Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Identifying objects using cluster and concept analysis

Many approaches to support (semi-automatic) identification of objects in legacy code take data structures as the starting point for candidate classes. Unfortunately, legacy data structures tend to grow over time, and may contain many unrelated fields at the time of migration. We propose a method for identifying objects by semi-automatically restructuring the legacy data structures. Issues involved include the selection of record fields of interest, the identification of procedures actually dealing with such fields, and the construction of coherent groups of fields and procedures into candidate classes. We explore the use of cluster and concept analysis for the purpose of object identification, and we illustrate their effect on a 100000 LOC Cobol system. Furthermore, we use these results to contrast clustering with concept analysis techniques.
Hindi Off-Line Signature Verification

Handwritten Signatures are one of the widely used biometrics for document authentication as well as human authorization. The purpose of this paper is to present an off-line signature verification system involving Hindi signatures. Signature verification is a process by which the questioned signature is examined in detail in order to determine whether it belongs to the claimed person or not. Despite of substantial research in the field of signature verification involving Western signatures, very little attention has been dedicated to non-Western signatures such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Persian etc. In this paper, the performance of an off-line signature verification system involving Hindi signatures, whose style is distinct from Western scripts, has been investigated. The gradient and Zernike moment features were employed and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) were considered for verification. To the best of the authors' knowledge, Hindi signatures have never been used for the task of signature verification and this is the first report of using Hindi signatures in this area. The Hindi signature database employed for experimentation consisted of 840 (35×24) genuine signatures and 1050 (35×30) forgeries. An encouraging accuracy of 7.42% FRR and 4.28% FAR were obtained following experimentation when the gradient features were employed.
Metareasoning: A manifesto

The 21st century is experiencing a renewed interest in an old idea within artificial intelligence that goes to the heart of what it means to be both human and intelligent. This idea is that much can be gained by thinking about one's own thinking. Traditionally within cognitive science and artificial intelligence, thinking or reasoning has been cast as a decision cycle within an actionperception loop similar to that shown in Figure 1. An intelligent agent perceives some stimuli from the environment and behaves rationally to achieve its goals by selecting some action from its set of competencies. The result of these actions at the ground level is subsequently perceived at the object level and the cycle continues. Metareasoning is the process of reasoning about this reasoning cycle. It consists of both the meta-level control of computational activities and the introspective monitoring of reasoning (see Figure 2). This cyclical arrangement represents a higher-level reflection of the standard action-perception cycle, and as such, it represents the perception of reasoning and its control.
The five-minute rule twenty years later, and how flash memory changes the rules

In 1987, Gray and Putzolo presented the five-minute rule, which was reviewed and renewed ten years later in 1997. With the advent of flash memory in the gap between traditional RAM main memory and traditional disk systems, the five-minute rule now applies to large pages appropriate for today's disks and their fast transfer bandwidths, and it also applies to flash disks holding small pages appropriate for their fast access latency. Flash memory fills the gap between RAM and disks in terms of many metrics: acquisition cost, access latency, transfer bandwidth, spatial density, and power consumption. Thus, within a few years, flash memory will likely be used heavily in operating systems, file systems, and database systems. Research into appropriate system architectures is urgently needed. The basic software architectures for exploiting flash in these systems are called "extended buffer pool" and "extended disk" here. Based on the characteristics of these software architectures, an argument is presented why operating systems and file systems on one hand and database systems on the other hand will best benefit from flash memory by employing different software architectures.
Individual Differences in Achievement Motivation are related to Vigilance Performance

Vigilance, or sustained attention, tasks require observers to attend to information over a prolonged period of time. One individual difference that may be associated with sustained attention performance is achievement motivation, given recent findings in the literature that indicate a relationship between human motivation and attention. Fifty-nine participants were randomly assigned to either a cognitive or sensory vigilance task. The present study indicated that individuals high in achievement motivation detected more critical signals and made fewer false alarms in the cognitive vigilance task. Participants high in achievement motivation in the cognitive condition also demonstrated some of the highest distress and worry scores post-task. Implications for sustained attention tasks are discussed.
Efficient Depth Coding By Exploiting Temporal Correlations in Depth Maps

