Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Neural Network Based Artificial Vision System for Licence Plate Recognition

This paper presents a neural network based artificial vision system able to analyze the image of a car given by a camera, locate the registration plate and recognize the registration number of the car. The paper describes in detail various practical problems encountered in implementing this particular application and the solutions used to solve them. The main features of the system presented are: controlled stability-plasticity behavior, controlled reliability threshold, both off-line and on-line learning, self assessment of the output reliability and high reliability based on high level multiple feedback. The system has been designed using a modular approach. Sub-modules can be upgraded and/or substituted independently, thus making the system potentially suitable in a large variety of vision applications. The OCR engine was designed as an interchangeable plug-in module. This allows the user to choose an OCR engine which is suited to the particular application and to upgrade it easily in the future. At present, there are several versions of this OCR engine. One of them is based on a fully connected feedforward artificial neural network with sigmoidal activation functions. This network can be trained with various training algorithms such as error backpropagation. An alternative OCR engine is based on the constraint based decomposition (CBD) training architecture. The system has showed the following performances (on average) on real-world data: successful plate location and segmentation about 99%, successful character recognition about 98% and successful recognition of complete registration plates about 80%.
The reliability and validity of the Turkish version of the Neuropsychiatric Inventory-Clinician.

BACKGROUND/AIM The Neuropsychiatric Inventory-Clinician (NPI-C) scale is one of the best-known scales for evaluating the behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia. This study aimed to assess the reliability and validity of the Turkish version of the NPI-C scale in patients with Alzheimer disease (AD). MATERIALS AND METHODS The NPI-C scale was administered to 125 patients with AD. For reliability, both Cronbach's α and interrater reliability were analyzed. The Behavioral Pathology in Alzheimer's Disease (BEHAVE-AD) scale was applied for validity and, in addition, the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE), Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) scale, and Disability Assessment of Dementia (DAD) scale were completed. RESULTS The Turkish version of the NPI-C scale showed high internal consistency (Cronbach's α = 0.75) and mostly good interrater reliability. Assessments of validity showed that the NPI-C and corresponding BEHAVE-AD domains were found to be significantly correlated, between 0.925 and 0.195. Moreover, the correlations between NPI-C and MMSE were significant for all domains except the dysphoria, anxiety, and elation/euphoria domains. When we conducted a correlation analysis of NPI-C with IADL, all domains were statistically significantly correlated except aggression, anxiety, elation/euphoria, and dysphoria. CONCLUSION The Turkish version of the NPI-C scale was found to be a reliable and valid instrument to assess neuropsychiatric symptoms in Turkish elderly subjects with AD.
Continuous Learning in the Workplace

hen Donald Schon wrote The Reflective Practitioner (1983), he did for the world of work what Betty Friedan did for women in the early days of consciousness raising: He named a phenomenon that many practitioners felt, but had not been able to put into words. Schon pointed out that people influence their everyday practice by having reflective conversations about a situation. People frame their understanding of a situation in light of experience, try out actions, and then reinterpret or reframe the situation in light of the consequences of action. What does reflective practice look like in the workplace? Why are people and organizations interested in this idea? Are there ways to actively facilitate it? What challenges can we expect if we try to create more opportunities for reflective practice and enhance the skills of people who wish to do this? We answer these questions in this article.
Strained silicon: A dielectric-response calculation.

Strain-induced birefringence is calculated with crystalline silicon for pressure applied along the (001) and (111) directions of the crystal. Results for the dielectric function and its change under hydrostatic strain are also given. The results are calculated for photon energies in the range 0--3.25 eV, i.e., below the direct band gap. We have made a fully-self-consistent Kohn-Sham local-density-approximation calculation, in the pseudopotential, plane-wave scheme, with a self-energy correction in the form of a rigid shift of the conduction bands of magnitude {Delta}=0.9 eV. Agreement with experiment is very good in the static limit, considering disagreements among the experimental values. Values of the photoelastic tensor for (001) strain are {ital p}{sub 11}{minus}{ital p}{sub 12}={minus}0.118 (theory) and {minus}0.111{plus minus}0.005, {minus}0.127{plus minus}0.005 (expt.). For (111) strain, we obtain {ital p}{sub 44}={minus}0.050 (theory) and {minus}0.051{plus minus}0.002, {minus}0.051{plus minus}0.002 (sic) (expt.); for hydrostatic distortions, {ital p}{sub 11}+2{ital p}{sub 12}={minus}0.067 (theory) and {minus}0.055{plus minus}0.006, {minus}0.070{plus minus}0.008 (expt.). For the static dielectric constant, we obtain 10.9, compared to 11.7 and 11.4 (0 K) (expt.). All experiments quoted are at room temperature, except as noted. Above 2 eV, the calculation predicts less dispersion than seen by the experiments. Thermal effects and electron-hole interactions are estimated to resolve somemore » of the discrepancies with experiment. The experimental data for (001) strains is not consistent with a single-oscillator model, and is therefore suspect. « less
A register-file approach for row buffer caches in die-stacked DRAMs

