Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Rate-Adaptive Multimedia Multicasting Mechanism in Multi-Rate 802 . 11 Wireless LANs ∗

IEEE 802.11 WLAN service is broadening its service area rapidly. One of the major driving factors of WLANs is multimedia services such as VOD or HDTV delivered by multicast protocols. However, there have been little research on how to efficiently operate multicast protocols in IEEE 802.11 WLANs. The most widespread variants of IEEE 802.11 standards, 802.11b and 802.11a, are characterized by the rate adaptation mechanism depending on time-varying wireless link conditions. However the current IEEE 802.11 WLAN standard does not utilize the rate adaptation function for multicast transmissions. In this paper we propose a new rate adaptation mechanism for multimedia multicasting in IEEE 802.11 WLAN environments, called SARM (SNR-based Auto Rate for Multicast). SARM is based on the RBAR (Receiver Based Auto Rate) protocol. Therefore SARM adapts its transmission rate based on the SNR values of mobile nodes. In order to obtain SNR values, since there are no RTSCTS messages or MAC layer ACK messages in multicast transmissions, SARM needs an additional signalling method by which the AP can estimate channel quality (SNR). By adapting multicast transmission rate based on SNR, SARM guarantees the best quality of multimedia service depending on the mobile nodes’ link conditions. Moreover the proposed protocol minimizes the portion of wireless channel resource for multimedia multicasting, so that it can allocate more bandwidth to other unicast traffic.
2003 AAAI Robot Competition and Exhibition

The Twelfth Annual American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Robot Competition and Exhibition was held in Acapulco, Mexico, in conjunction with the Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. The events included the Robot Host and Urban Search and Rescue competitions, the AAAI Robot Challenge, and the Robot Exhibition. In the Robot Host event, the robots had to act as mobile information servers and guides to the exhibit area of the conference. In the Urban Search and Rescue competition, teams attempted to find victims in a simulated disaster area using teleoperated, semiautomonous, and autonomous robots. The AAAI Robot Challenge is a noncompetitive event where the robots attempt to attend the conference by locating the registration booth, registering for the conference, and then giving a talk to an audience. Finally, the Robot Exhibition is an opportunity for robotics researchers to demonstrate their robots' capabilities to conference attendees. The three days of events were capped by the two Robot Challenge participants giving talks and answering questions from the audience.
25 Rationality and Bounded Rationality : The 1986

I am honored to present this lecture in tribute to Nancy L. Schwartz. I did not know Professor Schwartz well, yet I am aware of her important professional contributions. First and foremost are the direct advances to the profession made through her writings. But also her indirect contributions, as a teacher and an intellectual leader, are very important. Some of the ideas and applications discussed in this lecture were developed in the excellent department she helped build.
Probabilistic cost-effectiveness comparison of screening strategies for colorectal cancer

A stochastic discrete-event simulation model of the natural history of Colorectal Cancer (CRC) is augmented with screening technology representations to create a base for simulating various screening strategies for CRC. The CRC screening strategies recommended by the American Gastroenterological Association (AGA) and the newest screening strategies for which clinical efficacy has been established are simulated. In addition to verification steps, validation of screening is pursued by comparison with the Minnesota Colon Cancer Control Study. The model accumulates discounted costs and quality-adjusted life-years. The natural variability in the modeled random variables for natural history is conditioned using a probabilistic sensitivity analysis through a two-stage sampling process that adds other random variables representing parametric uncertainty. The analysis of the screening alternatives in a low-risk population explores both deterministic and stochastic dominance to eliminate some screening alternatives. Net benefit analysis, based on willingness to pay for quality-adjusted life-years, is used to compare the most cost-effective strategies through acceptability curves and to make a screening recommendation. Methodologically, this work demonstrates how variability from the natural variation in the development, screening, and treatment of a disease can be combined with the variation in parameter uncertainty. Furthermore, a net benefit analysis that characterizes cost-effectiveness alternatives can explicitly depend on variation from all sources producing a probabilistic cost-effectiveness analysis of decision alternatives.
TEACUP v 0 . 8 – A System for Automated TCP Testbed Experiments