With the growing demands for 3D and multi-view video content, efficient depth data coding becomes a vital issue in image and video coding field. In this paper, we propose a simple depth coding scheme using multiple prediction modes exploiting temporal correlation of depth map. Current depth coding techniques mostly depend on intra-coding mode that cannot get the advantage of temporal redundancy in the depth maps and higher spatial redundancy in inter-predicted depth residuals. Depth maps are characterized by smooth regions with sharp edges that play an important role in the view synthesis process. As depth images are more sensitive to coding errors, use of transformation or approximation of edges by explicit edge modelling has impact on view synthesis quality. Moreover, lossy compression of depth map brings additional geometrical distortion to synthetic view. In this paper, we have demonstrated that encoding inter-coded depth block residuals with quantization at pixel domain is more efficient than the intra-coding techniques relying on explicit edge preservation. On standard 3D video sequences, the proposed depth coding has achieved superior image quality of synthesized views against the new 3D-HEVC standard for depth map bit-rate 0.25 bpp or higher.
Impaired Immune Responses and B-Cell Proliferation in Mice Lacking the Id3 Gene

ABSTRACT B-lymphocyte activation and proliferation induced by the B-cell receptor (BCR) signals are important steps in the initiation of humoral immune responses. How the BCR signals are translated by nuclear transcription factors into cell cycle progression is poorly understood.Id3 is an immediate-early gene responding to growth and mitogenic signals in many cell types including B cells. The primary function of the Id3 protein has been defined as that of inhibitor of basic-helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcription factors. The interaction between Id3 and bHLH proteins, many of which are essential for cellular differentiation, has been proposed as a key regulatory event leading to cellular proliferation instead of differentiation. To further investigate the role of Id3 in tissue and embryo development and the mechanism of Id3-mediated growth regulation, we generated and analyzedId3-deficient mice. While these mice display no overt abnormality in tissue and embryo development, their humoral immunity is compromised. The amounts of immunoglobulins produced inId3-deficient mice immunized with a T-cell-dependent antigen and a type 2 T-cell-independent antigen are attenuated and severely impaired, respectively. Further analysis of lymphocytes isolated from Id3-deficient mice reveals a B-cell defect in their proliferation response to BCR cross-linking but not to lipopolysaccharide or a combination of BCR cross-linking and interleukin-4. Analyses of cultured lymphocytes also suggest involvement of Id3 in cytokine production in T cells and isotype switching in B cells. Finally, the proliferation defect inId3-deficient B cells can be rescued by ectopic expression of Id1, a homologue of Id3. Taken together, these results define a necessary and specific role for Id3 in mediating signals from BCR to cell cycle progression during humoral immune responses.
The Retailer Needs to Be Paid for Sophisticated Decisions: Modelling Promotional Interactions between Consumers, Retailers and Brand Managers

Competition among brands that sell through a supermarket chain is a repeated moderated oligopoly, where the retailer moderates brand competition by choosing the store promotions that consumers see each week. The interactions between consumers, retailers and brand managers are complex, with each having different goals and constraints. Here we use regression and Genetic Algorithm techniques to model these interactions. Our goal is to address an important question in the literature; specifically whether the retailer gains positive returns through more sophisticated moderation. In doing so, we draw on work in economics showing that unsophisticated or Zero-Intelligence (ZI) agents can often replicate real-world outcomes. Hence we posit and test three levels of retailer sophistication - ZI, naive and sophisticated - bringing a novel perspective to this important topic.We find that, although the behavior of brand managers is more realistic with the sophisticated retailer, on average the category volumes are lower than with either of the naive or ZI retailer. The dominant brand, however, does benefit with the sophisticated retailer, by preserving its profits and reducing those of its competitors. We speculate that the retailer either receives adequate side-payments from the dominant brand or there are sufficient spin-off benefits in other categories to compensate the retailer for the loss of volume in the focal category.
34 Multivariate Response : Changes in Means

