Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Online Graph Pruning for Pathfinding On Grid Maps

Pathfinding in uniform-cost grid environments is a problem commonly found in application areas such as robotics and video games. The state-of-the-art is dominated by hierarchical pathfinding algorithms which are fast and have small memory overheads but usually return suboptimal paths. In this paper we present a novel search strategy, specific to grids, which is fast, optimal and requires no memory overhead. Our algorithm can be described as a macro operator which identifies and selectively expands only certain nodes in a grid map which we call jump points. Intermediate nodes on a path connecting two jump points are never expanded. We prove that this approach always computes optimal solutions and then undertake a thorough empirical analysis, comparing our method with related works from the literature. We find that searching with jump points can speed up A* by an order of magnitude and more and report significant improvement over the current state of the art.
Reexamining Technology Acceptance in Online Task Behaviours

With rapid advances in information technology, information systems and software have become more versatile and multi‐functional. However, users may have varying degrees of preferences to different functions and tasks that can be accomplished using a single technology. In order to investigate this phenomenon, this study adopts a previous study by Gefen and Straub (2000) as a reference point and uses Internet technology to investigate two tasks: information search and online purchasing. The current study provides a more comprehensive picture of applying task behaviours by decomposing each variable in the technology acceptance model (TAM) according to the two online tasks. The proposed model was tested with survey data from 435 respondents. Results demonstrate that TAM holds its explanatory utility very well when applied to task behaviours. Convergent and discriminant validities indicate that each task possesses its own characteristics and variables. A structural equation modelling test was performed and the.
On Passivity Analysis of Bi-directional Associative Memory Neural Networks with Time Delay

The passivity conditions for bi-directional associative memory neural networks with time-varying delays and uncertainties are considered in this paper. We firstly derive the passivity condition for bi-directional associative memory neural networks with constant time delay, and then extend the result to the case with time-varying delays and uncertainties. Based on Lyapunov functionals and linear matrix inequalities, the passivity conditions are presented. The results obtained in this paper improve and extend some of the previous results
Development of an Indoor Navigation System Using NFC Technology

Existing indoor navigation systems face with many different technical and usability problems. In this paper we present a Near Field Communication (NFC) based indoor navigation system called NFC Internal in order to eliminate the current indoor navigation problems. NFC Internal enables an easy data transfer for indoor navigation systems just by touching tags spread over a building or a complex. The proposed system has several benefits and has potential to increase the usability of these systems. We discuss the system requirements and explain the phases of NFC Internal through use cases.
Research of Tongue Color Recognition Based on BP-ANN with Self-Adaptive Network Structure

Tongue color recognition is one of important research in objective tongue diagnosis. Since the network structure of traditional BP-ANN can greatly affect the recognition rates of tongue color, a kind of improved BP-ANN with self-adaptive network structure is introduced to solve the problem of tongue color recognition. In this method, according to the recognition rates, the node number of the hidden layer is automatically selected, i. e. the network structure is self-adaptive. As the experimental results show, our improved BP-ANN with self-adaptive network structure is more accurate than the traditional one.
2 Which Scene Graphs are there ?

The first section describes the basic structure of a scenegraph and the difference to a standard OpenGL program. As there are a large number of scene graphs around, Open Source and commercial, section 2 gives a short overview of the most commonly used ones. The remainder of this chapter will describe general concepts applying to most scene graphs and use OpenSG as a specific example. The next two sections describe the general node structure and how the graph is traversed. The most important leaf node, the Geometry, is described in section 5. The other of specifying the displayed geometry, the state of transformation and materials etc. is covered in section 6. Some more scene graph specific functionality is hidden inside other node types, as described in sec. 7. To minimize the memory footprint of a scene graph, data can be shared in different ways, sec. 8 gives details. Sec. 9 touches on the importance of multithreading and what is done in scene graphs to support it. After it has been used as an example in all of this part, sec. 10 talks a little about OpenSG. The last section talks about strengths and weaknesses of scene graphs and in which situations it might not make sense to use one (hint: there are not too many).
Social Mobility and Reproduction for Whom? College Readiness and First-Year Retention