Over the last few decades several TCP congestion control algorithms were developed in order to optimise TCP’s behaviour in certain situations. While TCP was traditionally used mainly for file transfers, more recently it is also becoming the protocol of choice for streaming applications, for example video streaming from YouTube and Netflix is TCP-based [1], [2] and there is an ISO standard for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) [3]. However, the impact of different TCP congestion control algorithms on TCP-based streaming flows (within a mix of other typical traffic) is not well understood. Experiments in a controlled testbed allow shedding more light on this issue. This report describes TEACUP (TCP Experiment Automation Controlled Using Python) version 0.8 – a software tool for running automated TCP experiments in a testbed. Based on a configuration file TEACUP can perform a series of experiments with different traffic mixes, different bottleneck configurations (such as bandwidths, queue mechanisms), different emulated network delays and/or loss rates, and different host settings (e.g. used TCP congestion control algorithm). For each experiment TEACUP automatically collects relevant information that allows analysing TCP behaviour, such as tcpdump files, SIFTR [4] and Web10G [5] logs.
Enhancing QoS parameters using an IEEE 802.11 multi-interface based wireless distribution system (MI-WDS)

Wireless Distributed Systems (WDS) are used to interconnect a set of Access Points to form a wireless Extended Service Set (ESS). In this paper, we investigate the performance enhancements accomplished by using multiple interface cards per AP within the WDS system. Detailed simulations are conducted to bring out the enhancements accomplished by just using a few interfaces per Access Point in terms of a much greater throughput and a much lower end-to-end delay and end-to-end jitter.
Plagiarism Detection across Distant Language Pairs

Plagiarism, the unacknowledged reuse of text, does not end at language boundaries. Cross-language plagiarism occurs if a text is translated from a fragment written in a different language and no proper citation is provided. Regardless of the change of language, the contents and, in particular, the ideas remain the same. Whereas different methods for the detection of monolingual plagiarism have been developed, less attention has been paid to the cross-language case. In this paper we compare two recently proposed cross-language plagiarism detection methods (CL-CNG, based on character n-grams and CL-ASA, based on statistical translation), to a novel approach to this problem, based on machine translation and monolingual similarity analysis (T+MA). We explore the effectiveness of the three approaches for less related languages. CL-CNG shows not be appropriate for this kind of language pairs, whereas T+MA performs better than the previously proposed models.
Leaving or Staying Home: Predicting Where Students Attend College

Focusing on a cohort of high school students from a Midwest metropolitan region, this study combines multiple sources of data and uses a multinomial logistic regression to model student postsecondary choices with respect to whether and where to attend college. Specifically, we examined the enrollment patterns by proximity to the home region and factors associated with these college decisions. The results suggest that these students’ college choices were a process influenced by both precollege individual characteristics and social contexts. The findings also supported our hypothesis that acquisition of various types of capital and academic success of the school district (as one of several indicators of a college-going culture) were negatively related to student preferences for college proximity. These findings highlight the interplay between individual, family, community, and school at different levels as it influences college decisions of students from the deindustrialized Midwest region and regions alike.
Measuring Consumers’ Willingness-to-Pay to Avoid Disruptive Advertising in Smartphone Applications

This research examines how advertisement attributes are received by consumers. Six advertisement attributes in the smartphone applications market are studied using a survey of university students. Respondents answer a series of choice experiments. Parameters of a random utility model are estimated by conditional logit to determine a consumer’s willingness - to-pay to avoid disruptive advertisement attributes within a smartphone application. The results show that a consumer is willing to pay $4.06 to avoid targeted ads, $0.28 to decrease the frequency of the ads when graphics are static, $2.71 to decrease the frequency of ads when graphics are animated, $1.30 to avoid ads with animated graphics, and $3.73 to avoid animated graphics when paired with the mean ad frequency level of 2.5, or 45 seconds. The results of this study are useful for app developers seeking to monetize their product without alienating users and for companies who aim to create and use an advertisement that does not decrease a consumer’s willingness -to-pay for their product.
The relationship between maternal speech clarity and infant language outcomes