The whole organism is so tied together than when slight variations in one part occur, and are accumulated through natural selection, other parts become modified. This is a very important subject, most imperfectly understood. The multivariate breeder's equation for predicting the change in a vector of means is one of the most powerful results in quantitative genetics. We have already informally discussed this equation in several previous chapters (10, 16, 29), and here we start its full development. Reviews of multivariate response are given by Arnold (1992), Arnold et al. (2001), and McGuigan (2006). We begin with a brief overview of the multivariate breeder's, reviewing its key features before discussing two slight generalizations of the breeder's equation: the multivariate secondary theorem of natural selection and the response under linear (but not necessarily normal) parent-offspring regressions. We then return to the historical roots of the multi-variate breeder's equation, reviewing (in a bivariate framework) correlated responses and estimation of realized genetic correlations. We then move on to what is the core of this chapter , the detailed analysis of the breeder's equation from an evolutionary biology perspective, as this field has driven much of the recent work on the analysis of multivariate selection. We first examine schemes to standardized response and apply these to the analysis of realized selection gradients – attempts to infer historical patterns of natural selection from the patterns of population divergence. We then turn to a detailed geometric analysis of the G matrix of genetic variances and covariances. The geometry of this matrix imposes constraints on direction of evolution and we review some central concepts, such as how the eigenstructure of G imposes constraints, the evolution of mean fitness, evolution along genetic lines of least resistance, subspace projection of response, and the multivariate extensions of evolvability and conditional evolvability. A key assumption through, which is relaxed in Chapter 31, is the constancy of G. Given our previous discussions about change in genetic variances under selection (Chapters 13, 24-26), we of course expect G is change, in particular because genetic covariances are much more sensitive to changes from selection than are variances. The justification for a constant G that appears in the evolutionary literature is that if selection has been proceeding for a long (i.e. evolutionary) time, the resulting covariance matrix may be in mutation-selection-drift equilibrium and hence be (relatively) constant (Chapter 27). While this may be true if …
Airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point density analysis

The point density is a preeminent parameter on airborne laser scanner surveys. It is not only related to accuracy but costs and savings. The lack of uniformity of the point density across the survey is well-known in the scientific community. This paper analyzes the behaviour of the point density derived by an oscillating mirror laser scanner on different single strips on flat bare ground in order to estimate a meaningful mean density value. The variation of the point density at both extreme ends of the oscillating mirror scan is meaningful. It will be demonstrated that excluding the extreme sectors across the strip corresponding to 1/8 of the swath width (12.5% of the sampling area, half in each side) for the computation of the mean density value is enough to satisfy light detection and ranging (LiDAR) specifications for national level surveys. Key words: Light detection and ranging (LiDAR), point density, point distribution.
Is This the Best Philosophy Can Do? Henry R. Luce and A Free and Responsible Press

Why did Time Inc. editor-in-chief Henry R. Luce spend US$200,000 on the Commission on Freedom of the Press and then denounce its conclusions? Scholars have surmised that he wanted to quell criticism and to forestall regulation of his media properties. But internal documents from Time Inc. suggest that Luce was dismayed over what he considered major gaps in the report’s philosophical argument, perhaps exacerbated by personal pique over having been excluded from Commission meetings. This is the first study of the Commission to use Time Inc.’s company files.
TCP Congestion Control Identification

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) carries most of the traffic on the Internet these days. There are several implementations of TCP, and the most important difference among them is their mechanism for controlling congestion. One of the methods for determining type of a TCP is active probing. Active probing considers a TCP implementation as a black box, sends different streams of data to the appropriate host. According to the response received from the host, it figures out the type of TCP version implemented. TCP Behavior Inference Tool (TBIT) is an implemented tool that uses active probing to check the running TCP on web servers. It can check several aspects of the running TCP including initial value of congestion window, congestion control algorithm, conformant congestion control, response to selective acknowledgment, response to Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) and time wait duration. In this paper we focus on congestion control algorithm aspect of it, explain the mechanism used by TBIT and present the results.
Global equilibrium stability of discrete-time analog neural networks

In this paper, some global stability criteria of an equilibrium state for a general class of discrete-time dynamic neural networks are presented using a novel diagonal Lyapunov function approach, and the resulting criteria are described by the diagonal Lyapunov matrix equations. First, globally diagonal Lyapunov function approaches are applied to study equilibrium stability problem of a class of discrete-time dynamic neural networks without linear terms. Some novel stability conditions are then obtained for a general class of discrete-time dynamic neural networks. <<ETX>>
The NASA Langley Multidisciplinary Uncertainty Quantification Challenge

NASA missions often involve the development of new vehicles and systems that must be designed to operate in harsh domains with a wide array of operating conditions. These missions involve high-consequence and safety-critical systems for which quantitative data is either very sparse or prohibitively expensive to collect. Limited heritage data may exist, but is also usually sparse and may not be directly applicable to the system of interest, making uncertainty quantification extremely challenging. NASA modeling and simulation standards require estimates of uncertainty and descriptions of any processes used to obtain these estimates. The NASA Langley Research Center has developed an uncertainty quantification challenge problem in an effort to focus a community of researchers towards a common problem. This challenge problem features key issues in both uncertainty quantification and robust design using a discipline-independent formulation. While the formulation is indeed discipline-independent, the underlying model, as well as the requirements imposed upon it, describes a realistic aeronautics application. A few high-level details of this application are provided at the end of this document. Additional information is available at: http://uqtools.larc. nasa.gov/nda-uq-challenge-problem-2014/.
A Missing Data Approach for Robust Automatic Speech Recognition in The Presence of Reverberation

