the two highest sperm concentrations and, interestingly, the magnitude of the compatibility effect consistently increased with sperm concentration. This suggests that females are able to modify the probability of sperm–egg fusion as the amount of sperm available increases.
Glycosylphosphatidylinositol‐anchored mucin‐like glycoproteins isolated from Trypanosoma cruzi trypomastigotes induce in vivo leukocyte recruitment dependent on MCP‐1 production by IFN‐γ‐primed‐macrophages

Glycosylphosphatidylinositol‐anchoredmucin‐like glycoproteins from Trypanosoma cruzi trypomastigotes (tGPI‐mucins) activate macrophages in vitro to produce proinflammatory cytokines, chemokines, and nitric oxide. These effects of tGPI‐mucins may be important in the ensuing immune response to T. cruzi. Here, we have sought evidence for a role of tGPI‐mucins in mediating leukocyte recruitment in vivo. tGPI‐mucins are highly effective in promoting cell recruitment in the pleural cavity of mice primed with IFN‐γ‐inducing agents but not in naïve mice. Maximal recruitment was observed at a dose between 250 and 1250 ng tGPI‐mucins. There was a significant elevation in the levels of MCP‐1 in the pleural cavity of primed animals injected with tGPI‐mucins, and in vivo neutralization of MCP‐1 abolished leukocyte recruitment. Pretreatment with anti‐MIP‐1α or anti‐RANTES had no effect on the recruitment induced by tGPI‐mucins. MCP‐1 immunoreactivity was detected in pleural macrophages, and macrophages produced MCP‐1 in vitro, especially after priming with IFN‐γ. Finally, tGPI‐mucins induced significant leukocyte recruitment in primed C3H/HeJ but not in TLR2‐deficient mice. Together, our results suggest that T. cruzi‐derived GPI‐mucins in conjunction with IFN‐γ may drive tissue chemokine production and inflammation and bear a significant role in the pathogenesis of Chagas disease.
Vitamin D as Adjunctive Host-Directed Therapy in Tuberculosis: A Systematic Review

Vitamin D plays an important role in innate defenses against intracellular pathogens. Seasonal vitamin D insufficiency (VDI) due to reduced sun exposure far from the equator increases tuberculosis risk. Eight randomized controlled trials examined vitamin D as adjunctive therapy during tuberculosis treatment. The studies varied substantially regarding patient genetic backgrounds, the extent of baseline VDI, the administered dose, the study endpoints, and the quality of the reported data. One carefully performed study in which moderately large vitamin D doses were given to markedly VDI patients found a benefit sufficient to support shortening treatment from 6 to 4 months, although other similar studies did not. Vitamin D is thought to have anti-inflammatory effects. However, 2 studies reported 3 vitamin D recipients with severe paradoxical inflammatory reactions. Future studies of vitamin D in tuberculosis in patients with specific genetic backgrounds must monitor these events closely to determine their risks and underlying mechanisms.
SemIndex: Efficient indexing mechanism for ontologies

To make machine understand the semantics of web page, there is need for representation language other than HTML, XML. Semantic Web, allows the information to be represented in well-defined manner using different languages like RDF, OWL which enhances the inference power of the machines, making the contents machine-interpretable. Indexing of the fetched web contents for these representation languages for effective information retrieval is the key issue of research. In this paper comparative analysis of existing indexing techniques for RDF documents is done. And framework is proposed and implemented for indexing crawled ontologies represented in Semantic Web Language like RDF language.
Fast shot segmentation combining global and local visual descriptors

This paper introduces an algorithm for fast temporal segmentation of videos into shots. The proposed method detects abrupt and gradual transitions, based on the visual similarity of neighboring frames of the video. The descriptive efficiency of both local (SURF) and global (HSV histograms) descriptors is exploited for assessing frame similarity, while GPU-based processing is used for accelerating the analysis. Specifically, abrupt transitions are initially detected between successive video frames where there is a sharp change in the visual content, which is expressed by a very low similarity score. Then, the calculated scores are further analysed for the identification of frame-sequences where a progressive change of the visual content takes place and, in this way gradual transitions are detected. Finally, a post-processing step is performed aiming to identify outliers due to object/camera movement and flash-lights. The experiments show that the proposed algorithm achieves high accuracy while being capable of faster-than-real-time analysis.
THE UBIQUITY OF THE RAPID NEUTRON-CAPTURE PROCESS

To better characterize the abundance patterns produced by the r-process, we have derived new abundances or upper limits for the heavy elements zinc (Zn, Z= 30), yttrium (Y, Z= 39), lanthanum (La, Z= 57), europium (Eu, Z= 63), and lead (Pb, Z= 82). Our sample of 161 metal-poor stars includes new measurements from 88 high-resolution and high signal-to-noise spectra obtained with the Tull Spectrograph on the 2.7 m Smith Telescope at the McDonald Observatory, and other abundances are adopted from the literature. We use models of the s-process in asymptotic giant branch stars to characterize the high Pb/Eu ratios produced in the s-process at low metallicity, and our new observations then allow us to identify a sample of stars with no detectable s-process material. In these stars, we find no significant increase in the Pb/Eu ratios with increasing metallicity. This suggests that s-process material was not widely dispersed until the overall Galactic metallicity grew considerably, perhaps even as high as [Fe/H] =−1.4, in contrast with earlier studies that suggested a much lower mean metallicity. We identify a dispersion of at least 0.5 dex in [La/Eu] in metal-poor stars with [Eu/Fe] <+0.6 attributable to the r-process, suggesting that there is no unique “pure” r-process elemental ratio among pairs of rare earth elements. We confirm earlier detections of an anti-correlation between Y/Eu and Eu/Fe bookended by stars strongly enriched in the r-process (e.g., CS 22892–052) and those with deficiencies of the heavy elements (e.g., HD 122563). We can reproduce the range of Y/Eu ratios using simulations of high-entropy neutrino winds of core-collapse supernovae that include charged-particle and neutron-capture components of r-process nucleosynthesis. The heavy element abundance patterns in most metal-poor stars do not resemble that of CS 22892–052, but the presence of heavy elements such as Ba in nearly all metal-poor stars without s-process enrichment suggests that the r-process is a common phenomenon.
Quantum information and precision measurement