Die-stacked DRAMs have been proposed that combine multiple layers of dense memory cells with a base logic layer to implement peripheral circuitry (decoders, sense amps), interface logic, and test structures. Even after implementing these various features, the base logic layer still contains significant unutilized space, providing an opportunity to add more functionality to the memory stack. One seemingly obvious approach is to add a cache to the base layer, which can potentially provide faster memory access while reducing the number of slow and power-hungry row buffer activations and closings. However, once the details of the internal DRAM buses are properly modeled, along with the timing constraints imposed by modern DRAM technologies, a conventional cache only provides a modest performance benefit. This work proposes a “file-managed” row buffer cache (FM-RB$) approach inspired by traditional register allocation and peep-hole optimization ideas from compiler design. By explicitly managing the allocation and deallocation of the row buffer “registers,” the FM-RB$ can deliver performance benefits beyond a conventional cache approach.
MAO: a Multiple Alignment Ontology for nucleic acid and protein sequences

The application of high-throughput techniques such as genomics, proteomics or transcriptomics means that vast amounts of heterogeneous data are now available in the public databases. Bioinformatics is responding to the challenge with new integrated management systems for data collection, validation and analysis. Multiple alignments of genomic and protein sequences provide an ideal environment for the integration of this mass of information. In the context of the sequence family, structural and functional data can be evaluated and propagated from known to unknown sequences. However, effective integration is being hindered by syntactic and semantic differences between the different data resources and the alignment techniques employed. One solution to this problem is the development of an ontology that systematically defines the terms used in a specific domain. Ontologies are used to share data from different resources, to automatically analyse information and to represent domain knowledge for non-experts. Here, we present MAO, a new ontology for multiple alignments of nucleic and protein sequences. MAO is designed to improve interoperation and data sharing between different alignment protocols for the construction of a high quality, reliable multiple alignment in order to facilitate knowledge extraction and the presentation of the most pertinent information to the biologist.
Arbitrage-Free Pricing of Credit Index Options: The No-Armageddon Pricing Measure and the Role of Correlation after the Subprime Crisis

In this work we consider three problems of the standard market approach to pricing of credit index options: the definition of the index spread is not valid in general, the usually considered payoff leads to a pricing which is not always defined, and the candidate numeraire one would use to define a pricing measure is not strictly positive, which would lead to a non-equivalent pricing measure. We give a general mathematical solution to the three problems, based on a novel way of modeling the flow of information through the definition of a new subfiltration. Using this subfiltration, we take into account consistently the possibility of default of all names in the portfolio, that is neglected in the standard market approach. We show that, while the related mispricing can be negligible for standard options in normal market conditions, it can become highly relevant for different options or in stressed market conditions. In particular, we show on 2007 market data that after the subprime credit crisis the mispricing of the market formula compared to the no arbitrage formula we propose has become financially relevant even for the liquid Crossover Index Options.
Question Answering System for the French Language

This paper describes our first participation in the QA@CLEF monolingual and bilingual task, where our objective was to propose a question answering system designed to respond to French queries submitted to search French documents. We wanted to combine a classic information retrieval model (based on the Okapi probabilistic model) with a linguistic approach based mainly on syntactic analysis. In order to utilize our monolingual system in the bilingual task, we automatically translated into French queries written in seven other source languages, namely Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, English and Bulgarian.
Experiences of teaching and learning mathematics in setted and mixed settings

An investigation of the effect of grouping practices on pupils’ mindsets, teachers’ mindsets and teachers’ beliefs and practices. This study compares mathematics in School A (mixed-ability groupings) and School B (sets). Questionnaire data was collected from 286 pupils and twelve teachers and triangulated with lesson observations and interviews. This study offers some evidence to support the notion that grouping practices could indeed influence pupils’ mindsets, teachers’ mindsets and teachers’ beliefs and practices when teaching mathematics. School A pupils had stronger growth-mindsets than School B pupils. School A teachers had stronger growth-mindsets than School B teachers. Mathematics teachers in School A were found to hold more ‘connectionist’ beliefs. Most pupils in School A perceive typical mathematics lessons as involving a substantial problem or challenge that is worked on collaboratively in pairs or small groups and has several entry points. Mistakes are encouraged, learnt from and pupils develop understanding through discussion. Teachers and pupils in School B tended to have a more traditional experience. This has implications for further research as mixed-ability groupings may be a catalyst for improving pupils’ experiences of learning mathematics.
On Embedding of Finite Metric Spaces into Hilbert Space