Title of Document: THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MATERNAL SPEECH CLARITY AND INFANT LANGUAGE OUTCOMES Kerry McColgan, Master of Arts, 2011 Directed by: Dr. Nan Bernstein Ratner, Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences Mothers’ use of infant-directed speech (IDS) may assist infants in decoding l anguage input. IDS is characterized by exaggerated prosodic features (Fernald, 1989) , shorter mean length of utterance (Cooper, 1997; Bernstein Ratner, 1996), repetition (Bernstei n Ratner, 1996), and more highly clarified acoustic qualities (Bernstein Ratner, 1984; Malsheen, 1980) in comparison to speech directed to adults. However, it is not yet known to what extent such measures of maternal input have long-term impacts on language development. This thesis seeks to test the overarching hypothesis t hat children who receive more clarified speech input during the prelinguistic stage may be expected to have better language skills at an earlier age than children who receive poorer qua lity
Spatial memory in pigeons (Columba livia) in an open-field feeding environment.

Pigeons, unlike rats, do not display very accurate spatial working memory when tested in the traditional radial arm maze apparatus unless they are given special and extended training (cf. Roberts & Van Veldhuizen, 1985). One possible reason for their apparent "unpreparedness" to display spatial memory abilities in radial arm mazes is that, in the wild, pigeons tend to feed in open-field environments. In these experiments, pigeons' spatial working memory abilities were tested in two multiple-goal open-field test environments. The first involved an open room with eight elevated food sites which the pigeons could fly to and eat from; the second involved an open room with ground-feeding sites, arranged in a circle or in rows, which the pigeons could walk to and eat from. Unlike the radial arm maze, these environments allowed the pigeon to choose its own path between food sites. Within only a few trials, pigeons displayed evidence of reasonably accurate spatial working memory in the flight apparatus and showed very high levels of accuracy in the ground-feeding apparatus. Thus, pigeons can display accurate spatial memory, but their "preparedness" to do so may be facilitated by the use of test environments that resemble the natural feeding habitats of the species. It is suggested that the ground-feeding apparatus developed here offers some unique advantages for studying the organization of spatial memory in pigeons.
iDec : Real-time eye state classification via web cam

This paper presents a real-time eye state classifier via a simple web cam. With the help of 3-means color clustering of detected eyes via OpenCV, features for Softmax Regression are derived and used to classify in real-time four different eye positions: looking straight, looking left, looking upward, looking right. Given that two eyes are detected in a face, the system classifies the eye-states with an accuracy ranging from 95-99%. We portray the systems value for both video content providers and consumers, including the ability to analyze content quality and viewer attention over time.
of Pollution in Farmington Bay and the Great Salt Lake , Utah Aquatic Ecology Laboratory Class Project 2001 College of Natural Resources Utah State University

