Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Optimizing Feature Selection for Recognizing Handwritten Arabic Characters

Abstract — Recognition of characters greatly depends upon the features used. Several features of the handwritten Arabic characters are selected and discussed. An off-line recognition system based on the selected features was built. The system was trained and tested with realistic samples of handwritten Arabic characters. Evaluation of the importance and accuracy of the selected features is made. The recognition based on the selected features give average accuracies of 88% and 70% for the numbers and letters, respectively. Further improvements are achieved by using feature weights based on insights gained from the accuracies of individual features. Keywords — Arabic handwritten characters, Feature extraction, Off-line recognition, Optical character recognition. I. I NTRODUCTIONRABIC writing system differs from European systems by some differences [1]. It is written from right to left and it is always cursive whether handwritten or printed. It contains 28 characters. Six of them can be connected only from the righthand side and have two shapes (connected and standalone). The rest can be connected from either or both sides. Hence, there are four shapes for these 22 characters according to the location of the character in the word (start, middle, end, or standalone). Some of the characters have secondary objects like a dot or combination of dots (one, two, or three). In fact, some characters can only be distinguished from others only by these secondary features. A comparison of various characteristics of Arabic, Latin and other languages are discussed in many references [2]. Many off-line Arabic character recognition techniques for printed text were published [3]. The state of the art of this type of recognition achieves good accuracy. There are even some successful commercial products for this application [4]. However, the off-line recognition of handwritten Arabic characters is more difficult and users are still waiting for reliable and accurate solutions. Characters are recognized by human eyes via recognition of features associated with the characters. Human eyes are trained to the recognition of these features and associate features to corresponding characters. Hence as a result of this association, the human brain uses the feature information to
Constant-weight Gray codes for local rank modulation

We consider the local rank-modulation scheme in which a sliding window going over a sequence of real-valued variables induces a sequence of permutations. The local rank-modulation, as a generalization of the rank-modulation scheme, has been recently suggested as a way of storing information in flash memory. We study constant-weight Gray codes for the local rank-modulation scheme in order to simulate conventional multi-level flash cells while retaining the benefits of rank modulation. We provide necessary conditions for the existence of cyclic and cyclic optimal Gray codes. We then specifically study codes of weight 2 and upper bound their efficiency, thus proving that there are no such asymptotically-optimal cyclic codes. In contrast, we study codes of weight 3 and efficiently construct codes which are asymptotically-optimal.
Assessing visitors' place attachment and associated intended behaviours related to tourism attractions

Place attachment, referring to the affective links between people and places, is an important concept linking people, place, and certain place-related phenomena. Central to the role of place attachment in place-related research fields is its ability to explain perceptions and behaviours in people’s interactions with places as a result of affection. Whilst it has been suggested that the concept of place attachment can assist in better understanding visitors’ behaviours in tourism settings, research adopting the concept in tourism is still limited. Only a few studies have touched on place attachment in the context of tourism, among which the two principle topics covered are: (i) local residents’ place attachment towards their tourism-based community and (ii) visitors’ place attachment towards destinations. Research on the former topic is aligned in nature to studies assessing residents’ place attachment to their residential places in environmental psychology, while the latter topic, which focuses on a unique type of place attachment, requires much more academic attention. This thesis addresses the need for further investigation of visitors’ place attachment in tourism settings. Limited studies to date have investigated visitor place attachment exclusively beyond destination level. Given tourism attractions, which serve as destination flagships have been ignored as the primary settings with which to study visitors’ emotional attachments, tourism attractions were chosen to explore whether descriptions of place attachment at the destination level may also apply to visitors’ place attachment perceived at the attraction level. The purpose of the current study was to understand the extent of visitors’ place attachment towards tourism attractions and its associations with the nature of attraction, the characteristics of visitors and their trip patterns, as well as visitors’ behavioural intentions and perceptions.
Partial HPRT Deficiency Phenotype and Incomplete Splicing Mutation

