Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human activities dataset and the ICPR 2012 human activities recognition and localization competition

We describe the LIRIS human activities dataset, the dataset used for the ICPR 2012 human activities recognition and localization competition. In contrast to previous competitions and existing datasets, the tasks focus on complex human behavior involving several people in the video at the same time, on actions involving several interacting people and on human-object interactions. The goal is not only to classify activities, but also to detect and to localize them. The dataset has been shot with two different cameras: a moving camera mounted on a mobile robot delivering grayscale videos in VGA resolution and depth images from a consumer depth camera (Primesense/MS Kinect); and a consumer camcorder delivering color videos in DVD resolution.
Combining actor-network theory with interventionist research: present state and future potential

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the philosophical and practical compatibility of actor-network theory (ANT) and interventionist research (IVR) and search for explanations for their scant combined use. The scope of investigation is limited to accounting, management and organization studies, but the findings are believed to be applicable in other social sciences as well. Design/methodology/approach - An analysis is conducted of accounting, management and organization studies in addition to interviewing eight accounting scholars who have applied IVR and/or ANT in their research. Findings - A comparison of the philosophical and other features of ANT and IVR suggests that they should be relatively easily combinable in studies. Based on interview material, three types of barriers to combining ANT and IVR are identified: perceived epistemological incompatibility; fear of going native or losing neutrality; and academic tribes. However, subsequent analysis indicates that none of these forms an insurmountable obstacle to the combination. Research limitations/implications - The combined application of ANT and IVR could benefit both IVR and ANT researchers in management accounting as it would enable them to conduct theoretically grounded studies on dynamic processes, such as the emergence and implementation of accounting innovations, to pose original research questions and to find new perspectives to accounting phenomena. Practical implications - Employing ANT and IVR in combination could increase organizational interest in management accounting research. Originality/value - The paper contributes to the discussion on the compatibility of different research approaches and highlights ways in which researchers could benefit from combining ANT and IVR.
Towards Understanding Interactive Debugging

Debugging is a laborious activity in which developers spend lot of time navigating through code, looking for starting points, and stepping through statements. Yet, although debuggers exist for 40 years now, there have been few research studies to understand this important and laborious activity. Indeed, to perform such a study, researchers need detailed information about the different steps of the interactive debugging process. In this paper, to help research studies on debugging and, thus, help improving our understanding of how developers debug systems using debuggers, we present the Swarm Debug Infrastructure (SDI), with which practitioners and researchers can collect and share data about developers' interactive debugging activities. We assess the effectiveness of the SDI through an experiment that aims to understand how developers apply interactive debugging on five true faults found in JabRef, toggling breakpoints and stepping code. Our study involved five freelancers and two student developers performing 19 bug location sessions. We collect videos recording and data about 6 hours of effective debugging activities. The data includes 110 breakpoints and near 7,000 invocations. We process the collected videos and data to answer five research questions showing that (1) there is no correlation between the number of invocations (respectively the number of breakpoints toggled) during a debugging session and the time spent on the debugging task, ρ = -0.039 (respectively 0.093). We also observed that (2) developers follow different debugging patterns and (3) there is no relation between numbers of breakpoints and expertise. However, (4) there is a strong negative correlation between time of the first breakpoint (ρ = -0.637), and the time spent on the task, suggesting that when developers toggle breakpoints carefully, they complete tasks faster than developers who toggle breakpoints too quickly. We conclude that the SDI allows collecting and sharing debugging data that can provide interesting insights about interactive debugging activities. We discuss some implications for tool developers and future debuggers.
Application of nonlinear dimensionality reduction to characterize the conformational landscape of small peptides

The automatic classification of the wealth of molecular configurations gathered in simulation in the form of a few coordinates that help to explain the main states and transitions of the system is a recurring problem in computational molecular biophysics. We use the recently proposed ScIMAP algorithm to automatically extract motion parameters from simulation data. The procedure uses only molecular shape similarity and topology information inferred directly from the simulated conformations, and is not biased by a priori known information. The automatically recovered coordinates prove as excellent reaction coordinates for the molecules studied and can be used to identify stable states and transitions, and as a basis to build free‐energy surfaces. The coordinates provide a better description of the free energy landscape when compared with coordinates computed using principal components analysis, the most popular linear dimensionality reduction technique. The method is first validated on the analysis of the dynamics of an all‐atom model of alanine dipeptide, where it successfully recover all previously known metastable states. When applied to characterize the simulated folding of a coarse‐grained model of β‐hairpin, in addition to the folded and unfolded states, two symmetric misfolding crossings of the hairpin strands are observed, together with the most likely transitions from one to the other. Proteins 2010. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Expected Effects of Offshore Wind Farms on Mediterranean Marine Life

