Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Leveraging information in vehicular parking games

Our paper approaches the parking assistance service in urban environments as an instance of service provision in non-cooperative network environments. We propose normative abstractions for the way drivers pursue parking space and the way they respond to partial or complete information for parking demand and supply as well as specific pricing policies on public and private parking facilities. The drivers are viewed as strategic agents who make rational decisions attempting to minimize the cost of the acquired parking spot. We formulate the resulting games as resource selection games and derive their equilibria under different expressions of uncertainty about the overall parking demand. The efficiency of the equilibrium states is compared against the optimal assignment that could be determined by a centralized entity and conditions are derived for minimizing the related price of anarchy value. Our results provide useful hints for the pricing and practical management of on-street and private parking resources. More importantly, they exemplify counterintuitive less-is-more effects about the way information availability modulates the service cost, which underpin general competitive service provision settings and contribute to the better understanding of effective information mechanisms.
Assessment of Tissue Perfusion Following Conventional Liposuction of Perforator-Based Abdominal Flaps

Background The effect of liposuction on the perforators of the lower abdominal wall has been investigated in several studies. There are controversial results in the literature that have primarily demonstrated the number and patency of the perforators. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of liposuction on the perfusion of perforator-based abdominal flaps using a combined laser–Doppler spectrophotometer (O2C, Oxygen to See, LEA Medizintechnik). Methods Nine female patients undergoing classical abdominoplasty were included in the study. Perforators and the perfusion zones of the deep inferior epigastric artery flap were marked on the patient's abdominal wall. Flap perfusion was quantitatively assessed by measuring blood flow, velocity, capillary oxygen saturation, and relative amount of hemoglobin for each zone preoperatively, after tumescent solution infiltration, following elevation of the flap on a single perforator, and after deep and superficial liposuction, respectively. Results The measurements taken after elevation of the flap were not significantly different than measurements taken after the liposuction procedures. Conclusions The liposuction procedure does not significantly alter the perfusion of perforator-based abdominal flaps in the early period. The abdominal tissue discarded in a classic abdominoplasty operation can be raised as a perforator flap and has been demonstrated to be a unique model for clinical research.
A novel approach to the modeling of the indoor power line channel-Part II: transfer function and its properties

In Part I of this work, we introduced multiconductor-transmission-line (MTL) theory to model the indoor power-line (PL) channel. We have also shown that the proposed MTL approach can also be used to take into consideration both the topology of the link and particular wiring practices such as bonding. In this contribution, we continue our bottom-up approach to indoor PL channel modeling and we show that the circuit model found in Part I can be represented in terms of cascaded two-port networks (2PNs) coupled through a single modal transformer. Once the equivalent 2PN representation is obtained, it is possible to represent the whole PL link by means of transmission (ABCD) matrices only. The results presented here allow us to reveal that the PL channel is a more deterministic media than commonly believed and also allows us to unveil interesting properties of the PL channel, such as symmetry, that were previously unknown.
A new key establishment scheme for wireless sensor networks

ABSTRACT Traditional key management techniques, such as public key cryptography or key distribution center (e.g., Kerberos), are often not effective for wireless sensor networks for the serious limitations in terms of computational power, energy supply, network bandwidth. In order to balance the security and efficiency, we propose a new scheme by employing LU Composition techniques for mutual authenticated pairwise key establishment and integrating LU Matrix with Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman for anonymous pathkey establishment. At the meantime, it is able to achieve efficient group key agreement and management. Analysis shows that the new scheme has better performance and provides authenticity and anonymity for sensor to establish multiple kinds of keys, compared with previous related works.
Evaluating the Image Quality of Closed Circuit Television Magnification Systems Versus a Head-Mounted Display for People With Low Vision

In this research, image analysis was used to optimize the visual output of a traditional Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) magnifying system and a head-mounted display (HMD) for people with low vision. There were two purposes: (1) To determine the benefit of using an image analysis system to customize image quality for a person with low vision, and (2) to have people with low vision evaluate a traditional CCTV magnifier and an HMD, each customized to the user’s needs and preferences. A CCTV system can electronically alter images by increasing the contrast, brightness, and magnification for the visually disabled when they are reading texts and pictures. The test methods was developed to evaluate and customize a magnification system for persons with low vision. The head-mounted display with CCTV was used to obtain better depth of field and a higher modulation transfer function from the video camera. By sensing the parameters of the environment (e.g., ambient light level, etc.) and collecting the user’s specific characteristics, the system could make adjustments according to the user’s needs, thus allowing the visually disabled to read more efficiently.
Vertical Integration for Full Outsourcing: Growth and Internationalization of a Portuguese Packaging Firm

