Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A physically-based model to correct atmospheric and illumination effects in optical satellite data of rugged terrain

A physically-based model to correct atmospheric and topographically induced illumination effects in optical satellite data is developed and tested. Special emphasis is put on the impact of rugged terrain. Ground reference data for various land use classes enables the assessment of the corrections' influence on land use classifications. The estimation of surface reflectance is achieved in a two-step procedure. First irradiance components and atmospheric parameters are calculated for horizontal surfaces using the atmo-code 6S, E. Vermonte et al. (1994), then the influence of the topography on the parameters is integrated using DEM data.
Principal Self-Efficacy and the Teacher Principal Evaluation Project

Principal Self-Efficacy and the Teacher Principal Evaluation Project By John A. Polm, Jr. Chairperson of the Dissertation Committee: Dr. Thomas Alsbury School of Education Cognitive psychologist Albert Bandura has made significant contributions to psychology and education since the 1950s. His social learning theory continues to have considerable influence in the study of human agency and in the related study of selfefficacy. A recent development in the study of self-efficacy concerns the perceived selfefficacy of school leaders, particularly of school principals. Researchers have developed instruments to measure this construct that identifies supportive elements associated with positive self-efficacy perceptions of principals. This study measured the perceived selfefficacy of principals using the Principal Self-Efficacy Scale (PSES). The study also measured the correlation between the principal’s level of self-efficacy score, and the belief that they will implement TPEP successfully in their schools. This study found an overwhelming majority of principals (91 percent) believed they would successfully implement TPEP. There was a small correlation between the PSES score and their belief that they can successfully implement TPEP in their school (r = .222, n = 336, p < .001). Implications provide additional validation to the strength of the PSES as an instrument as well as Bandura’s Triadic Reciprocal Causation theory applied to principal self-efficacy. Implications also may help inform the educational community about the correlation of principal self-efficacy to enact significant change and the importance of measuring and developing higher self-efficacy in leaders.
The role of content in addition to hyperlinks in user-clicking behavior

Motivation -- Cognitive models of web-navigation such as CoLiDeS, CoLiDeS+, SNIF-ACT compute the correct hyperlink by using information from the hyperlink text alone and ignore all other information on a web-page. This paper focuses on verifying the validity of this assumption by investigating the role played by the main content in addition to hyperlink text on the deciding the correct hyperlink. Research approach -- A mock-up website with two conditions: (i) with main content and hyperlinks and (ii) without main content but with hyperlinks was created. 18 students performed 8 information retrieval tasks on this mock-up website. Findings/Design -- The results showed that the user-click behaviour with or without main content remained largely the same. The same links were selected by users in both conditions. Also, the same amount of time was spent on the commonly selected links in both conditions. Research limitations/Implications -- We restrict ourselves to the role of main content in this experiment and did not study the impact of other factors like pictures. Originality/Value -- These results provide an empirical proof to the assumption CoLiDeS makes in its 3rd and 4th phases of focusing and selecting. Take away message -- Implication of the results is that one needs to study deeper the relevance/quality of wording used for hyperlinks in relation to the main content. We assume that if the wordings (of the links) are relevant or familiar to the user, the influence of main content would be negligible but if they are less relevant or unfamiliar, the content becomes more influential.
A Buffer-Sizing Algorithm for Network-on-Chips with Multiple Voltage-Frequency Islands

Buffers in on-chip networks constitute a significant proportion of the power consumption and area of the interconnect, and hence reducing them is an important problem. Application-specific designs have nonuniform network utilization, thereby requiring a buffer-sizing approach that tackles the nonuniformity. Also, congestion effects that occur during network operation need to be captured when sizing the buffers. Many NoCs are designed to operate in multiple voltage/frequency islands, with interisland communication taking place through frequency converters. To this end, we propose a two-phase algorithm to size the switch buffers in network-on-chips (NoCs) considering support for multiple-frequency islands. Our algorithm considers both the static and dynamic effects when sizing buffers. We analyze the impact of placing frequency converters (FCs) on a link, as well as pack and send units that effectively utilize network bandwidth. Experiments on many realistic system-on-Chip (SoC) benchmark show that our algorithm results in 42% reduction in amount of buffering when compared to a standard buffering approach.
Emotional–behavioral resilience among children of first-time mothers with and without depression across the early childhood period