1 Summary Farmington Bay covers 94 mi 2 (260 km 2) in the SW corner of the Great Salt Lake, and is essentially a separate lake because it is enclosed by Antelope Island and a causeway leading to the island from the mainland. The bay has received wastes from the adjoining Salt Lake City metropolitan area for decades. Because of water quality concerns for Farmington Bay, the Aquatic Ecology Laboratory class at Utah State University studied the bay and a nearby control site (Bridger Bay) in the Great Salt Lake during the fall of 2001. Field sampling and laboratory experiments, as well as other data sources, demonstrated the bay is severely eutrophic and is one of the most polluted water bodies in the state of Utah. A preliminary nutrient loading estimate for the bay indicates that total phosphorus coming into the system is 8-times higher than necessary for the bay to be classed as eutrophic. Sewage treatment plants discharging directly to the bay contribute approximately 50% of the nutrients. Metrics of eutrophication (chlorophyll, Secchi depth and total phosphorus) all indicated that the bay was hypereutrophic and the combined Trophic State Index was 91, higher than any other lake or reservoir in the state. Oxygen was supersaturated in the surface waters of Farmington Bay during the day, but the bottom water was anoxic. During the night, nearly the entire water column became anoxic due to respiratory demand of the biota. The anoxic conditions allowed high concentrations of foul-smelling hydrogen sulfide to be produced. Brine shrimp were not abundant in Farmington Bay and the community was dominated by rotifers. In contrast, water quality in Bridger Bay located on the main lake, was good and brine shrimp were abundant there. Our results, although restricted in scope, corroborate existing monitoring data from this bay. Water quality characteristics in Farmington Bay do not meet those mandated for the protection of aquatic life. Odor problems from the bay likely impact more people than are affected by any other polluted water body in the state. The impact of eutrophication and anoxia on the biota in Farmington Bay may also be substantial, although inadequate data exists to determine these impacts. There are substantial technical challenges to be overcome if water quality in the bay is to be improved to meet its designated use. However, before these technical issues can be solved, the responsible agencies will need to address …
Energy harvesting using a PZT ceramic multilayer stack

In this paper, the interdisciplinary energy harvesting issues on piezoelectric energy harvesting were investigated using a ‘33’ mode (mechanical stress and/or electric field are in parallel to the polarization direction) lead zirconate titanate multilayer piezoelectric stack (PZT-Stack). Key energy harvesting characteristics including the generated electrical energy/power in the PZT-Stack, the mechanical to electrical energy conversion efficiency, the power delivered from the PZT-Stack to a resistive load, the electrical charge/energy transferred from the PZT-Stack to a super-capacitor were systematically addressed. Theoretical models for power generation and delivery to a resistive load were proposed and experimentally affirmed. In a quasi-static regime, 70% generated electrical powers were delivered to matched resistive loads. A 35% mechanical to electrical energy conversion efficiency, which is more than 4 times higher than other reports, for the PZT-Stack had been obtained. The generated electrical power and power density were significantly higher than those from a similar weight and size cantilever-type piezoelectric harvester in both resonance and off-resonance modes. In addition, our study indicated that the capacitance and piezoelectric coefficient of the PZT-Stack were strongly dependent on the dynamic stress.
A Myristoylated Cell-Penetrating Peptide Bearing a Transferrin Receptor-Targeting Sequence for Neuro-Targeted siRNA Delivery

Many neurodegenerative disorders (NDDs) are characterized by aggregation of aberrant proteins and extensive oxidative stress in brain cells. As a treatment option for NDDs, RNA interference (RNAi) is a promising approach to suppress the activation of abnormal genes and negative regulators of antioxidant genes. Efficient neuro-targeted siRNA delivery requires a delicate optimization of nucleic acid carriers, quite distinct from putative pDNA carriers in regard to stable condensation and serum protection of siRNA, blood–brain barrier (BBB) bypass, effective siRNA delivery to brain cells, and functional release of bioactive siRNA at therapeutic levels. Here, we propose that a myristic acid conjugated, cell-penetrating peptide (transportan; TP), equipped with a transferrin receptor-targeting peptide (myr-TP-Tf), will lead to stable encapsulation of siRNA and targeted delivery of siRNA to brain cells overcoming the BBB. Myr-TP-Tf was successfully prepared by solid-phase peptide synthesis with high purity. Myr-TP-Tf–siRNA complexes formulated at a 20:1 (peptide–siRNA) molar ratio provided prolonged siRNA stability against serum and ribonuclease treatment. Fluorescence images clearly indicated that siRNA uptake was successfully achieved by myr-TP-Tf complexes in both a murine brain endothelioma and a human glioma cell line. The luciferase assay and the human placental alkaline phosphatase (hPAP) reporter assay results demonstrated the functional gene silencing effect of myr-TP-Tf–siRNA complexes in a human glioma cell line as well as in primary murine neurons/astrocytes, supportive of successful release of bioactive siRNA into the cytosol. Finally, the transcytosis assay revealed that favorable siRNA transport via receptor-mediated transcytosis was mediated by myr-TP-Tf complexes. In summary, these data suggest that myr-TP-Tf peptides possess promising properties as a vehicle for neuro-targeted siRNA delivery. We will further study this peptide in vitro and in vivo for transport mechanism kinetics and to validate its capability to deliver siRNA to the brain, respectively.
MEMS wing technology for a battery-powered ornithopter