Based on a case study of a Portuguese packaging firm, this paper examines how vertical integration of the supplier serves as a vehicle for the full outsourcing of the client firms' needs in a solution that reduces transaction costs, favors specialization, and permits small and medium-sized firms to develop competencies that may be exploited in a wide array of projects. Vertical integration by the supplier (a governance decision) is a strategic response to changes in the sourcing model of the clients. Client-supplier relationships have inter-spatial and inter-temporal value that surpasses spot market exchanges.
Frequency Domain TOF: Encoding Object Depth in Modulation Frequency

Time of flight cameras may emerge as the 3-D sensor of choice. Today, time of flight sensors use phase-based sampling, where the phase delay between emitted and received, high-frequency signals encodes distance. In this paper, we present a new time of flight architecture that relies only on frequency---we refer to this technique as frequency-domain time of flight (FD-TOF). Inspired by optical coherence tomography (OCT), FD-TOF excels when frequency bandwidth is high. With the increasing frequency of TOF sensors, new challenges to time of flight sensing continue to emerge. At high frequencies, FD-TOF offers several potential benefits over phase-based time of flight methods.
SVM Kernels for Time Series Analysis

Time series analysis is an important and complex problem in machine learning and statistics. Real-world applications can consist of very large and high dimensional time series data. Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are a popular tool for the analysis of such data sets. This paper presents some SVM kernel functions and discusses their relative merits, depending on the type of data that is used.
An Administration Console for the CSAP System

Our group is involved in the European funded Webocracy project in which an e-government system called Webocrat has been designed and implemented. Our responsibility is to provide mechanisms guaranteeing secure and reliable access to Webocrat. According to the security requirements from the city councils involved in the project we have implemented a generic and extensible security architecture called CSAP. In this paper we will shortly describe the CSAP architecture and a web-based administration console supporting the administration of RBAC-based authorization and access control services.
LOTED : Exploiting Linked Data in Analyzing European Procurement Notices

The world of procurements and eProcurement generates daily large amounts of data, that represent knowledge of great economical value both for individual companies and for public organisations wishing to achieve a better understanding of a given market. However, such data remains difficult to explore and analyze as it is being kept isolated from other sources of knowledge, in dedicated systems. In this paper, we present an ongoing work on extracting and linking data from the european ‘Tenders Electronic Daily’ system, which publishes approximately 1,500 tenders five times a week. We specifically show how such information is dynamically extracted and linked to external datasets, and how the created links enrich the original data, introducing new perspectives to its analysis. We show tools we developed to support such ‘linked data-based’ analysis of data, and report on the lessons learnt from our experience in building a linked data application with potential for real-life use in knowledge extraction.
On Secure Key Management in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

It is widely believed that although being more complex, a probabilistic key predistribution scheme is much more resilient against node capture than a deterministic one in lightweight wireless ad hoc networks. Backed up by the surprisingly large successful attack probabilities computed in this paper, we show that the probabilistic approaches have only limited performance advantages over deterministic approaches. We first consider a static network scenario as originally considered in the seminal paper by Eschenauer and Gligor [1], where any node capture happens after the establishment of all pairwise links, and show that the deterministic approach can achieve a performance as good as the probabilistic one. Whereas in a mobile network, the probabilistic key management as described in [1] can lead to a successful attack probability (SAP) of one order of magnitude larger than the one in a static network due to node fabrication attacks. Finally, we propose two low-cost secure-architecture-based techniques to improve the security against such attacks. Our new architectures, specifically targeted at the sensornode platform, protect long-term keys using a root of trust embedded in the hardware System-on-a-Chip (SoC). This prevents an adversary from extracting these protected long-term keys from a captured node to fabricate new nodes. The extensive simulation results show that the proposed architecture can significantly decrease the SAP and increase the security level of key management for mobile ad hoc networks.
The computational power of normalizer circuits over black-box groups

