Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Facilitating collaborative design through representations of context and intent

Domain-oriented design environments require support for three types of collaboration: (1) collaboration between domain-oriented designers (the users of design environments) and design environment builders, (2) collaboration between domain-oriented designers and clients (users of designed individual artifacts using a design environments), and (3) long-term direct collaboration among designers. Design environments provide representations that serve as a shared context for collaboration and ground languages of design. In this paper, we describe two components of our research work exploring domain-oriented design environments. First, the Knowing-in-Design (KID) environment uses explicit representations of the designers’ task at hand (representing a partial articulation of their intent) facilitate mutual education between clients and designers, and to deliver design knowledge relevant to the task at hand. Second, the Evolving-Artifact-Approach (EVA) which uses descriptive representations, functional representations, and seed prototypes to facilitate the mutual education process between designers and design environment builders necessary for achieying a deep knowledge of the application domain, for capturing design rationale, and for representing domain knowledge. Domain-oriented design environments are evolving artifacts supporting long-term indirect collaboration between designers: Each design produced in design environments contributes to the accumulated design knowledge. By delivering relevant information from the knowledge base, design environments create a virtual collaboration with past designers.
A New Method for Stability Analysis of Recurrent Neural Networks With Interval Time-Varying Delay

This brief deals with the problem of stability analysis for a class of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with a time-varying delay in a range. Both delay-independent and delay-dependent conditions are derived. For the former, an augmented Lyapunov functional is constructed and the derivative of the state is retained. Since the obtained criterion realizes the decoupling of the Lyapunov function matrix and the coefficient matrix of the neural networks, it can be easily extended to handle neural networks with polytopic uncertainties. For the latter, a new type of delay-range-dependent condition is proposed using the free-weighting matrix technique to obtain a tighter upper bound on the derivative of the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional. Two examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness and the reduced conservatism of the proposed results.
Coherent Out‐of‐Core Point‐Based Global Illumination

We describe a new technique for coherent out‐of‐core point‐based global illumination and ambient occlusion. Point‐based global illumination (PBGI) is used in production to render tremendously complex scenes, so in‐core storage of point and octree data structures quickly becomes a problem. However, a simple out‐of‐core extension of a classical top‐down octree building algorithm would be extremely inefficient due to large amount of I/O required. Our method extends previous PBGI algorithms with an out‐of‐core technique that uses minimal I/O and stores data on disk compactly and in coherent chunks for later access during shading. Using properties of a space‐filling Z‐curve, we are able to preprocess the data in two passes: an external ID‐sort and an octree construction pass.
A discrete firefly algorithm for the scaffolding modular construction in mega projects

Productivity is critical to large and complex capital projects in sectors like infrastructure and resources. It normally relates to a significant scheduling issue when pursuing both time and cost objectives. A poor planning of project schedule might incur both excessive labour cost and project delay. Looking at scaffolding activity, a foremost and prerequisite construction activity for the subsequence LNG equipment erection, this study identifies the present research gaps: very limited research emphasis has been placed on the impact of design of time-cost optimization in scaffolding, as well as the feasible solutions. Therefore, the practical guidance in scaffolding construction planning is treated as a critical research focal point in this study. Modular construction of scaffolding has been extensively implemented in LNG projects due to the risks of working on offshore platform and the enormous working area. The emphasis of this study therefore is placed on addressing time-cost tradeoff problems (TCTPs) of scaffolding modular construction. In particular, the questions of how to resolve the relatively multi-objective optimization issues using the Firefly algorithm and how to model the time and cost objective functions under specified constrains are answered. It is concluded that this paper, for the first time, looks into the complexity of scaffolding scheduling and gives solutions using such a robust optimization algorithm. In parallel, a simulation case study has been carrying out to test this algorithm based solution, to see how it can help scaffolding planners develop practical project schedules in either cost effective or time saving manners, or other trade-offs in between.
A Design of Faceted Search Engine – a Review

The World Wide Web (WWW) allows the people to share information and data from large database repositories globally. The amount of information is already in the billions of databases. We need to search the information with specialize tools known generically as search engine (SE). With the huge data that needs to be handled, search engines need to retrieve meaningful information intelligently, whereby only information of interest to the searcher needs to be returned. Facets (the particular aspect or feature of something being searched) can play an important role in helping the user understand an information space better. Queries techniques within faceted search will make the search results immediate and the interaction between searcher and search engine uninterrupted and focused. They can contribute to the user’s understanding of the researched terms or topics. Furthermore, they are more fun and interesting to use because users directly manipulate the search controls and the results can be displayed through choices of presentation such as text displays, transition animations, graphs etc. which bring the process closer to an experience in game playing. This paper review the design of faceted search engine.
The tiger and the terrorist: how Malaysian NGOs deal with terrorism