Completing college is now the minimum threshold for entry into the middle class. This has pushed college readiness issues to the forefront in efforts to increase educational attainment. Little is known about how college readiness improves outcomes for students traditionally marginalized in educational settings or if social background factors continue to impact students in the same way during college regardless of readiness. Examining first-year college retention using a nationally representative data set, this study asks if social background factors and financial resources for college differentially impact students based on readiness. Findings indicate that academic readiness matters and that parental income and college generation status differentially affect first-year college retention for less-ready students but not college-ready students. Students who begin college less prepared academically are also more disadvantaged than college-ready students by the funding sources they have for college. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.
The ICER Progressive Wavelet Image Compressor

ICER is a progressive, wavelet-based image data compressor designed to meet the specialized needs of deep-space applications while achieving state-of-the-art compression eﬀectiveness. ICER can provide lossless and lossy compression, and incorporates an error-containment scheme to limit the eﬀects of data loss during transmission. The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission will rely primarily on a software implementation of ICER for image compression. This article describes ICER and the methods it uses to meet its goals, and explains the rationale behind the choice of methods. Performance results also are presented.
The Blizzard Challenge 2006

Last year the Blizzard Challenge 2005 introduced th e speech synthesis community to the concept of large scale, multi-site evaluation of TTS systems using common data. In this, the second year of the Blizzard Challenge, we again tac kled this task. Participation increased dramatically, out of a total of 17 initial sites that showed interest, a total of 14 s ites from around the world actually submitted entries. In this pape r we discuss the results, difficulties, and differences in this year’s Challenge. Index Terms : speech synthesis, evaluation, corpus based synthesis
Parental influences on youth delinquency

The purpose of this paper is to inform the reader about the currently employed theories, research, and interventions in developmental criminology, with a particular emphasis on parental influences. ,As well as evoking the classical theories and relevant research in psychology and developmental criminology fields, some of the significant recent contributions are also evaluated to reveal how parenting is linked to youngsters’ delinquency in the extant literature. ,While parental factors do not directly affect delinquency of children and adolescents, it is an effectual mediator. ,Not a systematic (statistical) review, rather a hermeneutic one with righteous justifications. ,Evidence-based suggestions, regarding the allocation of time and resources for the modification of implicated parenting factors in planning preventative and interventional programs, are made. ,This review is an up-to-date instructional source that presents the major developmental criminology theories including the recent ones.
Adaptive MIMO switching of 2×2 MIMO system for WiMAX technology

The growth in traffic volume and the increase in many new services have forced the change of wireless configuration and transmission schemes. WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) system is considered as one technology to ground the broadband access facility by providing a variety of modulation and transmission schemes. MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) technique is employed in WiMAX system to provide a higher data rate and improve a spectral efficiency. The MIMO schemes based on WiMAX standard are determined by various choices of either space-time coding or spatial multiplexing in which each choice offers a different system performance. In this paper, the adaptive MIMO switching has been proposed to maintain the best BER (Bit Error Rate) efficiency of data transmission among various choices of MIMO schemes in WiMAX system. The results reveal that the proposed system achieves a significant improvement when using adaptive MIMO switching instead of using only either spatial multiplexing or space-time coding.
Power management strategies in data transmission

With the growing popularity of 3G-powered devices and their serious energy consumption problem, there are growing demands on energy-efficient data transmission strategies for various embedded systems. Different from the past work in energy-efficient real-time task scheduling, we explore strategies to maximize the amount of data transmitted by a 3G module under a given battery capacity. In particular, we present algorithms under different workload configurations with and without timing constraint considerations. Experiments were then conducted to verify the validity of the strategies and develop insights in energy-efficient data transmission.
FUTURE BUDGET PRESSURES ARISING FROM SPENDING ON HEALTH AND LONG-TERM CARE

Public health and long-term care spending is set to rise. Public spending on health and long-term care is likely to put considerable pressure on government budgets in the future. Such spending has already risen over the past three decades, accelerating since the turn of the century to reach almost 7% of GDP for OECD countries on average in 2005.1 OECD projections suggest that in the absence of policy action, the average spending share could almost double by 2050, albeit with considerable variation across individual countries. This chapter presents the projections, highlighting the many uncertainties – related both to policy and to the underlying drivers of spending – but also what seems like more robust conclusions.
Model to Quantify Confidentiality at Requirement Phase