Metric embedding plays an important role in a vast range of application areas such as computer vision, computational biology, machine learning, networking, statistics, and mathematical psychology, to name a few. The main criteria for the quality of an embedding is its average distortion over all pairs. A celebrated theorem of Bourgain states that every finite metric space on n points embeds in Euclidean space with O(log n) distortion. Bourgain’s result is best possible when considering the worst case distortion over all pairs of points in the metric space. Yet, is this the case for the average distortion ? Our main result is a strengthening of Bourgain’s theorem providing an embedding with constant average distortion for arbitrary metric spaces. In fact, our embedding possesses a much stronger property. We define the `q-distortion of a uniformly distributed pair of points. Our embedding achieves the best possible `q-distortion for all 1 ≤ q ≤ ∞ simultaneously.
Processing Adventure Experiences: It's the Story that Counts

The field of therapeutic recreation recently has experienced an increase in the use of outdoor-adventure activities, such as ropes courses, group initiatives, and wilderness travel. Through the use of these experiences, professionals seek to assist participants to develop insight and skills that transfers to their lives after they have completed the activities. Without such positive transfer, programs have limited long-term value. The purpose of this article is to discuss the importance of processing in relation to the transferability of outdoor-adventure experiences. Specifically, the constructivist view of learning and the role of narrative are discussed. Strategies that can be used by professionals to help individuals develop new self stories that generalize the learning to settings and situations after the adventure-based experience are presented.
Gaussian Mixture implementations of Probability Hypothesis Density filters for non-linear dynamical models

The probability hypothesis density (PHD) filter is a multiple- target filter for recursively estimating the number of targets and their state vectors from sets of observations. The filter is able to operate in environments with false alarms and missed detections. Two distinct algorithmic implementations of this technique have been developed. The first of which, called the particle PHD filter, requires clustering techniques to provide target state estimates which can lead to inaccurate estimates and is computationally expensive. The second algorithm, called the Gaussian mixture PHD (GM-PHD) filter does not require clustering algorithms but is restricted to linear-Gaussian target dynamics, since it uses the Kalman filter to estimate the means and covariances of the Gaussians. This article provides a review of Gaussian filtering techniques for non-linear filtering and shows how these can be incorporated within the Gaussian mixture PHD filters. Finally, we show some simulated results of the different variants.
Incremental coding over MIMO channels

The problem of multicasting common data to several users over multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Gaussian channels is studied. A closed-loop setup is considered where the channel matrices are known to the transmitter and respective receivers. An incremental-redundancy (rateless) scenario is considered, where the effective rate is measured by the time that each user needs to stay online until it is able to decode the message. A practical transmission scheme for the two-user case is proposed which, by linear pre — and post-processing combined with successive decoding and interference cancellation, transforms the two MIMO channels into a set of parallel channels with no loss of mutual information, where each user needs to tune in for a duration of time proportional to its individual capacity. This scheme is used for designing a practical transmission scheme for the Gaussian MIMO half-duplex relay channel. We then turn to the related scenario of transmission to a single user over a MIMO channel with unknown but constant signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), for which we develop an optimal low-complexity hybrid ARQ coding scheme, which is optimal for two SNRs and propose a scheme for more SNRs, the loss of which vanishes when the SNRs are high. Finally, we show that even when applied to single-input single-output (“scalar”) channels, the scheme provides a practical solution for cases not covered by previous work.
Job Termination Among Individuals with Severe Mental Illness Participating in a Supported Employment Program

This study, which explored job terminations among 60 individuals with severe mental illness participating in a supported employment program in Hong Kong, used the Chinese Job Termination Interview that was validated and translated from the Job Termination Interview (JTI; Becker, Drake, Bond et al., 1988). More than half of the job terminations (53%) were unsatisfactory which included dissatisfaction with job (44%) and lack of interest (22%). Modification of work schedules and provision of adequate supervision and coaching at the workplace were identified as necessary job accommodations. Similarities and differences of findings were compared with overseas studies. Possible improvement of current supported employment program was discussed.
Time-updating IAA-based spectral estimates with missing samples using data interpolation

In this work, we propose a computationally efficient time-updating algorithm for estimating the spectral content of a signal with missing samples. The algorithm extends earlier work on the topic by formulating a data-interpolation scheme reducing the required complexity to a fraction of the earlier efficient implementation, without resulting in any noticeable loss of performance for even a quite large degree of missing samples.
ImageHawk search engine: Content based image retrieval system