The deleterious effects of maternal depression on child emotional and behavioral development are well documented, yet many children exposed to maternal depression experience positive outcomes. The aim of this study was to identify psychosocial factors associated with the emotional–behavioral resilience of four-year-old children of first-time mothers experiencing depressive symptoms across the early childhood period. Data were from 1085 mother–child dyads in the Maternal Health Study collected prospectively at five time-points from pregnancy to child age four. Longitudinal trajectories of maternal depressive symptoms were identified, and children were regarded as resilient or competent if they scored in the normal range on the Total Difficulties subscale of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. We found that 22% of women had a pattern of moderate to high depressive symptoms, and within this group 78% of their children were identified as resilient. Maternal tertiary education and maternal involvement in home learning activities were unique predictors of children’s resilience. Higher maternal age at the time of pregnancy and financial security were factors associated with positive outcomes for all children. The findings highlight the importance of policy and intervention efforts to strengthen the quality of maternal–child interactions and the home learning environment to promote the emotional and behavioral functioning of children whose mothers are experiencing mental health difficulties in the early years of parenting.
XCORE: Support for developing program analysis tools

Building program analysis tools is hard. A recurring development task is the implementation of the meta-model around which a tool is usually constructed. The XCORE prototype supports this task by generating the implementation of the meta-model. For this purpose, developers will add directly into the source code of the tool under construction some meta-information describing the desired meta-model. Our demo presents some internal details of XCORE and emphasizes the advantages of our tool by describing the construction of a basic analysis instrument.
Creating personalized memories from social events: community-based support for multi-camera recordings of school concerts

The wide availability of relatively high-quality cameras makes it easy for many users to capture video fragments of social events such as concerts, sports events or community gatherings. The wide availability of simple sharing tools makes it nearly as easy to upload individual fragments to on-line video sites. Current work on video mashups focuses on the creation of a video summary based on the characteristics of individual media fragments, but it fails to address the interpersonal relationships and time-variant social context within a community of diverse (but related) users. The aim of this paper is to reformulate the research problem of video authoring, by investigating the social relationships of the media 'authors' relative to the performers. Based on a 10-month evaluation process, we specify a set of guidelines for the design and implementation of socially-aware video editing and sharing tools. Our contributions have been realized and evaluated in a prototype software that enables community-based users to navigate through a large common content space and to generate highly personalized video compilations of targeted interest within a social circle. According to the results, a system like ours is a valid alternative for social interactions when apart. We hope that our insights can stimulate future research on socially-aware multimedia tools and applications.
Biologically realistic simulation of a part of hippocampal CA 3 : Generation of testdata for the evaluation of spike detection algorithms

Biologically realistic simulations on the neuronal network level are frequently used in computational neuroscience in order to explain and understand biological brain functions. The presented simulation mimicks a tiny part of the CA3 region of the hippocampus. But new insights about the functionality of CA3 are not the ultimate goal in this case. Rather we want to show that sound extracellular potential data can be generated within a network close to reality. The data is used for the evaluation of spike detection methods.
Factor structure of the Gambling Symptom Assessment Scale among treatment-seeking adults in Singapore

Abstract The revised 12-item Gambling Symptom Assessment Scale (G-SAS) is a measure designed to assess gambling symptom severity. However, its factor structure has not been examined. The present study investigates the factor structure of the G-SAS based on a treatment-seeking population in Singapore. Participants were 521 patients presenting with problem gambling at a tertiary psychiatric hospital. Patients completed the G-SAS, gambling-related measures and the Personal Wellbeing Index (PWI), and were assessed by a psychiatrist for pathological gambling (PG) based on DSM-IV-TR criteria. Exploratory factor analysis resulted in a two-factor solution, with factors indicating (1) gambling impulse and (2) adverse consequences. Together, both factors explained for 77.10% of variance in G-SAS scores. The two-factor model was subsequently confirmed based on confirmatory factor analysis. Additionally, G-SAS scores were associated with multiple gambling-related indicators and discriminated between patients with and without a diagnosis of PG. Findings from the study suggest that the G-SAS consists of two factors, and is a reliable and valid tool for the assessment of gambling symptom severity in clinical settings.
Jurisdiction in school social workers’ and teachers’ work for pupils’ well-being

ABSTRACT This article describes how school social workers and teachers perceive their cooperation with each other with regard to pupils’ well-being in Swedish schools. A total of 23 qualitative interviews were conducted with a strategic sample of teachers and school social workers. The analysis of the interview data was based on Andrew Abbott’s theory of the system of professions, and the cooperation and boundary work of the two professional groups are discussed in terms of jurisdictional conflicts and “cultural machinery”. The analysis shows that on a general level both school social workers and teachers seem to agree about the need for school social work, but tensions and diverging views were uncovered when investigating the cultural machinery in their daily work. This study shows how both of these professional groups protect the boundaries of their own jurisdictions, but also how these boundaries are relaxed when social workers and teachers jointly try to solve everyday problems.
Reducing the Main Memory Consumptions of FPmax* and FPclose