The objective of this project is to develop a battery-powered ornithopter (flapping-wing) Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) with MEMS wings. In this paper, we present a novel MEMS-based wing technology that we developed using titanium-alloy metal as wingframe and parylene C as wing membrane. MEMS technology enables systematic research in terms of repeatability, size control, and weight minimization. We constructed a high quality low-speed wind tunnel with velocity uniformity of 0.5% and speeds from 1 m/s to 10 m/s. We have tested and have studied the unsteady-state aerodynamics of various types of MEMS wings. Finally, we built lightweight ornithopters with electric-powered transmission system and have demonstrated successful free flights of with flight duration ranges from 5 to 18 seconds.
CompAcc : Using Mobile Phone Compasses and Accelerometers for Localization

This paper identifies the possibility of using electronic compasses and accelerometers in mobile phones, as a simple and scalable method of localization. The idea is not fundamentally different from ship or air navigation systems, known for centuries. Nonetheless, directly applying the idea to human-scale environments is non-trivial. Noisy phone sensors and complicated human movements present practical research challenges. We cope with these challenges by recording a person’s walking patterns, and matching it against possible path signatures generated from a local electronic map. Electronic maps enable greater coverage, while eliminating the reliance on WiFi infrastructure and expensive war-driving. Measurement on Nokia phones and evaluation with real users confirm the anticipated benefits. Results show a location accuracy of less than 11m in regions where today’s localization services are unsatisfactory or unavailable.
Low-Latency Handshake Join

This work revisits the processing of stream joins on modern hardware architectures. Our work is based on the recently proposed handshake join algorithm, which is a mechanism to parallelize the processing of stream joins in a NUMA-aware and hardware-friendly manner. Handshake join achieves high throughput and scalability, but it suffers from a high latency penalty and a non-deterministic ordering of the tuples in the physical result stream. In this paper, we first characterize the latency behavior of the handshake join and then propose a new low-latency handshake join algorithm, which substantially reduces latency without sacrificing throughput or scalability. We also present a technique to generate punctuated result streams with very little overhead; such punctuations allow the generation of correctly ordered physical output streams with negligible effect on overall throughput and latency.
Executive information systems in Spain: a study of current practices and comparative analysis

Executive Information Systems (EIS) began to become popular in Spain in the 1990s. This chapter offers a primary descriptive study of EIS in Spain, bearing in mind two aims: to study the EIS usage in Spain and undertake a comparative analysis with reference to previous research. In this way, starting from the recognized EIS development framework of Watson, Rainer and Koh (1991), the authors focus on the structural perspective of the EIS elements and the development process. The study is based on a survey involving 70 organizations. The results show both parallelisms with preceding studies and new contributions to the current knowledge in the EIS field. Finally, the chapter identifies future trends in the executive information system concept.
Theoretical analysis of a class of randomized regularization methods

The convergence behavior of traditional leam-ing algorithms can be analyzed in the VC theoretical framework. Recently, many researchers have been interested in a class of randomized learning algorithms including the Gibbs algorithm from statistical mechanics. However, no successful theory concerning the generalization behavior of these random-ized learning algorithms have been established previously. In order to fully understand the behavior of these randomized estimators, we shall compare them with regularization schemes for deterministic estimators. Furthermore, we present theoretical analysis for such algorithms which leads to rigorous convergence bounds.