Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
RANSAC: Identification of Higher-Order Geometric Features and Applications in Humanoid Robot Soccer

The ability for an autonomous agent to selflocalise is directly proportional to the accuracy and precision with which it can perceive salient features within its local environment. The identification of such features by recognising geometric profile allows robustness against lighting variations, which is necessary in most industrial robotics applications. This paper details a framework by which the random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm, often applied to parameter fitting in linear models, can be extended to identify higher-order geometric features. Goalpost identification within humanoid robot soccer is investigated as an application, with the developed system yielding an order-of-magnitude improvement in classification performance relative to a traditional histogramming methodology.
Visual information abstraction for interactive robot learning

Semantic visual perception for knowledge acquisition plays an important role in human cognition, as well as in the learning process of any cognitive robot. In this paper, we present a visual information abstraction mechanism designed for continuously learning robotic systems. We generate spatial information in the scene by considering plane estimation and stereo line detection coherently within a unified probabilistic framework, and show how spaces of interest (SOIs) are generated and segmented using the spatial information. We also demonstrate how the existence of SOIs is validated in the long-term learning process. The proposed mechanism facilitates robust visual information abstraction which is a requirement for continuous interactive learning. Experiments demonstrate that with the refined spatial information, our approach provides accurate and plausible representation of visual objects.
Option pricing, arbitrage and martingales

theory of valuing derivative securities(cid:9) We discuss the mathematical setting of option price theory and derive the relationship between no(cid:13)arbitrage and mar(cid:13) tingales(cid:9) We provide examples how this theory can be applied to equity and foreign(cid:13)exchange derivatives(cid:9) We also explain how the theory can be applied to interest rate derivative securities and provide some examples(cid:9) (cid:0)(cid:2)
Integrating Information Theory in Agent-Based Crowd Simulation Behavior Models

Crowds must be simulated believable in terms of their appearance and behavior to improve a virtual environment's realism. Due to the complex nature of human behavior, realistic behavior of agents in crowd simulations is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel behavioral model which builds analytical maps to control agents’ behavior adaptively with agent–crowd interaction formulations. We introduce information theoretical concepts to construct analytical maps automatically. Our model can be integrated into crowd simulators and enhance their behavioral complexity. We made comparative analyses of the presented behavior model with measured crowd data and two agent-based crowd simulators.
Blind image quality metric for blackboard lecture images

This paper proposes a reference free perceptual quality metric for blackboard lecture images. The text in the image is mostly affected by high compression ratio and de-noising filters which cause blocking and blurring artifacts. As a result the perceived text quality of the blackboard image degrades. The degraded text is not only difficult to read by humans but it also makes the optical character recognition task even more difficult. Therefore, we put our effort firstly to estimate the presence of these artifacts and then we used it in our proposed quality metric. The blocking and blurring features are extracted from the image content on block boundaries without the presence of reference image. Thus it makes our metric reference free. The metric also uses the visual saliency model to mimic the human visual system (HVS) by focusing only on the distortions in perceptually important regions, i.e. those regions which contains the text. Moreover psychophysical experiments are conducted that show very good correlation between the mean opinion score and quality scores obtained from our reference free perceptual quality metric (RF-PQM). The correlation results are also compared with standard reference and reference free metric.
Physically-Based Shading Models in Film and Game Production

Physically grounded shading models have been known for many years, but they have only recently started to replace the " ad-hoc " models in common use for both film and game production. Compared to " ad-hoc " models, which require laborious tweaking to produce high-quality images, physically-based, energy-conserving shading models easily create materials that hold up under a variety of lighting environments. These advantages apply to both photorealistic and stylized scenes, and to game development as well as production of CG animation and computer VFX. Surprisingly, physically-based models are not more difficult to implement or evaluate than the traditional " ad-hoc " ones. This course begins with a short explanation of the physics of light-matter interaction and how it is expressed in simple shading models. Then several speakers discuss specific examples of how shading models have been used in film and game production. In each case, the advantages of the new models are demonstrated, and drawbacks or issues arising from their usage are discussed. The course also includes descriptions of specific production techniques related to physically-based shading. Practitioners from the videogame, CG animation, and VFX fields, as well as researchers interested in shading models. Prerequisites Basic familiarity with computer graphics, illumination and shading models in particular.
Modeling Study on the Interpersonal Relationship Network of Rumor Spreading