Deficiency of hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase (HPRT) activity is an inborn error of purine metabolism associated with uric acid overproduction and a continuum spectrum of neurological manifestations depending on the degree of enzyme deficiency. The complete deficiency causes Lesch-Nyhan syndrome (LNS). Partial HPRT-deficient patients can show a variable degree of neurological manifestations. Both diseases have been associated with mutations in the HPRT1 gene. Documented mutations in HPRT deficiency show a high degree of heterogeneity in type and location within the gene. In fact, more than 300 disease-associated mutations have been described. Splice mutations accounts for more that 16% of HPRT mutations and in most cases cause a complete LNS phenotype. A 16 year-old boy consulted to La Paz University Hospital because of hyperuricemia (9.4 mg/dL). At age one year he was given a diagnosis of dystonic cerebral palsy. Although he usually employs a wheelchair, under certain circumstances, he is able to stand up and walk by himself. He has never showed self injurious behavior. This patient presented a splice mutation (NM_000194.2: c.552 -2 A > G) causing exon 5 exclusion. An exon-5 specific PCR was designed, and a minor amount of normally spliced HPRT mRNA was found. Normally spliced HPRT mRNA was quantified by real-time PCR in this patient, in control subjects, and in two Lesch Nyhan patient with splice mutations excluding exon 4 (patient B) and exon 8 (patient C) who had clinically a Lesch Nyhan disease phenotype. A minor amount of normally spliced HPRT mRNA was found in all the patients. No correlation was found between the percentage of the normally spliced HPRT mRNA and the phenotype. We conclude that the partial HPRT deficient phenotype of this patient can not be explained by the finding of a minor amount of normally splice HPRT mRNA. It is possible that the amount of normally splice mRNA vary among different tissues.
The WindSat spaceborne polarimetric microwave radiometer: sensor description and early orbit performance

The global ocean surface wind vector is a key parameter for short-term weather forecasting, the issuing of timely weather warnings, and the gathering of general climatological data. In addition, it affects a broad range of naval missions, including strategic ship movement and positioning, aircraft carrier operations, aircraft deployment, effective weapons use, underway replenishment, and littoral operations. WindSat is a satellite-based multifrequency polarimetric microwave radiometer developed by the Naval Research Laboratory for the U.S. Navy and the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Integrated Program Office. It is designed to demonstrate the capability of polarimetric microwave radiometry to measure the ocean surface wind vector from space. The sensor provides risk reduction for the development of the Conical Microwave Imager Sounder, which is planned to provide wind vector data operationally starting in 2010. WindSat is the primary payload on the Department of Defense Coriolis satellite, which was launched on January 6, 2003. It is in an 840-km circular sun-synchronous orbit. The WindSat payload is performing well and is currently undergoing rigorous calibration and validation to verify mission success.
Graphics Processing Units

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are coprocessors that traditionally perform the rendering of 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional graphics information for display on a screen. In particular computer games request more and more realistic real-time rendering of graphics data and so GPUs became more and more powerful highly parallel specialist computing units. It did not take long until programmers realized that this computational power can also be used for tasks other than computer graphics. For example already in 1990 Lengyel, Reichert, Donald, and Greenberg used GPUs for real-time robot motion planning [43]. In 2003 Harris introduced the term general-purpose computations on GPUs (GPGPU) [28] for such non-graphics applications running on GPUs. At that time programming general-purpose computations on GPUs meant expressing all algorithms in terms of operations on graphics data, pixels and vectors. This was feasible for speed-critical small programs and for algorithms that operate on vectors of floating-point values in a similar way as graphics data is typically processed in the rendering pipeline. The programming paradigm shifted when the two main GPU manufacturers , NVIDIA and AMD, changed the hardware architecture from a dedicated graphics-rendering pipeline to a multi-core computing platform, implemented shader algorithms of the rendering pipeline in software running on these cores, and explicitly supported general-purpose computations on GPUs by offering programming languages and software-development toolchains. This chapter first gives an introduction to the architectures of these modern GPUs and the tools and languages to program them. Then it highlights several applications of GPUs related to information security with a focus on applications in cryptography and cryptanalysis. Graphics processing units have evolved to coprocessors of a size larger than typical CPUs. While CPUs use large portions of the chip area for caches, GPUs use most of the area for arithmetic logic units (ALUs). The main concept that both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs use to exploit the computational power of these ALUs is executing a single instruction stream on multiple independent data streams (SIMD) [23]. This concept is known from CPUs with vector registers 1
Color channel based segmentation of skin lesion from clinical images for the detection of melanoma

Lesion localization is the first and most important step in the development of a melanoma detection system. Skin lesions show distinct color variations as they evolve from benign to malignant one. The use of different color spaces can provide the best discriminative information of lesions embedded in a particular color channel and used in efficient segmentation of a digital image. A simple and efficient method for the automatic segmentation of clinical images using colorspace analysis and improved binary thresholding algorithm is proposed. Clinical images taken from normal mobile cameras have the inherent problem of improperly illumined background compared to dermoscopic images. The proposed algorithm corrects these constraints with initial pre-processing steps of adjustments of clinical image. The algorithm has been evaluated using 175 images from different online public databases. The efficiency of the overall segmentation process is carried out by calculation of similarity matrices for segmented lesions from each color channel used. The framework is able to differentiate and extract the cancerous lesion from the background skin with around 94% accuracy with the preferred choice of color channel.
The ProCESS trial--a new era of sepsis management.