We describe a technique for robust recognition of reverberated speech using the ‘missing data’ paradigm. Modulation filtering is used to identify time-frequency regions of the speech signal which are relatively uncontaminated by reverberation and contain strong speech energy; only these ‘reliable’ acoustic features are made directly available to the recogniser. The proposed system is evaluated on a connected digit recognition task using a range of reverberation conditions. Our approach improves recognition performance when the T60 reverberation time is longer than 0.7 sec. , relative to a baseline system which uses acoustic features derived from perceptual linear prediction and the modulation filtered spectrogram.
The TALP participation at ERD 2014

This document describes the work performed by the TALP Research Center, UPC in its first participation at ERD 2014 short text evaluation track. The objective of this evaluation track is to recognize mentions of entities in a given short text, disambiguate them and map them to the entities in a given collection of knowledge base. To this end, we presented our system taking advantage of a topic modeling approach to rank candidates of each entity mentions occurring in the query text.
Drifting sub-pulse analysis using the two-dimensional Fourier transform

The basic form of drifting sub-pulses is that of a periodicity whose phase depends (approximately linearly) on both pulse longitude and pulse number. As such, we argue that the two-dimensional Fourier transform of the longitude-time data (called the Two-Dimensional Fluctuation Spectrum; 2DFS) presents an ideal basis for studies of this phenomenon. We examine the 2DFS of a pulsar signal synthesized using the parameters of an empirical model for sub-pulse behaviour. We show that the transform concentrates the modulation power to a relatively small area of phase space in the region corresponding to the characteristic frequency of sub-pulses in longitude and pulse number. This property enables the detection of the presence and parameters of drifting sub-pulses with great sensitivity even in data where the noise level far exceeds the instantaneous flux density of individual pulses. The amplitude of drifting sub-pulses is modulated in time by scintillation and pulse nulling and in longitude by the rotating viewing geometry (with an envelope similar to that of the mean pulse profile). In addition, sub- pulse phase as a function of longitude and pulse number can dier from that of a sinusoid due to variations in the drift rate (often associated with nulling) and through the varying rate of traverse of magnetic azimuth aorded by the sight line. These deviations from uniform sub-pulse drift manifest in the 2DFS as broadening of the otherwise delta-function response of a uniform sinusoid. We show how these phase and amplitude variations can be extracted from the complex spectrum.
Object Tracking under Heavy Occlusion based on Extended Kalman Filter, Particle Filter, and Color Matching

Object tracking is useful in areas such as surveillance, access control, military applications, and health care. Objects may be human, vehicle, and other entities. A huge number of approaches have been proposed in this field. Different methods assume different environments and adopt various techniques ranging from deterministic to probabilistic approaches. Excellent surveys can be found in [1]. In this paper, we proposed a method for tracking objects by exploiting probabilistic power of track filters including extended Kalman filter and particle filter in the presence of heavy occlusion. We also use color matching to improve on tracking results. We applied the method to real world videos and obtained successful results.
Yeast Nucleoporins Involved in Passive Nuclear Envelope Permeability

The vertebrate nuclear pore complex (NPC) harbors an ∼10-nm diameter diffusion channel that is large enough to admit 50-kD polypeptides. We have analyzed the permeability properties of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae nuclear envelope (NE) using import (NLS) and export (NES) signal-containing green fluorescent protein (GFP) reporters. Compared with wild-type, passive export rates of a classical karyopherin/importin (Kap) Kap60p/Kap95p-targeted NLS-GFP reporter (cNLS-GFP) were significantly faster in nup188-Δ and nup170-Δ cells. Similar results were obtained using two other NLS-GFP reporters, containing either the Kap104p-targeted Nab2p NLS (rgNLS) or the Kap121p-targeted Pho4p NLS (pNLS). Elevated levels of Hsp70 stimulated cNLS-GFP import, but had no effect on the import of rgNLS-GFP. Thus, the role of Hsp70 in NLS-directed import may be NLS- or targeting pathway-specific. Equilibrium sieving limits for the diffusion channel were assessed in vivo using NES-GFP reporters of 36–126 kD and were found to be greater than wild-type in nup188-Δ and nup170-Δ cells. We propose that Nup170p and Nup188p are involved in establishing the functional resting diameter of the NPC's central transport channel.