This paper investigates the efforts of Malaysian NGOs in spreading peace and stopping terrorism. Instead of taking the usual sociological approach, this article will take a cultural-critical approach, drawing on the theories of Western and Muslim intellectuals in order to gain greater insight into the peace-promoting efforts. This article will look into four Malaysian NGOs: PERKIM, YADIM, ABIM, and JIM. These NGOs are representative of Malaysian NGOs as a whole, with regards to their efforts in defusing terrorism. The first section of this article provides a justification for the use of a cultural-critical approach. The second section looks at the space open for NGOs to work in, and examines the importance of providing counter-narratives to terrorist rhetoric. The third section looks at the unique narrative on Islam in Malaysia, and how that helps NGOs in peace-building efforts. The fourth section examines the social projects NGOs provide and sees how they target the roots of terrorism. The fifth section relates some of the challenges Malaysian NGOs face in their peace-building efforts. This article concludes that prevalent strategies in Terrorism Studies need to be re-examined and re-evaluated in order to make them more effective. It is hoped this article will give a new perspective on counter-terrorism strategies and help policy makers in better understanding the ubiquitous threat terrorists pose.
Multi-player Detection with Articulated Mixtures-of-Parts Representation Constrained by Global Appearance

We describe a new representation for multiple articulated sport players for court player detection. Instead modeling object into deformable parts templates or mixtures of small parts which just capture local appearance of parts and spatial relations between parts, our proposed model trained with local part information with global constraint by a structured SVM can capture not only such local appearance and spatial relations above, but also the semantic relations between body parts which are the critical factors for precisely detecting objects and pose estimation. Our approach has several novel properties: (1) we adopt typical articulated part-based model with global appearance constraint to control trade-off between recall and precision for detection (2) we incorporate semantic knowledge about various articulation of court players into our mixture-of-parts model, these semantic knowledge are popularly used for pose estimation (3) after the root (global) and part (local) bounding boxes are predicted by our system, we train a linear least-squares regression model to output the final detection results which yields considerable improvements in performance. In our experiments with very challenging APIDIS basketball dataset and standard INRIA person dataset, it indicates that our detection system achieves state-of-art performance compared to previous works.
Constrained Min-Cut Replication for K-Way Hypergraph Partitioning

Replication is a widely-used technique in information retrieval and database systems for providing fault tolerance and reducing parallelization and processing costs. Combinatorial models based on hypergraph partitioning are proposed for various problems arising in information retrieval and database systems. We consider the possibility of using vertex replication to improve the quality of hypergraph partitioning. In this study, we focus on the constrained min-cut replication (CMCR) problem, where we are initially given a maximum replication capacity and a K-way hypergraph partition with an initial imbalance ratio. The objective in the CMCR problem is finding the optimal vertex replication sets for each part of the given partition such that the initial cut size of the partition is minimized, where the initial imbalance is either preserved or reduced under the given replication capacity constraint. In this study, we present a complexity analysis of the CMCR problem and propose a model based on a unique blend.
Adaptive control based on hierarchical sliding mode for under-actuated systems

In this paper, an adaptive control law based on hierarchical sliding mode is addressed for under-actuated systems with 2 degrees of freedom. By capturing the physical nature, the class of systems can be considered to be made up of two subsystems so that the hierarchical structure of the sliding surfaces with double layers is constructed. From such kind of hierarchical structure, the adaptive law and the control law are deduced from Lyapunov direct method. The asymptotic stability of all the sliding surfaces is proven by Barbalat's lemma and Lasalle's invariance principle. Simulation results show the feasibility of this method.
Efficient Synchronization in Message Passing Systems

The problem of synchronization can be formulated in terms of rules constraining the occupancy of regions in different processes, where a region is a block of code whose execution may require synchronization. In this region synchronization problem, the region occupancy rules (or the synchronization policy) can be specified using a global invariant. The task of a region synchronization algorithm is to constrain the region entry and exit of processes in a manner that satisfies the global invariant. This paper proposes efficient algorithms for region synchronization in message passing systems. In particular, we propose extension of two existing mutual exclusion algorithms to solve the region synchronization problem. We show that our algorithms are message efficient and satisfy the property of absence of unnecessary synchronization. We show that many existing synchronization problems such as group mutual exclusion, readers/writers, committee coordination, and barrier can be specified as instances of the region synchronization problem, and hence our algorithms can be used to solve a large class of problems.
Roomzoner: Occupancy-based room-level zoning of a centralized HVAC system