This work presents a precise connection between Clifford circuits, Shor's factoring algorithm and several other famous quantum algorithms with exponential quantum speed-ups for solving Abelian hidden subgroup problems. We show that all these different forms of quantum computation belong to a common new restricted model of quantum operations that we call \emph{black-box normalizer circuits}. To define these, we extend the previous model of normalizer circuits [arXiv:1201.4867v1,arXiv:1210.3637,arXiv:1409.3208], which are built of quantum Fourier transforms, group automorphism and quadratic phase gates associated to an Abelian group $G$. In previous works, the group $G$ is always given in an explicitly decomposed form. In our model, we remove this assumption and allow $G$ to be a black-box group. While standard normalizer circuits were shown to be efficiently classically simulable [arXiv:1201.4867v1,arXiv:1210.3637,arXiv:1409.3208], we find that normalizer circuits are powerful enough to factorize and solve classically-hard problems in the black-box setting. We further set upper limits to their computational power by showing that decomposing finite Abelian groups is complete for the associated complexity class. In particular, solving this problem renders black-box normalizer circuits efficiently classically simulable by exploiting the generalized stabilizer formalism in [arXiv:1201.4867v1,arXiv:1210.3637,arXiv:1409.3208]. Lastly, we employ our connection to draw a few practical implications for quantum algorithm design: namely, we give a no-go theorem for finding new quantum algorithms with black-box normalizer circuits, a universality result for low-depth normalizer circuits, and identify two other complete problems.
Ratings of counselor expertness, attractiveness and trustworthiness as a function of counselor sex, counselor sex role and subject sex, with subject feminist orientation as a covariate.

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Edge-avoiding wavelets and their applications

We propose a new family of second-generation wavelets constructed using a robust data-prediction lifting scheme. The support of these new wavelets is constructed based on the edge content of the image and avoids having pixels from both sides of an edge. Multi-resolution analysis, based on these new edge-avoiding wavelets, shows a better decorrelation of the data compared to common linear translation-invariant multi-resolution analyses. The reduced inter-scale correlation allows us to avoid halo artifacts in band-independent multi-scale processing without taking any special precautions. We thus achieve nonlinear data-dependent multi-scale edge-preserving image filtering and processing at computation times which are linear in the number of image pixels. The new wavelets encode, in their shape, the smoothness information of the image at every scale. We use this to derive a new edge-aware interpolation scheme that achieves results, previously computed by solving an inhomogeneous Laplace equation, through an explicit computation. We thus avoid the difficulties in solving large and poorly-conditioned systems of equations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the new wavelet basis for various computational photography applications such as multi-scale dynamic-range compression, edge-preserving smoothing and detail enhancement, and image colorization.
Speaker clustering of unknown utterances based on maximum purity estimation

This paper addresses the problem of automatically grouping unknown speech utterances that are from the same speaker. A clustering method based on maximum purity estimation is proposed, with the aim of maximizing the similarities of voice characteristics between utterances within all the clusters. This method employs a genetic algorithm to determine the cluster where each utterance should be located, which overcomes the limitation of conventional hierarchical clustering that the final result can only reach the local optimum. The proposed clustering method also incorporates a Bayesian information criterion to determine how many clusters should be created.
Trajectory generation for dynamic bipedal walking through qualitative model based manifold learning

Legged robots represent great promise for transport in unstructured environments. However, it has been difficult to devise motion planning strategies that achieve a combination of energy efficiency, safety and flexibility comparable to legged animals. In this paper, we address this issue by presenting a trajectory generation strategy for dynamic bipedal walking robots using a factored approach to motion planning - combining a low-dimensional plan (based on intermittently actuated passive walking in a compass-gait biped) with a manifold learning algorithm that solves the problem of embedding this plan in the high-dimensional phase space of the robot. This allows us to achieve task level control (over step length) in an energy efficient way - starting with only a coarse qualitative model of the system dynamics and performing a data-driven approximation of the dynamics in order to synthesize families of dynamically realizable trajectories. We demonstrate the utility of this approach with simulation results for a multi-link legged robot.
Consistent Music Recommendation in Heterogeneous Pervasive Environment