Abstract We describe some applications of quantum information theory to the analysis of quantum limits on measurement sensitivity. A measurement of a weak force acting on a quantum system is a determination of a classical parameter appearing in the master equation that governs the evolution of the system; limitations on measurement accuracy arise because it is not possible to distinguish perfectly among the different possible values of this parameter. Tools developed in the study of quantum information and computation can be exploited to improve the precision of physics experiments; examples include superdense coding, fast database search, and the quantum Fourier transform.
The Impacts of Supplier-Base Concentration on Bullwhip Effect: Evidence from Chinese Manufacturing Firms

This paper empirically tests the influence of supplier-base concentration on the size of the bullwhip effect of enterprises. The study quantifies bullwhip effect of the enterprise by the ratio of fluctuations in production and the fluctuations in demand in each of the four quarters of each year. The study found that about half of the listed manufacturers in China have a bullwhip effect, and the size of the bullwhip effect of the enterprise is very heterogeneous. Empirical analysis found that after controlling the quarterly ratio of demand, the persistence of demand shock, the number of days of inventory holding, the gross profit margin, the size of the enterprise, and the lead time, the concentration of suppliers was significantly negatively correlated with the size of the bullwhip effect. This shows that the more concentrated the supplier of the enterprise, the closer the company and the supplier are in information sharing and production cooperation, and the shorter the company will be from receiving the order to delivering the goods to the customer. The rapid response of the company to customer demand reduces the distortion of demand and therefore reduces the bullwhip effect.
A Traceability-based Method to Support Conceptual Model Evolution

Motivation Renewing software systems is one of the most cost-effective ways to protect software investment, which saves time, money and ensures uninterrupted access to technical support and product upgrades. There are several motivations to promote investment and scientific effort for specifying systems by means of conceptual models and supporting its evolution. As an example, the software engineering community is addressing solutions for supporting model traceability, continuous improvement of business process, organisational reengineering, information system maintenance, etc. Model-driven techniques have been developed in order to analyse systems raising the abstraction level of its specification. However, a support for conceptual model evolution by means of model-driven techniques is still needed. This thesis proposes a traceability-based method that involves model-driven capabilities for designing and providing guidelines, techniques, and tools to support conceptual model evolution. The main idea is to support information system analysts in the tasks related to: justify why the conceptual models have evolved, report and specify what elements have evolved, and guide how to carry out evolution in certain predefined organisational contexts. We plan to apply our method to guide the evolution of an E-shopping software. This way, we also provide mechanism to facilitate industrial adoption.
Parallel suboptimal heuristic search for finding a w-admissible solution. performance analysis

Discrete optimization problems are interesting due to their complexity and applications, particularly in robotics. In this paper, a parallel algorithm that allows finding solutions to these problems, is presented. Then, the modifications that can be applied to it to obtain a second parallel algorithm that finds suboptimal solutions, reducing computation time, are studied. The algorithms proposed are based on two variations of the heuristic search algorithm Best First Search, and are called A* and Weighted A*, respectively. The parallel solutions were implemented using MPI to be run on cluster, taking the N2-1 Puzzle as study case. The experimental work focuses on analyzing the speedup and efficiency achieved for various initial instances, varying architecture configuration. Finally, the quality of the solutions found by the optimal and suboptimal algorithms are compared and performance variation is analyzed.
MATHEMATICAL MODELING OF ELECTROSTATIC MEMS WITH TAILORED DIELECTRIC PROPERTIES

The “pull-in” or “snap-down” instability in electrostatically actuated microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) presents a ubiquitous challenge in MEMS technology of great importance. In this instability, when applied voltages are increased beyond a critical value, there is no longer a steady-state configuration of the device where mechanical members remain separate. This severely restricts the range of stable operation of many devices. In an attempt to reduce the effects of this instability, researchers have suggested spatially tailoring the dielectric properties of MEMS devices. Here, a mathematical model of an idealized electrostatically actuated MEMS device is constructed and analyzed for the purpose of investigating this possibility. The pull-in instability is characterized in terms of the bifurcation diagram for the mathematical model. Variations in this bifurcation diagram for various dielectric profiles are studied, yielding insight into how this technique may be used to increase the stable range of operation of electrostatically actuated MEMS devices.
Prosodic manifestations of confidence and uncertainty in spoken language

We present a project aimed at understanding the acoustic and prosodic correlates of confidence and uncertainty in spoken language. We elicited speech produced under varying levels of certainty and performed perceptual and statistical analyses on the speech data to determine which prosodic features (e.g., pitch, energy, timing) are associated with a speaker’s level of certainty and where these prosodic manifestations occur relative to the location of the word or phrase that the speaker is confident or uncertain about. Our findings suggest that prosodic manifestations of confidence and uncertainty occur both in the local region that causes the uncertainty as well as in its surrounding context.