Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sensitivity of stable rates in cognitive radio systems to the sensing errors

We study the sensitivity of stable rates to imperfect sensing in cognitive radio systems comprised of a set of source-destination pairs having different priorities. The adopted cognitive access protocol allows the secondary user not only to exploit the idle slots of the primary user but also to transmit along with the primary user with some probability. This is aimed at achieving full utilization of the shared channel with capture. The abolition of strong primacy, however, requires the secondary user to properly regulate its multi-access probability in order not to impede the primary user's stability guarantee at any stabilizable input demand. To this end, the stability region of the system is characterized which describes the theoretical limit on rates that can be pushed into the system while maintaining the queues stable. Interestingly, we found that even with non-zero sensing error rates, there exists a condition for which we can achieve identical stability region that is achieved with perfect sensing, i.e., the stability is insensitive to the sensing errors. This happens when relatively strong capture effect is present. For the case when the stability is sensitive to the sensing errors, we precisely quantify the loss due to the imperfect sensing in terms of the size of the stability region.
The Velocity and Mass Distribution of Clusters of Galaxies from the CNOC1 Cluster Redshift Survey

In the context of the CNOC1 cluster survey, redshifts were obtained for galaxies in 16 clusters. The resulting sample is ideally suited for an analysis of the internal velocity and mass distribution of clusters. Previous analyses of this data set used the Jeans equation to model the projected velocity dispersion profile. However, the results of such an analysis always yield a strong degeneracy between the mass density profile and the velocity dispersion anisotropy profile. Here we analyze the full (R,v) data set of galaxy positions and velocities in an attempt to break this degeneracy. We build an "ensemble cluster" from the individual clusters under the assumption that they form a homologous sequence; if clusters are not homologous then our results are probably still valid in an average sense. To interpret the data we study a one-parameter family of spherical models with different constant velocity dispersion anisotropy, chosen to all provide the same acceptable fit to the projected velocity dispersion profile. The best-fit model is sought using a variety of statistics, including the likelihood of the data set and the shape and Gauss-Hermite moments of the grand-total velocity histogram. The confidence regions and goodness of fit for the best-fit model are determined using Monte Carlo simulations. Although the results of our analysis depend slightly on which statistic is used to judge the models, all statistics agree that the best-fit model is close to isotropic. For none of the statistics does the 1 σ confidence region extend below σr/σt = 0.74, or above σr/σt = 1.05. This result derives primarily from the fact that the observed grand-total velocity histogram is close to Gaussian, which is not expected to be the case for a strongly anisotropic model. The best-fitting models have a mass–to–number density ratio that is approximately independent of radius over the range constrained by the data. They also have a mass density profile that is consistent with the dark matter halo profile advocated by Navarro, Frenk, & White in terms of both the profile shape and the characteristic scale length. This adds important new weight to the evidence that clusters do indeed follow this proposed universal mass density profile. We present a detailed discussion of a number of possible uncertainties in our analysis, including our treatment of interlopers and brightest cluster galaxies, our use of a restricted one-parameter family of distribution functions, our use of spherical models for what is in reality an ensemble of nonspherical clusters, and our assumption that clusters form a homologous set. These issues all constitute important approximations in our analysis. However, none of the tests that we have done indicates that these approximations influence our results at a significant level.
Mobile recommender system analysis & design

This paper describes an implementation of recommender system to facilitate the user proactive search to find interesting products (e.g. movies in a movie store). Using an application installed on users' mobiles and client-server architecture, the mobile interacts with the recommender through its built-in communications facilities and the wireless LAN installed in shopping centers. Recommender system can infer what individual customers want and thus give those appropriate recommendations according to the user's tastes (ratings) and enhanced k-means clustering algorithm. The paper contains an overview of the system architecture and the services should be offered through a brief scenario. The entity relationship diagram, class diagram and other design decisions are reviewed. The system can be customized to be used in malls, bookstores and others.
Optimal and efficient segmentation for 3D vascular forest structure with graph cuts