Current climate policy and issues of energy security mean wind farms are being built at an increasing rate to meet energy demand. As wind farm development is very likely in the Mediterranean Sea, we provide an assessment of the offshore wind potential and identify expected biological effects of such developments in the region. We break new ground here by identifying potential offshore wind farm (OWF) “hotspots” in the Mediterranean. Using lessons learned in Northern Europe, and small-scale experiments in the Mediterranean, we identify sensitive species and habitats that will likely be influenced by OWFs in both these hotspot areas and at a basin level. This information will be valuable to guide policy governing OWF development and will inform the industry as and when environmental impact assessments are required for the Mediterranean Sea.
Co‐immobilized Phosphorylated Cofactors and Enzymes as Self‐Sufficient Heterogeneous Biocatalysts for Chemical Processes

Abstract Enzyme cofactors play a major role in biocatalysis, as many enzymes require them to catalyze highly valuable reactions in organic synthesis. However, the cofactor recycling is often a hurdle to implement enzymes at the industrial level. The fabrication of heterogeneous biocatalysts co‐immobilizing phosphorylated cofactors (PLP, FAD+, and NAD+) and enzymes onto the same solid material is reported to perform chemical reactions without exogeneous addition of cofactors in aqueous media. In these self‐sufficient heterogeneous biocatalysts, the immobilized enzymes are catalytically active and the immobilized cofactors catalytically available and retained into the solid phase for several reaction cycles. Finally, we have applied a NAD+‐dependent heterogeneous biocatalyst to continuous flow asymmetric reduction of prochiral ketones, thus demonstrating the robustness of this approach for large scale biotransformations.
A multi-agent home automation approach for power management

Abstract This paper presents the principles of a Home Automation System dedicated to power management that adapts power consumption to available power ressources according to inhabitant comfort and cost criteria. The system relies on a multi-agent paradigm. Each agent supports a service achieved by several devices, it cooperates and coordinates its action with others in order to find an acceptable near-optimal solution. The control algorithm is decomposed into two complementary mechanisms: a reactive mechanism, which protects from constraint violations, and an anticipation mechanism, which computes a plan for global consumption according to predicted productions and consumptions and to inhabitant criteria. The paper shows how to compute a global consumption plan relying on Bellman-Ford's algorithm and how to reduce the problem complexity by dividing the whole problem into independent sub-problems.
Advanced Image Enhancement Based on Wavelet & Histogram Equalization for Medical Images

Image enhancement is used to produce high quality pictures like Medical images. As the quality of the image is very much depends on environmental effects like light, weather or equipment that we used to capture the picture, images may loose important information which is required to enhance the quality of an image. So we have many techniques to recover the lost data to improve the quality of the picture . In this paper, we are using non linear enhancement technique to increase the contrast level of an image like wavelet transform and Histogram Equalization. In this experiment we found that this method enhance the contrast level of an image.
The Association between Ambient Air Pollution and Daily Mortality in Beijing after the 2008 Olympics: A Time Series Study

In recent decades, ambient air pollution has been an important public health issue in Beijing, but little is known about air pollution and health effects after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. We conduct a time-series analysis to evaluate associations between daily mortality (nonaccidental, cardiovascular and respiratory mortality) and the major air pollutants (carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter less than 10 µm in aerodynamic diameter) in Beijing during the two years (2009∼2010) after the 2008 Beijing Olympics. We used generalized additive model to analyze relationship between daily mortality and air pollution. In single air pollutant model with two-day moving average concentrations of the air pollutants, increase in their interquartile range (IQR) associated with percent increase in nonaccidental mortality, 2.55 percent [95% confidence interval (CI): 1.99, 3.11] for CO, 2.54 percent (95% CI: 2.00, 3.08) for NO2 and 1.80 percent (95% CI: 1.21, 2.40) for PM10, respectively; increases in the IQR of air pollutant concentrations associated with percent increase in cardiovascular mortality, 2.88 percent (95% CI: 2.10,3.65) for CO, 2.63 percent (95% CI: 1.87, 3.39) for NO2 and 1.72 percent (95% CI: 0.88, 2.55) for PM10, respectively; and increase in IQR of air pollutant concentrations associated with respiratory mortality, 2.39 percent (95% CI: 0.68, 4.09) for CO, 1.79 percent (95% CI: 0.11, 3.47) for NO2 and 2.07 percent (95% CI: 0.21, 3.92) for PM10, respectively. We used the principal component analysis to avoid collinearity of varied air pollutants. In addition, the association stratified by sex and age was also examined. Ambient air pollution remained a significant contributor to nonaccidental and cardiopulmonary mortalities in Beijing during 2009∼2010.
Microgrids for Commercial Building Combined Heat and Power and Power and Heterogeneous Power Quality and Reliability