In [4], we gave FPgrowth*, FPmax* and FPclose for mining all, maximal and closed frequent itemsets, respectively. In this short paper, we describe two approaches for improving the main memory consumptions of FPmax* and FPclose. Experimental results show that the two approaches successfully reduce the main memory requirements of the two algorithms, and that in particular one of the approaches does not incur any practically significant extra running time.
Secrecy in MIMO Gaussian bidirectional broadcast channels

Recent research developments show that the concept of bidirectional relaying significantly improves the performance in wireless networks. This applies to three-node networks, where a half-duplex relay node establishes a bidirectional communication between two other nodes using a decode-and-forward protocol. In this work we assume multiple transmit and receive antennas and consider the scenario when in the broadcast phase the relay transmits additional confidential information to one node, which should be kept completely secret from the other, non-intended node. This is the MIMO Gaussian bidirectional broadcast channel with confidential messages for which we establish the secrecy capacity region.
Self-Orientation Modulates the Neural Correlates of Global and Local Processing

Differences in self-orientation (or “self-construal”) may affect how the visual environment is attended, but the neural and cultural mechanisms that drive this remain unclear. Behavioral studies have demonstrated that people from Western backgrounds with predominant individualistic values are perceptually biased towards local-level information; whereas people from non-Western backgrounds that support collectivist values are preferentially focused on contextual and global-level information. In this study, we compared two groups differing in predominant individualistic (N = 15) vs collectivistic (N = 15) self-orientation. Participants completed a global/local perceptual conflict task whilst undergoing functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scanning. When participants high in individualistic values attended to the global level (ignoring the local level), greater activity was observed in the frontoparietal and cingulo-opercular networks that underpin attentional control, compared to the match (congruent) baseline. Participants high in collectivistic values activated similar attentional control networks o only when directly compared with global processing. This suggests that global interference was stronger than local interference in the conflict task in the collectivistic group. Both groups showed increased activity in dorsolateral prefrontal regions involved in resolving perceptual conflict during heightened distractor interference. The findings suggest that self-orientation may play an important role in driving attention networks to facilitate interaction with the visual environment.
Experiential and Informational Knowledge, Architectural Marketing Capabilities, and the Adaptive Performance of Export Ventures: A Cross-National Study

Knowledge-based view (KBV) theory posits that the acquisition and use of relevant knowledge is key to understanding organizational performance. However, there is relatively little empirical evidence to support or refute several important propositions underlying KBV theory explanations of organizational performance. In particular, the extant literature has focused on individual technical and scientific components of the knowledge bases of firms in dynamic industries, and largely ignored both different levels of informational and experiential knowledge relevant to the market environment, and the increasingly important context of exporting. Our study addresses these knowledge gaps by developing a framework for export venture knowledge management and empirically examining relationships between different types of individual-level and organizational-level knowledge relevant to the market environment, architectural marketing capabilities, and the adaptive performance of export ventures. Using primary data collected in the United Kingdom and China, our study indicates that export ventures' organizational-level experiential and informational knowledge, and individual-level experiential knowledge relevant to the market environment, is positively associated with export ventures' architectural marketing capabilities, which are in turn associated with the adaptive performance of export ventures.
On Modeling Protocol-Based Clustering Tag in RFID Systems with Formal Security Analysis

This paper presents an efficiency and adaptive cryptographic protocol to ensure users' privacy and data integrity in RFID system. Radio Frequency Identification technology offers more intelligent systems and applications, but privacy and security issues have to be addressed before and after its adoption. The design of the proposed model is based on clustering configuration of the involved tags where they interchange the data with the reader whenever it sends a request. This scheme provides a strong mutual authentication framework that suits for real heterogeneous RFID applications such as in supply-chain management systems, healthcare monitoring and industrial environment. In addition, we contribute with a mathematical analysis to the delay analysis and optimization in a clustering topology tag-based. Finally, a formal security and proof analysis is demonstrated to prove the effectiveness of the proposed protocol and that achieves security and privacy.
High performance connected digit recognition through gender-dependent acoustic modelling and vocal tract length normalisation