In this paper, we propose an optimal segmentation method for vascular forest structure based on graph cuts framework, which has widely been used in recent years because of its global optimal object segmentation property. However, shrinking bias, a classical issue of the graph cuts methods, sets up a barrier for the use of these methods on elongated structures such as blood vessels, especially the complex vascular tree and forest structures. To deal with this problem, a new graph construction method and a new energy function are proposed in this paper. The global optimal segmentation of vascular forest structure can be obtained more efficiently, while the shrinking bias can be overcome by the proposed method. The method is compared with a classical graph cuts method [1] and two methods [2, 3] for vascular tree structure segmentation, and is demonstrated to be more accurate on both the synthetic and clinical images, especially on noisy images. Different from many other tree structure segmentation methods, the proposed method does not have to consider the bifurcations explicitly.
Comparison of different error signals driving the adaptation in assist-as-needed controllers for neurorehabilitation with an upper-limb robotic exoskeleton

Assist-as-needed control aims at maximizing stroke survivors involvement during robotic-led therapies of neurorehabilitation. Besides the specific characteristics of the designed adaptive control strategy, a fundamental property of this control architecture is the choice of the error signal which will drive the adaptation process. This driving source is a necessary control parameter to be chosen, although often sidelined in the control design, and several solutions already exist in the state-of-the-art. For this reason, we wanted to compare three different strategies to guide the adaptation, respectively based on the local joint performances, on the end-effector only behaviour, or on the performance of one specific joint in the kinematic chain of the robot. The resulting analysis evaluates the possibilities offered by simply changing from one source to another with respect to the specific stage of the motor recovery of the patients, potentially extending the capabilities of current exoskeleton controllers for neurorehabilitation.
MODELING OF SPATIAL VARIABILITY OF SOIL PROPERTY AND RELIABILITY BASED DESIGN OF PILES

It is the essence of geotechnical design to obtain soil parameters for design that are different from a site to another. Therefore, soil investigations play very important role in geotechnical design. The modeling of the ground based on investigation results is called site characterization, and there are some new developments in this area based on statistical theories. In the new approach, the results are directly related to reliability based design of geotechnical structures, where the resulting uncertainties (e.g. ultimate bearing capacity of a pile, settlement of embankment etc.) related to soil variability and statistical estimations are quantified. This study covers the following contents: (1) Explain some basic statistical concepts and tools that are necessary to understand the statistical site characterization of ground for geotechnical design. (2) Introduce some statistical site characterization examples and describe the procedures to carry out the analysis. The examples include several sites where CPT tests were carried out extensively. (3) Based on the statistical site characterization, vertical bearing capacity of piles is evaluated to see the influence of soil variability and statistical estimation errors. (4) Summary, conclusions and possible future works will be suggested.
Fuzzy logic based MPPT approach in a grid connected photovoltaic system

The maximum power point tracking (MPPT) is required for harnessing maximum power from the grid connected photovoltaic (PV) system. This paper describes a real time implementation of a grid connected photovoltaic system based on the fuzzy MPPT algorithm to control the power of the PV panel on the generation side as well as the current of the voltage source inverter (VSI) which is connected to the grid side. The performance of the control algorithm is verified by simulation and experiment. The implementation of the fuzzy algorithm is realized on a dSPACE 1104 single board by controlling a boost chopper and a VSI. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of the control techniques of the proposed fuzzy logic by fixing the MPPT in the I-V curve of the solar panel. The DC bus voltage controller based on Lyapounov theory and the hysteresis based current control of the inverter allow a quasi total transit of the maximum extracted power from the solar panel to the grid under unit power factor operation.
Value Added of Teachers in High Poverty Schools and Lower Poverty Schools

Using student-level microdata from 2000–2001 to 2004–2005 from Florida and North Carolina, we compare the effectiveness of teachers in schools serving primarily students from low-income families (>70% free-and-reduced-price-lunch students) with teachers in schools serving more advantaged students. The results show that the average effectiveness of teachers in high poverty schools is in general less than teachers in other schools and there is significantly greater variation in teacher quality among high poverty schools. These differences are largely driven by less productive teachers at the bottom of the teacher effectiveness distribution in high-poverty schools. The bulk of the quality differential is due to differences in the unmeasured characteristics of teachers. We find that the gain in productivity to more experienced teachers from additional experience is much stronger in lower-poverty schools. The lower return to experience in high-poverty schools does not appear to be a result of differences in the quality of teachers who leave teaching or who switch schools, however. Our findings suggest that measures that induce highly effective teachers to move to high-poverty schools and which promote an environment in which teachers’ skills will improve over time are more likely to be successful.
Exponentially-modulated filter bank transmultiplexer with fine-coarse adaptive filtering

In this paper we explore filter bank based multicarrier transmission, which has received increasing interest also in wireless communications system development as an alternative to the DFT-based OFDM technique. The odd-stacked low delay exponentially-modulated filter bank (EMFB) transmultiplexer is described. The subfilter biorthogonality condition is distorted in practical transmission channels and we use oversampled (by factor of two) per-subband equalization to recover the data symbols. The fine-coarse normalized least mean square (LMS) algorithm is applied with EMFB-specific modifications. The adaptation speed of the fine-subequalizers are further improved with simple re-initialization procedure. Numerical studies exhibit fast convergence and relatively small residual error in semiblind, decision-directed operation mode.
Investigating Personality Profiles in Action Teams: Relationships with Performance.