Seamlessly integrating services in a heterogeneous environment is a hot topic in pervasive computing. Given information explosion, it is wise to provide users services of recommending personalized information, although recommendation quality in a P2P network usually can not be compared with that in a centralized environment. In this paper, we introduce a music collaborative filtering system combining centralized and P2P recommendation algorithms together, which aims to provide consistent music recommendation services in a heterogeneous pervasive environment. Instead of bothering users for explicit ratings, we first track their listening behaviors and then extract implicit ratings using a new extraction mechanism. Meanwhile, we adopt a double-criteria strategy for the centralized algorithm, which integrates song recommendation and artist recommendation together. Moreover, we design a novel scalable gossip-based P2P recommendation algorithm that takes advantage of centralized services as much as possible with contexts switching. In addition, we shed some lights on the serendipity problem that is common in most recommendation systems.
Preparing To Parent: Mindfulness In Expectant Parents Exposed To Adversity

PREPARING TO PARENT: RISK AND RESILIENCE IN A SAMPLE OF EXPECTANT PARENTS EXPOSED TO ADVERSITY by LAUREL MARIE HICKS, M.S.W. August 2017 Advisor: Carolyn J. Dayton, Ph.D. Major: Social Work (Clinical & Infant Mental Health) Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Expectant parents who have been exposed to psychosocial risk encounter deleterious psychological (Ashley et al., 2016), and physiological (cite) effects. This not only affects the parent-to-be, but also may affect the developing fetus (cite) and is linked to poorer infant development (cite). However, not all risk-exposed individuals experience this, many are resilient and still thrive in the face of adversity. Understanding potential risk and resiliency factors in expectant parents is advantageous, so tailored interventions can be devised to improve outcomes. One potential resiliency factor, mindfulness, is finding its way into a variety of contexts, however little research has been explored in a sample of diverse, expectant parents who are exposed to risk. In response, this three-paper dissertation examined dispositional mindfulness in women and men expecting a baby (N=102). First, the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and depressive symptoms, considering the potential confounding effect of trauma symptoms was explored. Next, mindfulness and trauma were investigated as predictors of potential risk for child abuse. Finally, physiological stress (vagal tone) response to a parenting stressor was studied in low and high resiliency groups. Findings illustrate a significant relationship, in the expected direction,
An Emergency Evacuation Planning Model for Special Needs Populations

The need to have evacuation plans in place for ready implementation for special needs populations became evident after catastrophic events such as Hurricane Katrina. For the purpose of this study, special needs populations will include, but are not limited to, people with physical disabilities, older adults, non-English-speaking populations, residents and employees without vehicles, and tourists. The main objective of this study was to evaluate different evacuation procedures for special needs populations from large urban areas using current public transit systems. A microscopic simulation model was constructed to analyze real-life scenarios for evacuation methodologies. A linear programming optimization model was developed to find the optimum locations for evacuation bus stops for the case study area. The results from this study are very interesting and can aid evacuation planners in the future.
Developing a Standard Cell Library for Subthreshold Source-Coupled Logic

2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to many people who supported and encouraged me during the work leading to this master project. I would like to specially thank Prof. Y. Leblebici, the director of Microelectronic Systems Laboratory (LSM), for his extensive support during master study and guiding me to select worthwhile research topics for both semester and master projects. I am grateful to him and to other professors and colleagues at LSM for providing an enjoyable environment. Special thank goes to Mr. Tajalli and Mr. Badel for guiding me through all stages of the project. I really appreciate their help and invaluable advices. Finally, I would like to thank my family for their interest and never-ending support during my studies. 3 ABSTRACT Power consumption is one of the main concerns in design of modern integrated circuits. The trend for implementing the required functionality using digital circuits has made the design of ultra-low power logic circuits very desirable. Sub-threshold Source-Coupled Logic (STSCL) technique is a novel method that could be used to design ultra-low power circuits operating in sub-threshold regime. In this technique, the load and the source-coupled nMOS transistors are biased in Weak Inversion (WI). The circuits designed using the STSCL technique can operate over a wide range of frequency. An interesting advantage of this technique is that the speed and power consumption of such circuits can be simply adjusted by altering the bias current of the gates without the need to resize the devices. In fact, as long as the nMOS devices remain in WI, logic evaluation will be performed correctly. In this work, design and characterization of a standard cell library for the STSCL circuits is presented. As the existing tools cannot handle the circuits with differential input/output ports, a unique method is employed to create so called fat cells out of the STSCL cells. These cells are treated exactly like their CMOS counterparts by the tools. When placement and routing of a design is finished, the fat wires are splitted into differential ones and the fat cells are replaced by corresponding cells with differential input/output ports. An FIR filter, as a demonstration circuit, is finally synthesized and implemented using the STSCL library cells to show the capabilities of the mentioned technique. 4 CONTENTS