This paper describes large-scale content based image retrieval system, Image Hawk search engine. ImageHawk search engine uses 23.4 million images in its gallery. Users have two different methods to make their search: Product Quantization (PQ) and Transductive Support Vector Machine based Hashing using Binary Hierarchical Trees (TSVMH-BHT). Images are first represented with 20480-dimensional Fisher vectors and then binary codes are extracted from Fisher vectors by using these two methods. 256-bit binary codes are used for PQ and 512-bit binary codes are used for TSVMH-BHT. When a query image is given to the search engine, the system returns the most similar 100 images in 30–40 seconds based on the size of the query image. In addition we also describe our new image retrieval dataset created by using ImageCLEF 2013 and report the accuracies of some popular image retrieval methods on this dataset.
Graph Ranking for Sentiment Transfer

With the aim to deal with sentiment-transfer problem, we proposed a novel approach, which integrates the sentiment orientations of documents into the graph-ranking algorithm. We apply the graph-ranking algorithm using the accurate labels of old-domain documents as well as the "pseudo" labels of new-domain documents. Experimental results show that proposed algorithm could improve the performance of baseline methods dramatically for sentiment transfer.
Detecting Link Spam Using Temporal Information

How to effectively protect against spam on search ranking results is an important issue for contemporary web search engines. This paper addresses the problem of combating one major type of web spam: 'link spam. ' Most of the previous work on anti link spam managed to make use of one snapshot of web data to detect spam, and thus it did not take advantage of the fact that link spam tends to result in drastic changes of links in a short time period. To overcome the shortcoming, this paper proposes using temporal information on links in detection of link spam, as well as other information. Specifically, it defines temporal features such as in-link growth rate (IGR) and in-link death rate (IDR) in a spam classification model (i.e., SVM). Experimental results on web domain graph data show that link spam can be successfully detected with the proposed method.
TEAM BUILDING IN SPORT: A NARRATIVE REVIEW OF THE PROGRAM EFFECTIVENESS, CURRENT METHODS, AND THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS

Despite team building (TB) methods having their roots in organizational development (OD), this theoretical background has been seldom applied in sport. The purpose of this study was to provide chronological narrative review of the recent (1997-2008) sport-related research on team building. A total of 28 articles were reviewed. The findings suggest that team building has a positive effect on group functioning, especially increasing group cohesion. It was also apparent that thus far, the team building research in sport is mostly focused on cohesion. In conclusion, it would be advantageous for researchers to familiarize themselves with the existing organizational development research tradition. This could assist in establishing a clear definition and a solid theoretical framework for team building in sport, as well as preventing sport researchers making the same mistakes made in work organizations. By doing so, team building, and the development of group functioning and performance, could become an even more promising area for sport science research
A Performance Comparison and Evaluation of Analysing Node Misbehaviour in MANET using Intrusion Detection System

— This Paper presents a coherent survey on to detect the misbehaving node in Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) with the intent of serving as a quick reference to the current research issues in MANET. A mobile ad-hoc network is an infrastructure less network, that is self-configuring mobile nodes connected by wireless links. The open medium and the decentralized property of these nodes relay on each other to store and forward packets. Most of the proposed MANET protocols do not address security issues. Furthermore, MANETs are highly vulnerable for passive and active attacks because of their open medium, rapidly changing topology, lack of centralized monitoring. The encryption and authentication solution, which are considered as the first line of defence, are no longer sufficient to protect MANETs. Therefore, Intrusion Detection System (IDSs) is needed to be the second line of defence to protect the network from Security problems. In recent years, the security issues on MANET have become one of the primary concerns and several existing security problem on MANET can be probed quickly for future researches.
Multi-Relay Selection Design and Analysis for Multi-Stream Cooperative Communications

In this paper, we consider the problem of multi-relay selection for multi-stream cooperative MIMO systems with M relay nodes. Traditionally, relay selection approaches are primarily focused on selecting one relay node to improve the transmission reliability given a single-antenna destination node. As such, in the cooperative phase whereby both the source and the selected relay nodes transmit to the destination node, it is only feasible to exploit cooperative spatial diversity (for example by means of distributed space time coding). For wireless systems with a multi-antenna destination node, in the cooperative phase it is possible to opportunistically transmit multiple data streams to the destination node by utilizing multiple relay nodes. Therefore, we propose a low overhead multi-relay selection protocol to support multi-stream cooperative communications. In addition, we derive the asymptotic performance results at high SNR for the proposed scheme and discuss the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff as well as the throughput-reliability tradeoff. From these results, we show that the proposed multi-stream cooperative communication scheme achieves lower outage probability compared to existing baseline schemes.