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) combine low-power radios with embedded processors in order to provide high-resolution sensing and actuation over a geographic area. This revolution has begun to deliver a new generation of engineering systems and scientific breakthroughs. One area in which CPSs can have a significant impact is in energy conservation through the intelligent control of systems. In this paper we present a CPS that enables a centralized Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system to be retrofitted to enable room-level conditioning of a residence. This is a compelling application due to residential HVAC systems accounting for over 15% of all U.S. energy usage, making it one of the nation's largest energy consumers. Also, it has all the aspects of a complex CPS: it uses sensors to detect room occupancy and indoor climate, it actuates hardware, and it requires complex control algorithms in order to maximize energy savings without damaging the HVAC equipment or discomforting the occupants. With an implementation using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components and a simple control algorithm we demonstrate an almost 15% energy saving in a residence over its existing centralized thermostat. With this demonstration, we pose a challenge to control theorists with the CPS community to refine our approach which could lead to even greater energy savings.
Coamplification of DAD-R, SOX5, and EKI1 in human testicular seminomas, with specific overexpression of DAD-R, correlates with reduced levels of apoptosis and earlier clinical manifestation.

Seminomas and nonseminomas represent the invasive stages of testicular (TGCTs) of adolescents and adults. Although TGCTs are characterized by extra copies of the short arm of chromosome 12, the genetic basis for gain of 12p in the pathogenesis of this cancer is not yet understood. We have demonstrated that gain of 12p is related to invasive growth and that amplification of specific 12p sequences, i.e., 12p11.2-p12.1, correlates with reduced apoptosis in the tumors. Here we show that three known genes map within the newly determined shortest region of overlap of amplification (SROA): DAD-R, SOX5, and EKI1. Whereas EKI1 maps close to the telomeric region of the SROA, DAD-R is the first gene at the centromeric region within the 12p amplicon. Although all three genes are amplified to the same level within the SROA, expression of DAD-R is significantly up-regulated in seminomas with the restricted 12p amplification compared with seminomas without this amplicon. DAD-R is also highly expressed in nonseminomas of various histologies and derived cell lines, both lacking such amplification. This finding is of particular interest because seminomas with the restricted 12p amplification and nonseminomas are manifested clinically in the third decade of life and show a low degree of apoptosis. In contrast, seminomas lacking a restricted 12p amplification, showing significantly lower levels of DAD-R with pronounced apoptosis, manifest clinically in the fourth decade of life. A low level of DAD-R expression is also observed in normal testicular parenchyma and in parenchyma containing the precursor cells of this cancer, i.e., carcinoma in situ. Therefore, elevated DAD-R expression in seminomas and nonseminomas correlates with invasive growth and a reduced level of apoptosis associated with an earlier clinical presentation. These data implicate DAD-R as a candidate gene responsible in part for the pathological effects resulting from gain of 12p sequences in TGCTs. In addition, our results also imply differences in expression regulation of DAD-R between seminomas and nonseminomas.
Course Project Final Report Blind Measurement of Blocking Artifact in Images

Blocking effect is the most annoying artifact in block transform-coded image/video. Objective measurement of blocking artifact plays an important role in the development, optimization, and assessment of image/video coding systems. It is also very useful for the design and evaluation of the post-processing algorithms at the decoding side. In this report, a deterministic approach is proposed that can blindly measure blocking artifact in blocky images without the reference of the original ones. The new metric is developed by using the secondorder and the third-order statistical features of the image. Furthermore, by considering human visual masking effects, the metric is modified to comply with human perception. JPEG compressed images are used to test the measurement systems.
A STUDY ON ROUGH SET THEORY BASED DYNAMIC REDUCT FOR CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM OPTIMIZATION

In the present day huge amount of data is generated in every minute and transferred frequently. Although the data is sometimes static but most commonly it is dynamic and transactional. New data that is being generated is getting constantly added to the old/existing data. To discover the knowledge from this incremental data, one approach is to run the algorithm repeatedly for the modified data sets which is time consuming. Again to analyze the datasets properly, construction of efficient classifier model is necessary. The objective of developing such a classifier is to classify unlabeled dataset into appropriate classes. The paper proposes a dimension reduction algorithm that can be applied in dynamic environment for generation of reduced attribute set as dynamic reduct, and an optimization algorithm which uses the reduct and build up the corresponding classification system. The method analyzes the new dataset, when it becomes available, and modifies the reduct accordingly to fit the entire dataset and from the entire data set, interesting optimal classification rule sets are generated. The concepts of discernibility relation, attribute dependency and attribute significance of Rough Set Theory are integrated for the generation of dynamic reduct set, and optimal classification rules are selected using PSO method, which not only reduces the complexity but also helps to achieve higher accuracy of the decision system. The proposed method has been applied on some benchmark dataset collected from the UCI repository and dynamic reduct is computed, and from the reduct optimal classification rules are also generated. Experimental result shows the efficiency of the proposed method.
Suppression During Binocular Rivalry Broadens Orientation Tuning