Large inter-speaker variability of speech is one of the major sources which degrade the performance of state-of-the-art speech recognition systems. During the recent years, several methods, including gender-dependent acoustic modelling and vocal tract length normalisation, have been developed to reduce this variability. In this paper, we first investigate these two methods individually and propose how they should be implemented in real-world speech recognition systems. Secondly, we show that by combining these two techniques, it is possible to further reduce the error rate in a connected digit recognition task under a realistic car noise environment. Experimental results justify the use of the combined approach. A 44.1% decrease in string error rate was observed when the performance of the joint system was compared to the gender-independent baseline system. The results were also better than that obtained when using these techniques individually. tract length normalisation, for maximising the recognition performance in a connected digit recognition task under a car noise environment. The use of gender-specific models alone produced a 15.5% decrease in the string error rate for a Finnish connected digit recognition task when compared to the use of gender independent models. We also showed that the combined use of both sets of gender-specific models produced better performance than the use of separate sets of gender-specific models depending on the gender of each speaker. The combination of previously proposed speaker-specific Vocal Tract Length Normalisation (VTLN) and gender-dependent modelling produced a further improvement in performance with a 44.1% decrease in the string error rate, indicating that the effect of using VTLN and gender dependent modelling could be essentially additive. These results were also better than that obtained for speaker specific VTLN with the use of gender-independent models.
Remarks on the Fundamental Solution to Schr\"odinger Equation with Variable Coefficients

We consider Schr\"odinger operators $H$ on $R^n$ with variable coefficients. Let $H_0=-\frac12\triangle$ be the free Schr\"odinger operator and we suppose $H$ is a "short-range" perturbation of $H_0$. Then, under the nontrapping condition, we show the time evolution operator: $e^{-itH}$ can be written as a product of the free evolution operator $e^{-itH_0}$ and a Fourier integral operator $W(t)$, which is associated to the canonical relation given by the classical mechanical scattering. We also prove a similar result for the wave operators. These results are analogous to results by Hassell and Wunsch, but the assumptions, the proof and the formulation of results are considerably different. The proof employs an Egorov-type theorem similar to those used in previous works by the authors combined with a Beals-type characterization of Fourier integral operators.
Quantum simulation of self-heating effects in rough Si nanowire FETs

We present a quantum approach to simulate self-heating effects in transistors based on silicon nanowires and estimate the resulting performance degradation. Our self-consistent thermoelectric simulations are based on the nonequilibrium Green's function approach and provide the heat power transferred from electrons to phonons, thus allowing the calculation of the local temperature and its impact on the transistor output characteristics. We apply our approach to the simulation of a tri-gate transistor with a 14 nm channel length in the presence of surface roughness. Our results clearly indicate that self-heating effects are enhanced by surface roughness, with important consequences on the on-current of the device.
A Knowledge-Based Approach to Robust Parsing

The research presented in this thesis describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a natural-language processing system that is used as part of an information retrieval system. Specifically, I focus on the development of a system that performs robust syntactic analysis of scientific texts written in English. The context of this research was provided by the Condorcet project. This project aimed at the development of structured concept systems to allow the use of structured concepts as indexing `terms' for effective and efficient retrieval. Moreover, it aimed at the development of a method to assign index concepts to machine-readable documents on the basis of semi-automatic analysis of title and abstract.
Anonymous Search Histories Featuring Personalized Advertisement - Balancing Privacy with Economic Interests

Search engines are key to finding information on the web. Search presently is free for users financed by targeted advertisement. Today, the current search terms determine the ad placement. In the near future, search-engine providers will make use of detailed user profiles for better ad placement. This puts user privacy at risk. Anonymizing search histories, which is a solution in principle, gives way to a trade-off between privacy and the usability of the data for ad placement. This paper studies this tradeoff systematically. To this end, we implement an algorithm for the anonymization of search histories which is flexible regarding the target function. It can retain frequent terms or terms where corresponding ads are clicked with a high probability, keep up the number of users it can derive interests for, etc. We quantify the usefulness of the anonymized log for ad placement in a broad way, e.g., by estimating the number of ad clicks or of ad impressions, based on marketing data from Yahoo! As a result, anonymized search logs are still useful for ad placement, but this very much depends on the target function.
A Politeness Theory Analysis of Cell-Phone Usage in the Presence of Friends

Politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987) provided the framework for analyzing focus-group transcripts in which college students discussed their perceptions of cell-phone use by friends while in one another’s presence and their responses to friends’ usage. Findings revealed that this context is inherently face threatening in terms of both positive and negative face. Consequently, participants reported often using hybrid politeness strategies for managing positive and negative face threats, although they also used bald-on-record and going off-record strategies as well as not engaging the face-threatening act.