Electricity supply may be entering a period of significant change, and currently there are conflicting visions for the reshaped industry. A major share of the uncertainty revolves around the pressing need for carbon emissions abatement, while at the same time, there is an additional and growing requirement of modern economies for high power quality and reliability (PQR). The developed economies must urgently find the most cost effective means of meeting these two objectives. This paper begins by describing two stylized alternative visions in popular currency of how the power system might evolve to meet increasing future requirements for PQR, a supergrids paradigm and a dispersed paradigm. An economic perspective is presented on the choice of homogeneous universal power quality upstream in the electricity supply chain, and on the extremely heterogeneous requirements of end-use loads. One promising approach discussed for addressing our current challenges is via the deployment of microgrids in commercial buildings. The Distributed Energy Resources Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM), an optimization approach to choosing such systems and their operating schedules, is described and recently added extensions to incorporate heat and electrical storage options are demonstrated. An illustrative example for a San Francisco hotel is reported.
Playing the trade-off game: Architecture exploration using Coffeee

Modern mobile devices need to be extremely energy efficient. Due to the growing complexity of these devices, energy-aware design exploration has become increasingly important. Current exploration tools often do not support energy estimation, or require the design to be very detailed before estimation is possible. It is important to get early feedback on both performance and energy consumption during all phases of the design and at higher abstraction levels. This article presents a unified optimization and exploration framework to explore source-level transformation to processor architecture design space. The proposed retargetable compiler and simulator framework can map applications to a range of processors and memory configurations, simulate, and report detailed performance and energy estimates. An accurate and consistent energy modeling approach is introduced which can estimate the energy consumption of processor and memories at a component level, which can help to guide the design process. Fast energy-aware architecture exploration is illustrated by modeling both state-of-the-art processors as well as other architectures. Various design trade-offs are also illustrated on different academic as well as industrial benchmarks from both the wireless communication and multimedia domain. We also illustrate a design space exploration on different applications and show that there is large trade-off space between application performance, energy consumption, and area. We show that the proposed framework is consistent, accurate, and covers a large design space including various novel low-power extensions in a unified framework.
Value congruence and commitment to change in healthcare organizations

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between value congruence and affective commitment to change as well as to test the moderating roles of psychological contract breach and workplace ostracism on that very relationship. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from 13 university hospitals in Turkey. The sample included 1,113 randomly chosen certified nurses and head nurses of their units. The moderating roles of psychological contract breach and workplace ostracism on the value congruence and affective commitment to change relationship were tested using the moderated hierarchical regression analysis. Findings The moderated hierarchical regression analysis results revealed a significant positive relationship between value congruence and employees’ commitment to change. In addition, this very relation was weaker when both psychological contract breach and workplace ostracism were higher than when they were lower. Practical implications This study showed that employee perception of value congruence increased employee’s affective commitment to change. Organizations can enhance employees’ affective commit by recruiting individuals who fit well within their organizations’ characteristics and by encouraging supervisors to develop close, supportive relationships with subordinates. Moreover, recognizing that employees are likely to experience concern and discomfort about a change initiative along with the fact that such psychological states (psychological contract breach or workplace ostracism) can dramatically impact the effectiveness of change efforts can help organizations to better plan change-related strategies geared towards managing properly such potentially harmful reactions. Originality/value The study provides new insights into the influence that value congruence may have on affective commitment to change and the moderating roles of psychological contract breach and workplace ostracism in the link between value congruence and change commitment. The paper also offers a practical assistance to employees in healthcare management and their leaders interested in building trust, increasing person-organization fit and change commitment, and lowering workplace ostracism.
Identification of Kinetic and Temporal Factors Related to Vertical Jump Performance