JOHNSON, ANN-MARIE CLAYTON. Investigating Personality Profiles in Action Teams: Relationships with Performance. (Under the direction of Dr. Lori Foster). Action teams are highly interdependent teams of skilled individuals formed to accomplish collective tasks requiring intense yet brief periods of maximum performance. Examples include, but are not limited to, military combat units, surgical teams, disaster response teams, and law enforcement special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams. The significance of this type of teamwork creates a pressing need to understand who is best suited to such work. This study investigates whether the personality characteristics of neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, grit, hardiness, and core self-evaluation predict action team performance over and above physical fitness and cognitive ability. This was examined in two ways, by employing: (a) the more traditional variable-centered approach (i.e., regression analysis) and the (b) the less commonly utilized person-centered approach (i.e., latent profile analysis). Participants consisted of 894 action team candidates working in a physically demanding, high stress team environment to complete complex, interdependent tasks. Afterwards, their teammates rated their performance. Regression results indicated that three personality variables predicted performance over and above the influence of cognitive ability and physical fitness: openness to experience, neuroticism, and extraversion. LPA analyses revealed four distinct clusters of personality characteristics in the study sample. One of these profiles, labeled the “Negative Extreme,” included candidates who trended -. 5 standard deviations from the mean on all variables of interest except neuroticism where they were +. 5 standard deviations from the mean. Candidates with this personality profile showed significantly lower performance compared to those characterized by the other three profiles, even when cognitive ability and physical fitness were controlled for. Overall, this study helps to pinpoint personality variables and combinations that should be taken into account when seeking to identify who will be viewed by teammates as effective contributors in an action team context.
Sanitation and health externalities: Resolving the Muslim mortality paradox

In India, Muslims face significantly lower child mortality rates than Hindus, despite Muslim parents being poorer and less educated on average. Because observable characteristics would predict a Muslim disadvantage relative to Hindus, previous studies documenting this robust and persistent pattern have called it a “puzzle” of Muslim mortality. This paper offers a simple solution to the puzzle in the form of an important sanitation externality. Most of India’s population defecates in the open, without the use of toilets or latrines, spreading fecal pathogens that can make children ill. Hindus are 40% more likely than Muslims to do so, and we show that this one difference in sanitation can fully account for the large (18%) child mortality gap between Hindus and Muslims. Building on our finding that religion predicts infant and child mortality only through its association with latrine use, we show that latrine use constitutes an externality rather than a pure private gain: It is the open defecation of one’s neighbors, rather than the household’s own practice, that matters most for child survival. The gradient and mechanism we uncover have important implications for child health and mortality worldwide, since 15% of the world’s population defecates in the open. To put the results in context, we find that moving from a locality where everybody defecates in the open to a locality where nobody defecates in the open is associated with a larger difference in child mortality than moving from the bottom quintile of asset wealth to the top quintile of asset wealth.
Coaching efficacy, moral disengagement, and responses to hostile aggression among high school coaches

This mixed-methods study examined the association between high school sport coaches’ moral disengagement and their perceived coaching efficacy, and began to explore coaches’ justifications of and consequences for the hostile aggression exhibited by their athletes. High school coaches in the United States (N = 449) completed online surveys that included the Moral Disengagement in Sport Scale, Coaching Efficacy Scale II-High School Teams, and questions regarding their beliefs about and responses to athlete’s hostile aggressive behaviors. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to determine the association between coaches’ moral disengagement and their perceived coaching efficacy, and multiple analysis of variance explored differences in moral disengagement and coaching efficacy based on coaches’ justifications for athletes’ hostile aggression. Qualitative analyses involved coding coaches’ responses to questions of when they believed hostile aggression displayed by athletes was justified, and their typical responses to athletes’ hostile aggression. Results suggested that coaches’ moral disengagement was a negative predictor of their total perceived coaching efficacy, as well as specific aspects of their perceived coaching efficacy. Further, a majority of coaches indicated that hostile aggression was never acceptable or justified. Based on these results, differences in moral disengagement were found between coaches who did and did not justify athlete hostile aggression. The most common consequences for hostile aggression involved reduced playing time and additional physical conditioning. The current findings highlight the significance of coaches’ moral disengagement as it relates to their coaching, supporting a need for greater coaching education around coaching philosophies and approaches to disciplining athletes.
Advanced Design for a Realistic Virtual Brush