Faced with the difficulty to foresee and control the rumors about emergency events, it usually causes psychological panic and inappropriate behavior in people crowd. With the appearance of new media for rumor spreading, for example cell phones, which has something to do with the relations of people, the interpersonal relationship network of rumor spreading is becoming more and more international and complicated. In this paper, some social psychology research related with earthquake rumors in recent years is summarized. Following these achievements, we propose a global interpersonal relationship network model based on the preferential attachments and preferential strengthening mechanism between local characteristic groups. The topological properties of rumor spreading is investigated in the social individual level, and its rationality is also analyzed to well describe the statistical results of rumor spreading on the interpersonal relationship network.
On the Efficiency and Scalability of Decentralised Monitoring using Mobile Agents

This paper considers the problem of improving the efficiency and scalability of current monitoring systems, which generally follow a centralised and static management model. Several alternative solutions based on Mobile Agents (MAs), specifically tailored to network monitoring are described. In particular, the key problem of computing efficiently the initial number and location of MAs is addressed, and two algorithms for rapid MA deployment are proposed. Moreover, mathematical models for the proposed MA solutions and for the common technique of centralised polling are built and a comparative analysis of their performance is carried out. Performance is expressed in terms of traffic (incurred by the monitoring system) and monitoring delay. Results on traffic show that MAs typically offer improved efficiency, although they do not always scale better than polling. However, results on delay demonstrate that MA solutions improve both scalability and efficiency under all circumstances.
A Universally Stable and Energy-Efficient Scheduling Protocol for Packet Switching Network

Energy efficiency is becoming an important issue in networks. Although some research works have been devoted to this topic, only a little attention has been paid to the stability of the network equipped with the energy conservation mechanisms. In fact, we find that the stability of networks can be undermined in the worst case if it isn't considered with care by the energy conservation mechanism.In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient scheduling protocol which can guarantee the stability of the network in all cases. We start by building a new model which can be used to verify the stability of the network equipped with the energy conservation mechanisms. With this model, we transform the packet scheduling problem to a Job Shop Scheduling problem. For this problem, we propose a time-stamp based work-conserving scheduling algorithm - G-FSA. Compared with existing methods, this scheduling algorithm guarantees a tighter bound on the make span of the jobs. Then, we integrate G-FSA with a time partition approach to generate our energy-efficient packet scheduling protocol. It is proved that the obtained protocol can guarantee the stability of network in all cases. And its approximation ratio in terms of energy efficiency can be bounded by O((1+∈ )α) for any ∈ > 0, where is an input parameter depending on the hardware infrastructure. Typically, 1 <; α ≤ 3.
VDE: Seamless Mobility on Desktop Environment

Virtual Desktop Environment (VDE) provides a real virtual working environment in which users could personally customize and update the application list from application template libraries. The heterogeneous applications actually running in the remote application servers could cooperatively communicate with each other. It is a thin client approach to mobility in which the perfect combination of VM technology and DFS technology are the keys to the rapid seamless resuming of the usage scenarios. Usage scenarios are incrementally suspended including the user’s documents and the running applications. The usage data stored in data center provides a unified view for the users through historical scenario manager and ensures the data’s security and reliability at the same time. This paper explores the building policy of a real virtual working environment and the suspending/resuming policy of usage scenarios. Experiments demonstrate and evaluate VDE’s efficiency and effectiveness.
Enriching knowledge networks - considering synergies between social network analysis

Ronèl Davel THESIS submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree DPhil: Information Science in the Department of Information Science Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment & Information Technology at the UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA PROMOTER: Professor A. S. A. du Toit ASSISTANT PROMOTER: Professor M. A. Mearns January 2017 ENRICHING KNOWLEDGE NETWORKS – CONSIDERING SYNERGIES BETWEEN SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS, COMMUNITIES OF PRACTICE AND KNOWLEDGE MAPS
Assisting document annotation using a data sharing platform

Most of the organizations today generate and share textual descriptions of their products, services, and actions. Such textual collections consists of significant amount of structured information, which remains buried in the unstructured text. Even though information extraction algorithms provides the extraction of structured relations, they are often expensive and inaccurate. We present an alternative approach that facilitates the generation of the structured metadata which is useful for querying the database. Document annotations are comments, notes, or other types of external remarks that can be attached to a document. Our approach relies on the idea that humans can add the valuable metadata during creation time prompted by an interface. We can increase the quality of searching to some extent, if the documents are properly annotated. Existing probabilistic approaches have some demerits. This paper proposes an approach that uses inverted indexing scheme for effective mining of informations. Major contribution of this paper relies on the fact that annotates the document by utilizing the content of the document and query workload.
A neural network approach for predicting forest fires