The importance of early detection and treatment for reducing the mortality associated with sepsis has been a tenet of medical training since the middle ages, when it was noted that “. the physicians say it happens in hectic fever, that in the beginning of the malady it is easy to cure but difficult to detect, but in the course of time, not having been either detected or treated in the beginning, it becomes easy to detect but difficult to cure. ”1,2 The critical role of the clinician in the early recognition of sepsis continues to this day to be fundamental .
Introducing Product Line Engineering in a Bottom-up Approach

The optimal way for introducing a product line is to set up a completely new product line by developing a reuse infrastructure for the whole range of products right from the start. However, in practice, product line engineering is frequently introduced by a company after having developed a number of products separately (i.e. in single system engineering). The challenge then consists of defining the product line based on these existing products, i.e. to a certain extent these products have to be re-engineered. More precisely, two problems need to be solved: first, commonality and variability among the existing products needs to be identified to define a common set of core assets, and, second, the way in which future systems (i.e. products of the product line) will be developed based on this common set of assets needs to be defined. The method we suggest in this paper solves these two problems. Our method focuses on control systems, i.e. systems which monitor/control certain quantities in their environment.
Fractional-N PLL phase noise effects on baseband signal-to-noise ratio in FMCW radars

This work presents a model for estimating the effect of the fractional-N phase locked loop (Frac-N PLL) phase noise (PN) on frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar baseband (BB) signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The model captures the SNR degradation due to PN in secondary radars as well as the range correlation effect in primary radars which reduces the amount of SNR degradation. Estimates from the proposed model are in good agreement with measurement results from a dual band FMCW radar test chip fabricated on an IBM7WL BiCMOS 0.18 μm technology. In secondary radar mode, a BB SNR of 30.0 and 23.0 dB is achieved at the 2.4 and 5.8 GHz bands respectively while in primary radar mode a BB SNR of 35.0 and 33.7 dB is achieved at the same bands. The fabricated FMCW radar test chips achieved a ranging precision of 5.2 and 0.3 mm in secondary and primary radar modes respectively.
Applying Collaborative Filtering to Usenet News

newsgroups carry a wide enough spread of messages to make most individuals consider Usenet news to be a high noise information resource. Furthermore, each user values a different set of messages. Both taste and prior knowledge are major factors in evaluating news articles. For example, readers of the rec.humor newsgroup, a group designed for jokes and other humorous postings, value articles based on whether they perceive them to be funny. Readers of technical groups, such as comp.lang. c11 value articles based on interest and usefulness to them—introductory questions and answers may be uninteresting to an expert C11 programmer just as debates over subtle and advanced language features may be useless to the novice. The combination of high volume and personal taste made Usenet news a promising candidate for collaborative filtering. More formally, we determined the potential predictive utility for Usenet news was very high. The GroupLens project started in 1992 and completed a pilot study at two sites to establish the feasibility of using collaborative filtering for Usenet news [8]. Several critical design decisions were made as part of that pilot study, including:
Characterization of the RpoN regulon reveals differential regulation of T6SS and new flagellar operons in Vibrio cholerae O37 strain V52

The alternative sigma factor RpoN is an essential colonization factor of Vibrio cholerae and controls important cellular functions including motility and type VI secretion (T6SS). The RpoN regulon has yet to be clearly defined in T6SS-active V. cholerae isolates, which use T6SS to target both bacterial competitors and eukaryotic cells. We hypothesize that T6SS-dependent secreted effectors are co-regulated by RpoN. To systemically identify RpoN-controlled genes, we used chromatin immunoprecipitation coupled with sequencing (ChIP-Seq) and transcriptome analysis (RNA-Seq) to determine RpoN-binding sites and RpoN-controlled gene expression. There were 68 RpoN-binding sites and 82 operons positively controlled by RpoN, among which 37 operons had ChIP-identified binding sites. A consensus RpoN-binding motif was identified with a highly conserved thymine (−14) and an AT-rich region in the middle between the hallmark RpoN-recognized motif GG(−24)/GC(−12). There were seven new RpoN-dependent promoters in the flagellar regions. We identified a small RNA, flaX, downstream of the major flagellin gene flaA. Mutation of flaX substantially reduced motility. In contrast to previous results, we report that RpoN positively regulates the expression of hcp operons and vgrG3 that encode T6SS secreted proteins but has no effect on the expression of the main T6SS cluster encoding sheath and other structural components.
Ellipticine cytotoxicity to cancer cell lines — a comparative study