The most significant factor for software development is software security. In today's era security being the most crucial quality aspect as well as imperative demand for any software projects. To address security a number of approaches, techniques and design have been evolved to secure software applications. Security requirements are used during the software development life cycle in order to reduce vulnerabilities particularly during requirement elicitation by performing functions such as measuring adherence to secure requirement standards, identifying likely vulnerabilities that may exist, and tracing and inspecting security flaws that are sooner or later discovered. To achieve these objectives, the assessment of security using model is more appropriate and its validation signifies the valid impact of functional requirement of secure software. The model to quantify confidentiality is developed using multiple linear regression technique on requirement constructs. The statistical analysis on this study concludes its statistical significance that the calculated data is highly acceptable.
A Belief Propagation Approach to Traffic Prediction using Probe Vehicles

This paper deals with real-time prediction of traffic conditions in a setting where the only available information is floating car data (FCD) sent by probe vehicles. Starting from the Ising model of statistical physics, we use a discretized space-time traffic description, on which we define and study an inference method based on the belief propagation (BP) algorithm. The idea is to encode into a graph the a priori information derived from historical data (marginal probabilities of pairs of variables), and to use BP to estimate the actual state from the latest FCD. The behavior of the algorithm is illustrated by numerical studies on a simple simulated traffic network. The generalization to the superposition of many traffic patterns is discussed.
Vigilance analysis based on EEG band power using Support Vector Machine

Vigilance analysis associated with safe driving based on EEG has drawn considerable attention of researchers in recent years. Preventing traffic accidents caused by low level vigilance is highly desirable. This paper presents a novel vigilance analysis system by evaluating electroencephalographic (EEG) changes. EEG signals are preprocessed with independent component analysis to eliminate noise from the original EEG recording. Then, EEG band power features are extracted by using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). These features serve as an input for further classification. Support Vector Machine (SVM) is subsequently employed as a classifier to distinguish vigilance level. Nine healthy subjects participated in our experiment at which they drive a car in driving simulator. Experimental results reveal that the proposed approach could be used to develop a noninvasive monitoring system for vigilance state.
Shortest Point-Visible Paths on Polyhedral Surfaces

In this paper we study the problem of nding the shortest path between two points lying on the surface of a (possibly nonconvex) polyhedron which is constrained so that a given point on the surface of the polyhedron must be seen from some point in the path. Our algorithm runs in time O(n 2 log n) for the convex polyhedron and O(n 3 log n) for nonconvex case. The method used is based on the subdivision of the inward layout and intersecting it with the visibility map of the point to be seen.
SRILM at Sixteen: Update and Outlook

We review developments in the SRI Language Modeling Toolkit (SRILM) since 2002, when a previous paper on SRILM was published. These developments include measures to make training from large data sets more efficient, to implement additional language modeling techniques (such as for adaptation and smoothing), and for client/server operation. In addition, the functionality for lattice processing has been greatly expanded. We also highlight several external contributions and notable applications of the toolkit, and assess SRILM’s impact on the research community.
Co-evolution of Infrastructure and Source Code - An Empirical Study

Infrastructure-as-code automates the process of configuring and setting up the environment (e.g., servers, VMs and databases) in which a software system will be tested and/or deployed, through textual specification files in a language like Puppet or Chef. Since the environment is instantiated automatically by the infrastructure languages' tools, no manual intervention is necessary apart from maintaining the infrastructure specification files. The amount of work involved with such maintenance, as well as the size and complexity of infrastructure specification files, have not yet been studied empirically. Through an empirical study of the version control system of 265 Open Stack projects, we find that infrastructure files are large and churn frequently, which could indicate a potential of introducing bugs. Furthermore, we found that the infrastructure code files are coupled tightly with the other files in a project, especially test files, which implies that testers often need to change infrastructure specifications when making changes to the test framework and tests.
'RGB' Color Image Quantization using Pollination based Optimization

Color Image Quantization plays an important role for image analysis and visualization. In this paper, RGB color image quantization using pollination based optimization is implemented. The pollination based optimization is applied to RGB color model for image quantization. The Euclidean Distance metric is used for color difference between pixels. Color elimination and reproduction is done by evaluating the Euclidean Distance. Threshold value is taken as the fitness function to calculate the popular and unpopular colors. Color difference calculated using Euclidean Distance and correlate better with visual assessment than color differences calculated using other distance metrics. In order to evaluate the performance of proposed algorithm, MSE (Mean Square Error), Euclidean Distance, Correlation coefficient, PSNR, Time Taken (in seconds) is used. Experimental results shows that MSE values are significantly reduced and we achieve better PSNR and Correlation coefficient values.
Isolation of Clara cells from the mouse lung.