In this paper, we present an application of artificial neural networks to the real-world problem of predicting forest fire. The neural network used for this application is a multilayer perceptron whose architectural parameters, i.e., the number of hidden layers and the number of neurons per layer were heuristically determined. The synaptic weights of this architecture were adjusted using the backpropagation learning algorithm and a large set of real data related to the studied problem. We also present and discuss some preliminary results which illustrate the performance and the usefulness of the proposed approach.
Heston ’ s Stochastic Volatility Model Implementation , Calibration and Some

To take into account leverage effect, Wiener stochastic processes W1, W2 should be correlated dW1 · dW2 = ρdt. The stochastic model (1.2) for the variance is related to the square-root process of Feller (1951) and Cox, Ingersoll and Ross (1985). For the square-root process (1.2) the variance is always positive and if 2κθ > σ 2 then it cannot reach zero. Note that the deterministic part of process (1.2) is asymptotically stable if κ > 0. Clearly, that equilibrium point is Vt = θ .
Thermoeconomic Coherence: A Methodology for the Analysis and Optimisation of Thermal Systems

In the field of thermal systems, different approaches and methodologies have been proposed to merge thermodynamics and economics. They are usually referred as thermoeconomic methodologies and their objective is to find the optimum design of the thermal system given a specific objective function. Some thermoeconomic analyses go beyond that objective and attempt to find whether every component of the system is correctly designed or to quantify the inefficiencies of the components in economic terms. This paper takes another step in that direction and presents a new methodology to measure the thermoeconomic coherence of thermal systems, as well as the contribution of each parameter of the system to that coherence. It is based on the equality of marginal costs in the optimum. The methodology establishes a criterion to design coherently the system. Additionally, it may be used to evaluate how much a specific design is far from the optimum, which components are undersized or oversized and to measure the strength of the restrictions of the system. Finally, it may be extended to the analysis of uncertainties of the design process, providing a coherent design and sizing of the components with high uncertainties.
Online accelarated implementation of the Fuzzy C-means algorithm with the use of the GPU platform

Fuzzy C-means is a very widely covered topic in literature. It is a very successful clustering method whose subtle variations are involved in various clustering related applications. Despite its success, it shares a disadvantage with almost all of its contemporary pattern discovery algorithms — computational complexity. With the explosion in multimedia data over the internet and growing storage systems, there is a lot of research done in content based data retrieval. Fuzzy C-means is an integral part of this goal but its innate complexity makes it a strictly offline algorithm. Online pattern discovery is the need of the hour and our paper aims to address this issue without the use of powerful servers for implementing Fuzzy C-Means (FCM). We aim at accelerating the algorithm using Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), which are basically graphic cards common in desktop computers. We aim at restructuring the algorithm in a manner in which maximum data parallelism could be extracted thus utilizing the resources of the GPU to the fullest extent. In this paper we compare the speed of our approach using a NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU to that of sequential versions running on an Intel Xeon 2.93 GHz and an Intel Dual Core 2GHz.
The association of PBX1 polymorphisms with overweight/obesity and metabolic alterations in the Korean population

Pre-B-cell leukemia transcription factor 1 (PBX1), which is located on chromosome 1q23, was recently reported to be associated with type 2 diabetes mellitus. We examined whether single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of the PBX1 gene are associated with overweight/obesity in a Korean population. We genotyped 66 SNPs in the PBX1 gene and investigated their association with clinical phenotypes found in 214 overweight/obese subjects and 160 control subjects using the Affymetrix Targeted Genotyping chip array. Seven SNPs (g.+75186C>T, g.+78350C>A, g.+80646C>T, g.+138004C>T, g.+185219G>A, g.+191272A>C, and g.+265317T>A) were associated with the risk of obesity in three models (codominant, dominant, and recessive) (P=0.007-0.05). Haplotype 1 (CAC) and 3 (TAC) of block 3 and haplotype 2 (GGAAT) of block 10 were also strongly associated with the risk of obesity. In the control group, subjects that had homozygote for the major allele for both g. +185219G>A and g. +191272A>C showed lower high density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C) level compared to those possessing the minor allele, suggesting that the association between the homozygote for the major allele for both g. +185219G>A and g. +191272A>C and HDL-C is attributable to the increased risk of obesity. This study suggests that the PBX1 gene is a possible risk factor in overweight/obese patients.
Bernoulli-Gaussian Approximate Message-Passing Algorithm for Compressed Sensing with 1D-Finite-Difference Sparsity