During binocular-rivalry suppression, an ordinarily visible stimulus is erased from awareness, but how is the sensory representation of that stimulus affected? Although it is established that rivalry suppression attenuates signal strength, the influence of suppression on signal fidelity remains unknown. Here, we show that noise plays a hitherto undiscovered role in the degradation of the percept under suppression. In Experiment 1, we measured psychometric functions for a stimulus presented under dominance and suppression, and found that the slope of these functions was shallower under suppression—a result suggesting that the signal representation was rendered noisier. Experiment 2 then revealed the source of this noise: An examination of the influence of suppression on the orientation bandwidth of noise masking showed that tuning bandwidth is significantly broadened under suppression. Thus, the discriminability of a suppressed stimulus is weakened not only by a general decrease in signal strength, but also by broader orientation tuning that introduces more noise in the neural representation of the suppressed stimulus.
Caloric vestibular stimulation in aphasic syndrome

Caloric vestibular stimulation (CVS) is commonly used to diagnose brainstem disorder but its therapeutic application is much less established. Based on the finding that CVS increases blood flow to brain structures associated with language and communication, we assessed whether the procedure has potential to relieve symptoms of post-stroke aphasia. Three participants, each presenting with chronic, unilateral lesions to the left hemisphere, were administered daily CVS for four consecutive weeks. Relative to their pre-treatment baseline scores, two of the three participants showed significant improvement on both picture and responsive naming at immediate and 1-week follow-up. One of these participants also showed improved sentence repetition, and another showed improved auditory word discrimination. No adverse reactions were reported. These data provide the first, albeit tentative, evidence that CVS may relieve expressive and receptive symptoms of aphasia. A larger, sham-controlled study is now needed to further assess efficacy.
An Agent Model for the Appraisal of Normative Events Based in In-Group and Out-Group Relations

Emotional synthetic characters are able to evaluate (appraise) events as positive or negative with their emotional states being triggered by several factors. Currently, the vast majority of models for appraisal in synthetic characters consider factors related to the goals and preferences of the characters. We argue that appraisals that only take into consideration these "personal" factors are incomplete as other more social factors, such as the normative and the social context, including in-group and out-group relations, should be considered as well. Without them, moral emotions such as shame cannot be appraised, limiting the believability of the characters in certain situations. We present a model for the appraisal of characters' actions that evaluates whether actions by in-group and out-group members which conform, or not, to social norms generate different emotions depending on the social relations between the characters. The model was then implemented in an architecture for virtual agents and evaluated with humans. Results suggest that the emotions generated by our model are perceived by the participants, taking into account the social context and that participants experienced very similar emotions, both in type and intensity, to the emotions appraised and generated by the characters.
Inhibition of poliovirus RNA synthesis by brefeldin A

Brefeldin A (BFA), a fungal metabolite that blocks transport of newly synthesized proteins from the endoplasmic reticulum, was found to inhibit poliovirus replication 10(5)- to 10(6)-fold. BFA does not inhibit entry of poliovirus into the cell or translation of viral RNA. Poliovirus RNA synthesis, however, is completely inhibited by BFA. A specific class of membranous vesicles, with which the poliovirus replication complex is physically associated, is known to proliferate in poliovirus-infected cells. BFA may inhibit poliovirus replication by preventing the formation of these vesicles.
Banking Efficiency in Visegrad Countries Before Joining the European Union

This paper is the first attempt to estimate commercial banks’ efficiency in the Visegrad region before joining the EU and also to consider differences in efficiency across the countries. Employing Data Envelopment Analysis, we analyze which of the banking sectors is the most efficient and whether there has been an improvement in banking intermediation efficiency since 1999. Incorporating censored Tobit regression analysis we try to detect whether the cross-country differences should be explained by country specific environmental factors or internal variables such as profitability, size or foreign ownership. Overall, the results suggest that since 1999 there has been, with the exception of Hungary, no improvement in efficiency, and its actual level reaches preferably moderate levels. Efficiency differences among Visegrad banking industries seem to be in the first place determined by country specific factors.