This paper proposes a novel algorithmic framework for an advanced virtual brush to be used in interactive digitalpainting. The framework comprises the following components: a geometry model of the brush using a hierarchicalrepresentation that leads to substantial savings in every step of the painting process; fast online brush motionsimulation assisted by offline calibration that guarantees an accurate and stable simulation of the brush's dynamicbehavior; a new pigment model based on a diffusion process of random molecules that considers delicateand complex pigment behavior at dipping time as well as during painting; and a user‐adaptation component thatenables the system to cater for the personal painting habits of different users. A prototype system has been implementedbased on this framework. Compared with other virtual brushes, this new system is designed to presenta realistic brush in the sense that the system accurately and stably simulates the complex painting functionalityof a running brush, and therefore is capable of creating high‐quality digital paintings with minute aesthetic detailsthat can rival the real artwork. The advanced features also give rise to a high degree of expressiveness ofthe virtual brush that the user can comfortably manipulate. http://www.csis. hku.hk/songhuale‐brush/ providessupplementary materials for this paper.
Accurate pitch marking for prosodic modification of speech segments

This paper describes a new approach to pitch marking. Unlike other approaches that use the same combination of features for the whole signal, we take into account the signal properties and apply different features according to some heuristic. Basically we use a special type of energy contour for pitch marking. Where the energy information turns out to be not suitable as an indicator we resort to the fundamental wave computed from a contiguous F0 contour in combination with detailed voicing information. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed pitch marking algorithm clearly improves the quality of synthesised speech generated by a concatenative text-to-speech system that uses TD-PSOLA for prosodic modifications. Index Terms: speech synthesis, glottal closure instants, pitch marks, automatic pitch marking, signal analysis.
Peripheral Pulse Pressure, Large Arteries, and Microvessels

The aorta is a capacitance vessel that enables transformation of the “on-off” blood-flow characteristics of the left ventricle into a less pulsatile flow in more distal vessels. Thus, a smooth nonpulsatile blood-flow pattern is achieved at capillary level. Arterial wall stiffness determines the degree of energy absorbed by the elastic aorta and its recoil in diastole. Aortic pulse pressure (PP) in health is physiologically lower than peripheral PP. Reduction of elevated aortic systolic blood pressure (SBP) protects circulation from pressure-induced damage. Maintaining aortic diastolic blood pressure (DBP) ensures adequate coronary perfusion. A stiffer aorta, which can be observed with aging and in different pathological conditions such as hypertension, obesity, diabetes mellitus, and dyslipidemia, fails in both of these tasks. Numerous studies now show that PP, arterial stiffness, and early wave reflections are strong predictors of cardiovascular (CV) risk.1 The CV complications are usually located above the aortic recoil and mainly affect the heart. The downward consequences of enhanced pulsatility, particularly at the peripheral and even the microvascular levels, are less documented. The study by Mitchell et al2 in the June issue of Hypertension addresses this subject, with particular focus on a healthy elderly population. In addition to arterial stiffness, the pulse waveform characteristics are influenced by wave reflection. Energy propagated through the circulation usually meets vessel branching points, at which some of the antegrade energy is “reflected” and becomes retrograde. At some point through the aorta and its braches, the incident and reflected waves summate. Where and when this happens …
A novel text steganography by context-based equivalent substitution

The text steganography is a prevalent technique for covert communication. We propose a novel linguistic steganography by context-based substitution. We utilize the conditional equivalence between the definite article and demonstrative adjectives ubiquitous in natural texts to embed covert messages. Considering the diverse usage of these words, we adopt a part-of-speech filter, a 3-gram language model, a 2-range context, the minimum matching distance, and the perplexity to evaluate the substitution suitability degree in our steganography and the substitution can only be carried out under certain conditions. The results of the blind test show that the generated stego-text can hardly have syntax errors or unsuitable words, which proves that the steganography is imperceptible.