This paper proposes a fast approximate message-passing (AMP) algorithm for solving compressed sensing (CS) recovery problems with 1D-finite-difference sparsity in term of MMSE estimation. The proposed algorithm, named ssAMP-BGFD, is low-computational with its fast convergence and cheap per-iteration cost, providing phase transition nearly approaching to the state-of-the-art. The proposed algorithm is originated from a sum-product message-passing rule, applying a Bernoulli-Gaussian (BG) prior, seeking an MMSE solution. The algorithm construction includes not only the conventional AMP technique for the measurement fidelity, but also suggests a simplified message-passing method to promote the signal sparsity in finite-difference. Furthermore, we provide an EM-tuning methodology to learn the BG prior parameters, suggesting how to use some practical measurement matrices satisfying the RIP requirement under the ssAMP-BGFD recovery. Extensive empirical results confirms performance of the proposed algorithm, in phase transition, convergence speed, and CPU runtime, compared to the recent algorithms.
Asynchronous Parallel Potts Model for Simulation of Grain Growth

This work describes an implementation of the Potts model for simulation of grain growth in 2D on a distributed-memory parallel architecture. The simulation scheme utilizes continuous-time, asynchronous parallel version of the n-fold way algorithm. Each Processing Element (PE) carries a piece of the global simulation domain while the virtual topology of the PEs is in the form of a square grid in 2D and Torus in 3D. Different PEs have different local simulated times. Inter-processor communication is facilitated by the Message Passing Interface (MPI) routines. Sample results for grain growth simulation in 2D are presented for 720 x 720 global domain size distributed over 16 PEs. The grain growth kinetics obtained in the simulation of pure, isotropic systems demonstrates a close agreement with the analytical models. Grain size distribution obtained in the parallel simulation is well described by the expected lognormal distribution, thus validating the simulation procedure.
A Pattern Language for Online Auctions Management

Online auctions are gaining popularity as they provide an excellent means of selling goods. Their advantages include: reducing transaction costs, selling goods that are difficult to sell through the ordinary market channels, and increasing the circle of potential customers. This paper presents a pattern language for the Web auction application domain. The pattern language has ten analysis patterns that offer solutions to support all the basic functionalities of this domain. Its development was based on several existing Internet auction systems and its application can guide the developer during analysis of such systems.
Climas motivacionales, motivación autodeterminada, afectos y burnout en deportistas: enfoque multinivel

espanolEste estudio tuvo como objetivo poner a prueba un mo­delo de mediacion multinivel que examino las relaciones entre la percepcion del clima motivacional generado por los entrenadores a nivel de equipo y los afectos y el burnout a nivel individual, mediados por la motivacion autodeterminada. Participaron 745 atletas universitarios de diversos deportes, con edades entre 17 a 28 anos (M = 21.46, DT = 2.14) quienes completaron los instrumentos que evaluaban las variables del estudio (PMCSQ-2, SMS-II, PANAS y ABQ). Los resultados mostraron que a nivel individual (nivel intra), la motivacion autodeterminada se relacionaba positivamente con el afecto positivo; por el contrario, se relacionaba negativamente con el afecto ne­gativo y las tres dimensiones de burnout. A nivel del equipo (nivel entre), la percepcion del clima de implica­cion en la tarea se relacionaba positivamente con la mo­tivacion autodeterminada, mientras que el clima de im­plicacion en el ego se relacionaba negativamente con la motivacion autodeterminada. De manera similar, la mo­tivacion autodeterminada se relacionaba positivamente con el afecto positivo y negativamente el afecto nega­tivo, asi como con las tres dimensiones del burnout. Tanto el clima de implicacion en la tarea como el de im­plicacion en el ego mostraron un efecto indirecto sobre el bienestar y el malestar a traves de la motivacion autode­terminada. Se sugiere a los entrenadores generar un clima de implicacion en la tarea para potenciar el bie­nestar de los deportistas. EnglishThis study aimed to test a multilevel mediation model that examined the relationship between the per­ceived motivational climate created by coaches at team level and the affects and burnout at individual level, as me­diated by the self-determined motivation. Participants were 745 college athletes from various sports, aged 17 to 28 years old (M = 21.46, DT = 2.14) who completed the instruments that evaluated the study variables (PMCSQ-2, SMS-II, PANAS, and ABQ). The results showed that at the within-team level, self-determined motivation was positively related to positive affect; on the contrary, was negatively related to negative affect and three dimen­sions of burnout. At the between-team level, the percep­tion of the task-involving climate was positively related to self-determined motivation, while the ego-involving climate was negatively related to self-determined moti­vation. Similarly, self-determined motivation was positi­vely related to positive affect and negatively negative af­fect, as well as to the three dimensions of burnout. Both the task-involving climate and ego-involving climates showed an indirect effect on well-being and discomfort through self-determined motivation. It is suggested that coaches generate a task-involving climate to promote the well-being of athletes.