Ellipticine cytotoxicity to cancer cell lines - a comparative study Ellipticine is a potent antineoplastic agent exhibiting multiple mechanisms of action. This anticancer agent should be considered a pro-drug, whose pharmacological efficiency and/or genotoxic side effects are dependent on its cytochrome P450 (CYP)- and/or peroxidase-mediated activation to species forming covalent DNA adducts. Ellipticine can also act as an inhibitor or inducer of biotransformation enzymes, thereby modulating its own metabolism leading to its genotoxic and pharmacological effects. Here, a comparison of the toxicity of ellipticine to human breast adenocarcinoma MCF-7 cells, leukemia HL-60 and CCRF-CEM cells, neuroblastoma IMR-32, UKF-NB-3 and UKF-NB-4 cells and U87MG glioblastoma cells and mechanisms of its action to these cells were evaluated. Treatment of all cells tested with ellipticine resulted in inhibition of cell growth and proliferation. This effect was associated with formation of two covalent ellipticine-derived DNA adducts, identical to those formed by 13-hydroxy- and 12-hydroxyellipticine, the ellipticine metabolites generated by CYP and peroxidase enzymes, in MCF-7, HL-60, CCRF-CEM, UKF-NB-3, UKF-NB-4 and U87MG cells, but not in neuroblastoma UKF-NB-3 cells. Therefore, DNA adduct formation in most cancer cell lines tested in this comparative study might be the predominant cause of their sensitivity to ellipticine treatment, whereas other mechanisms of ellipticine action also contribute to its cytotoxicity to neuroblastoma UKF-NB-3 cells.
Ultrahigh speed induction generators applied in Disperse Power Plants

In recent years, due to the shrinking energy resources facing mankind, the increased demand for more energy and the protection of environment, have led to intensive search for environment-friendly ways of energy production. Special attention has been paid to renewable, alternative and waste energy sources as a possible way of electric power production in Disperse Power Plants (DPP). The research in electromechanical energy conversion systems resulted new, highly efficient and ultra high speed machines that are applicable in small scale Turbine-Generator (T-G) systems. The application of ultrahigh speed induction generators (IG) has a number of technical and economical benefits over standard SGs. Here, a controlled self-excitation method for specially designed ultrahigh speed IG used in a small scale T-G system is described and studied. It can be applied in supplying telecommunication stations and data centers in DPPs. The design and analysis of the system are relied on computer simulation techniques verified by test results.
Evolutionary dynamics of incubation periods

The incubation period of a disease is the time between an initiating pathologic event and the onset of symptoms1. For typhoid fever2,3, polio4, measles5, leukemia6 and many other diseases7–10, the incubation period is highly variable. Some affected people take much longer than average to show symptoms, leading to a distribution of incubation periods that is right skewed and often approximately lognormal8–10. Although this statistical pattern was discovered more than sixty years ago8, it remains an open question to explain its ubiquity11. Here we propose an explanation based on evolutionary dynamics on graphs12–18. For simple models of a mutant or pathogen invading a network-structured population of healthy cells, we show that skewed distributions of incubation periods emerge for a wide range of assumptions about invader fitness, competition dynamics, and network structure. The skewness stems from stochastic mechanisms associated with two classic problems in probability theory: the coupon collector and the random walk19,20. Unlike previous explanations11,21 that rely crucially on heterogeneity, our results hold even for homogeneous populations. Thus, we predict that two equally healthy individuals subjected to equal doses of equally pathogenic agents may, by chance alone, show remarkably different time courses of disease.
A New Approach for Analyzing Average Time Complexity of Population-Based Evolutionary Algorithms on Unimodal Problems

In the past decades, many theoretical results related to the time complexity of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) on different problems are obtained. However, there is not any general and easy-to-apply approach designed particularly for population-based EAs on unimodal problems. In this paper, we first generalize the concept of the takeover time to EAs with mutation, then we utilize the generalized takeover time to obtain the mean first hitting time of EAs and, thus, propose a general approach for analyzing EAs on unimodal problems. As examples, we consider the so-called (N + N) EAs and we show that, on two well-known unimodal problems, leadingones and onemax , the EAs with the bitwise mutation and two commonly used selection schemes both need O(nlnn + n 2/N) and O(n lnlnn + nlnn/N) generations to find the global optimum, respectively. Except for the new results above, our approach can also be applied directly for obtaining results for some population-based EAs on some other unimodal problems. Moreover, we also discuss when the general approach is valid to provide us tight bounds of the mean first hitting times and when our approach should be combined with problem-specific knowledge to get the tight bounds. It is the first time a general idea for analyzing population-based EAs on unimodal problems is discussed theoretically.
The immune response of Lewis rats to peptide 68-88 of guinea pig myelin basic protein. I. T cell determinants.

A series of peptides, produced from peptide 68-88 by selective enzyme cleavage, were used to define the amino acid sequences required for the induction of experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (EAE), an in vitro lymphocyte proliferative response (LPR), and serum antibody by peptide 68-88 in the Lewis rat. Here we present data that indicate that the T cell determinants for induction of EAE, an LPR, and helper function in the production of antibody are located in the same region of the molecule and that a minimum of 13 amino acids are involved; i.e., residues 71-85.