Subjects performed maximum vertical jumps on a force platform to reveal whether resulting force-time curves could identify characteristics of good performances. Instantaneous power-time curves were also derived from the force-time curves. Eighteen temporal and kinetic variables were calculated from the force- and power-time curves and were compared with the takeoff velocities and maximum heights via correlation and multiple regression. The large variability in the patterns of force application between the subjects made it difficult to identify important characteristics of a good performance. Maximum positive power was found to be an excellent single predictor of height, but the best three-predictor model, not including maximum power, could only explain 66.2% of the height variance. A high maximum force (> 2 body weights) was found to be necessary but not sufficient for a good performance. Some subjects had low jumps in spite of generating high peak forces, which indicated that the pattern of force applica.
The Cosmic Evolution of Quasar Host Galaxies

We present the results of a near-infrared imaging study of the host galaxies of 17 quasars in the redshift range 1 < z < 2. The observations were carried out at the ESO VLT UT1 8 m telescope under excellent seeing conditions (~0.″4). The sample includes radio-loud (RLQs) and radio-quiet (RQQs) quasars with similar distribution of redshift and optical luminosity. For all the observed objects but one we have been able to derive the global properties of the surrounding nebulosity. The host galaxies of both types of quasars appear to follow the expected trend in luminosity of massive ellipticals undergoing simple passive evolution. However, we find a systematic difference by a factor ~2 in the host luminosity between RLQs and RQQs [RLQ (host) = -27.55 ± 0.12 and RLQ (host) = -26.83 ± 0.25]. Comparison with other samples of quasar hosts at similar and lower redshift indicates that the difference in the host luminosity between RLQs and RQQs remains the same from z = 2 to the present epoch. No significant correlation is found between the nuclear and the host luminosities. Assuming that the host luminosity is proportional to the black hole mass, as observed in nearby massive spheroids, these quasars emit at very different levels (spread ~1.5 dex) with respect to their Eddington luminosity and with the same distribution for RLQs and RQQs. Apart from a factor of ~2 difference in luminosity, the hosts of RLQs and RQQs of comparable nuclear luminosity appear to follow the same cosmic evolution as massive inactive spheroids. Taken together, our results support a view where nuclear activity can occur in all luminous ellipticals without producing a significant change in their global properties and evolution. Quasar hosts appear to be already well formed at z ~ 2, in disagreement with the predictions of models for the joint formation and evolution of galaxies and active nuclei based on the hierarchical structure formation scenario.
On the role of zealotry in the voter model

We study the voter model with a finite density of zealots—voters that never change opinion. For equal numbers of zealots of each species, the distribution of magnetization (opinions) is Gaussian in the mean-field limit, as well as in one and two dimensions, with a width that is proportional to , where Z is the number of zealots, independent of the total number of voters. Thus just a few zealots can prevent consensus or even the formation of a robust majority.
A review of the linkage between student participation in the International Baccalaureate Continuum and student learning attributes

Given the rapid growth in the number of students completing the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme and the potential for students to be educated entirely through IB programmes, it is important to understand associations between programme participation and cognitive and non-cognitive learning attributes. Through a mixed methods study, this research considers evidence derived from Diploma Programme examinations, a newly designed and validated student questionnaire, and complementary case studies to examine plausible explanations for associations between IB programmes and learning attributes.
Overweight in Mice and Enhanced Adipogenesis In Vitro Are Associated With Lack of the Hedgehog Coreceptor Boc

Obesity arises from a combination of genetic, environmental, and behavioral factors. However, the processes that regulate white adipose tissue (WAT) expansion at the level of the adipocyte are not well understood. The Hedgehog (HH) pathway plays a conserved role in adipogenesis, inhibiting fat formation in vivo and in vitro, but it has not been shown that mice with reduced HH pathway activity have enhanced adiposity. We report that mice lacking the HH coreceptor BOC displayed age-related overweight and excess WAT. They also displayed alterations in some metabolic parameters but normal food intake. Furthermore, they had an exacerbated response to a high-fat diet, including enhanced weight gain and adipocyte hypertrophy, livers with greater fat accumulation, and elevated expression of genes related to adipogenesis, lipid metabolism, and adipokine production. Cultured Boc−/− mouse embryo fibroblasts showed enhanced adipogenesis relative to Boc+/+ cells, and they expressed reduced levels of HH pathway target genes. Therefore, a loss-of-function mutation in an HH pathway component is associated with WAT accumulation and overweight in mice. Variant alleles of such HH regulators may contribute to WAT accumulation in human individuals with additional genetic or lifestyle-based predisposition to obesity.