A method is described for isolating Clara cells from the mouse lung that does not require the technique of elutriation. Mouse lungs totally perfused of blood are instilled with crystalline trypsin (0.25%) and incubated for the optimum time of 15 min. The lung tissue is chopped, mechanically agitated, and sequentially filtered to obtain a primary digest of 3 to 5 x 10(6) cells. Clara cells, identified routinely by histochemical localization of NADPH diaphorase, using the stain nitrotetrazolium blue (NBT), accounts for between 20 to 40% of the cells in the primary digest. Layering the cells of the primary digest on a discontinuous Percoll gradient followed by centrifugation gives rise to a major band of cells, 52% that are Clara cells (0.77 +/- 0.28 x 10(6)/mouse). A second method was devised to purify the Clara cells by simply centrifuging (32g, 6 min, 10 degrees C) the primary digest and discarding the supernatant that contained only a few NBT positive cells. When this process was repeated three times, the final pellet contained 68% Clara cells realizing 0.55 +/- 0.16 x 10(6) cells/mouse. The cells have typical Clara cell morphology as confirmed by electron microscopy and have a high level of P-450 enzymes (7-ethoxycoumarin deethylase and coumarin hydroxylase). Furthermore, the primary digests and the purified isolates contain less than 1% alveolar Type II cells, although such cells, identified by the histochemical localization of alkaline phosphatase, can be obtained by a second, more extensive digestion procedure. The simple procedure described for the isolation of mouse Clara cells could be further advanced if methods could be devised to prevent the loss of NADPH diaphorase activity during enzymatic digestion and cell centrifugation. ImagesFIGURE 1. 1aFIGURE 1. 1bFIGURE 1. 1cFIGURE 1. 1dFIGURE 1. 1eFIGURE 1. 1fFIGURE 2.FIGURE 3.FIGURE 4.FIGURE 5.FIGURE 6.FIGURE 7.FIGURE 8.FIGURE 9.FIGURE 10.FIGURE 11.FIGURE 12.FIGURE 13.
Dynamics filter - concept and implementation of online motion generator for human figures

Humanoid robots are required to make a variety of dynamics and even expressive motions in changing environments. However, the conventional methods for generating humanoid motions fail do achieve this requirement since they can only generate quite artificial and predefined motions through rather complicated optimization processes. In this paper, we propose the concept of "dynamics filter" which transforms a physically inconsistent motion into a consistent one, and provide an example of its implementation using feedback control and local optimization. The optimization is based on the equation of motion of constrained kinematic chains, which is derived from our previously proposed method for computing the dynamics of structure-varying kinematic chains. The proposed method can be applied to online motion generator of humanoid robots.
Total Recovery of Defects Generated by Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI)

NBTI degradation is known to generate defects which can partially recover during a fast interruption. This paper investigates the hole de-trapping effect but also re-trapping kinetics and re-passivation of interface states. The comparison of relaxation at low and high temperatures allows us to conclude that the annealing at 300degC is a real recovery and healing of oxide defects. Indeed, interface states are totally re-passivated and hole traps are de-trapped but have also totally recovered. Furthermore, we show that the retrapping time of oxide traps is three times longer than their generation whatever the stress conditions and relaxation times.
On Randomized Linear Network Codes and Their Error Correction Capabilities

Randomized linear network code for single source multicast was introduced and analyzed in Ho et al. (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, October 2006) where the main results are upper bounds for the failure probability of the code. In this paper, these bounds are improved and tightness of the new bounds is studied by analyzing the limiting behavior of the failure probability as the field size goes to infinity. In the linear random coding setting for single source multicast, the minimum distance of the code defined in Zhang, (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, January 2008) is a random variable taking nonnegative integer values that satisfy the inequality in the Singleton bound recently established in Yeung and Cai (Communications in Information and Systems, 2006) for network error correction codes. We derive a bound on the probability mass function of the minimum distance of the random linear network code based on our improved upper bounds for the failure probability. Codes having the highest possible minimum distance in the Singleton bound are called maximum distance separable (MDS). The bound on the field size required for the existence of MDS codes reported in Zhang, (IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, January 2008) and Matsumoto (arXiv:cs.IT/0610121, Oct. 2006) suggests that such codes exist only when field size is large. Define the degradation of a code as the difference between the highest possible minimum distance in the Singleton bound and the actual minimum distance of the code. The bound for the probability mass function of the minimum distance leads to a bound on the field size required for the existence of network error correction codes with a given maximum degradation. The result shows that allowing minor degradation reduces the field size required dramatically.