Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Loss-load curves: support for rate-based congestion control in high-speed datagram networks

Congestion control is an important problem in high-speed computer networks. Networks must limit the packet load that they accept to avoid excessive packet loss and delay. Hosts must limit their transmission rates to match what the network can handle at any given time or else suffer high packet drop rates. Rate-based congestion control schemes control network load by regulating the rate of packet transmission into the network. In this paper, we propose the use of loss-load curves to characterize the network’s packet delivery service to the clients of the network. For a given sender, the loss-load curve expresses the probability of packet loss as a function of offered load at a given time or load condition in the network. Using this information, a sender chooses its own tradeoff between throughput and packet loss. To illustrate the approach, we present and evaluate a specific loss-load algorithm. The algorithm is designed to encourage sender cooperation, to provide protection from misbehaving senders, and to keep offered load close to network capacity at all times. Our analytic and simulation results show that the algorithm converges, without oscillation, to a small and stable overload, and that it provides a bounded and predictable level of packet loss to cooperating senders.
Tensor-krylov Methods for Large Nonlinear Equations Tensor-krylov Methods for Large Nonlinear Equations

In this paper, we describe tensor methods for large systems of nonlinear equations based on Krylov subspace techniques for approximately solving the linear systems that are required in each tensor iteration. We refer to a method in this class as a tensor-Krylov algorithm. We describe comparative testing for a tensor-Krylov implementation versus an analogous implementation based on a Newton-Krylov method. The test results show that tensor-Krylov methods are much more eecient and robust than Newton-Krylov methods on hard nonlinear equations problems.
Turbulence in Optical Flow Fields

In this thesis I will examine the relations between turbulence as found in physical systems and turbulence in optic ow elds. I will record some image sequences of a theoretically well understood turbulent physical system and from these image sequences I will examine the relations between the optic ow of the image sequences and the physical parameters of the turbulent system. I will examine the image sequences at di erent scales using the theory of linear Gaussian scale-space, because linear Gaussian scale-space has proven to be a valuable tool in digital image processing and because the physics of turbulence can be explained through scaling properties of the turbulent ow. From these analyses I hope to be able to describe the theoretical relations between turbulence in optic ow elds and turbulence in physical systems. I have obtained the permission to borrow and use equipment and experimental setup for the recording of the image sequences by Preben Alstr m and Mogens Levinsen from the Niels Bohr Institute (NBI). This abstract is a translated version of the description of the project (\Arbejdsbeskrivelse"), delivered to the administration of DIKU at the start of this project.
Language Skills of Children with Early Cochlear Implantation

Objective This study investigated factors contributing to the comprehension and production of English language by children with prelingual deafness after 4 to 7 yr of multichannel cochlear implant use. The analysis controlled for the effects of child and family characteristics so that educational factors most conducive to maximum implant benefit could be identified. Design A battery of language tests were administered to 181 8- and 9 - yr-old children from across the United States and Canada who received a cochlear implant by age 5. Tests of comprehension, verbal reasoning, narrative ability and spontaneous language production were administered either in speech and sign or in the child’s preferred communication mode. These constituted the Total Language measures. Spoken Language measures were derived from a speech-only language sample. Type and amount of educational intervention since implantation constituted the independent variables. Characteristics of the child and the family were considered intervening variables. A series of multiple regression analyses determined the amount of variance in Total Language and Spoken Language ability accounted for by the intervening variables and the amount of additional variance attributable to the independent variables. Results More than half of the children (with performance intelligence quotients in the average range) exhibited language skills that were similar to those of hearing 8 to 9 yr olds on measures of verbal reasoning, narrative ability, utterance length, and lexical diversity. Significant predictors of language ability were similar for Total and for Spoken Language outcomes and included greater nonverbal intelligence, smaller family size, higher socio-economic status and female gender. Age at receiving an implant did not affect language outcome. After the variance due to these variables was controlled, the primary rehabilitative factors associated with linguistic outcome were amount of mainstream class placement and an educational emphasis on speech and auditory skills. Conclusions Use of a cochlear implant has had a dramatic impact on the linguistic competence of profoundly hearing-impaired children. More than half of the children in this sample with average learning ability produced and understood English language at a level comparable with that of their hearing age mates. Such mature language outcomes were not typical of children with profound hearing loss who used hearing aids. Use of a visual (i.e., sign) language system did not provide the linguistic advantage that had been anticipated. Children educated without use of sign exhibited a significant advantage in their use of narratives, the breadth of their vocabulary, in their use of bound morphemes, in the length of their utterances and in the complexity of the syntax used in their spontaneous language. An oral educational focus provided a significant advantage for both spoken and total language skills.
Effectiveness of Same Versus Mixed Asthma Inhaler Devices: A Retrospective Observational Study in Primary Care

Purpose Correct use of inhaler devices is fundamental to effective asthma management but represents an important challenge for patients. The correct inhalation manoeuvre differs markedly for different inhaler types. The objective of this study was to compare outcomes for patients prescribed the same inhaler device versus mixed device types for asthma controller and reliever therapy. Methods This retrospective observational study identified patients with asthma (ages 4-80 years) in a large primary care database who were prescribed an inhaled corticosteroid (ICS) for the first time. We compared outcomes for patients prescribed the same breath-actuated inhaler (BAI) for ICS controller and salbutamol reliever versus mixed devices (BAI for controller and pressurised metered-dose inhaler [pMDI] for reliever). The 2-year study included 1 baseline year before the ICS prescription (to identify and correct for confounding factors) and 1 outcome year. Endpoints were asthma control (defined as no hospital attendance for asthma, oral corticosteroids, or antibiotics for lower respiratory tract infection) and severe exacerbations (hospitalisation or oral corticosteroids for asthma). Results Patients prescribed the same device (n=3,428) were significantly more likely to achieve asthma control (adjusted odds ratio, 1.15; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.02-1.28) and recorded significantly lower severe exacerbation rates (adjusted rate ratio, 0.79; 95% CI, 0.68-0.93) than those prescribed mixed devices (n=5,452). Conclusions These findings suggest that, when possible, the same device should be prescribed for both ICS and reliever therapy when patients are initiating ICS.
A sparse reduced-rank regression approach for hyperspectral image unmixing

In this paper we propose a semi-supervised method for hyperspectral image unmixing. Given a set of endmembers present in the image, we assume that (a) each pixel is composed of a subset of the available endmembers and (b) adjacent pixels are, in all possibility, correlated. Then, we define an inverse problem, where the abundance matrix to be estimated is assumed to be simultaneously sparse and low-rank. These assumptions give rise to a regularized linear regression problem, where a mixed penalty is enforced, comprising the weighted ℓ1 norm and an upper bound of the nuclear matrix norm. The resulting optimization problem is efficiently solved using a novel coordinate descend type unmixing algorithm. The estimation performance of the proposed scheme is illustrated in experiments conducted on both simulated and real data.
Transition Densities for Interest Rate and Other Nonlinear Diffusions

This paper applies to interest rate models the theoretical method developed in Ait-Sahalia (1998) to generate accurate closed-form approximations to the transition function of an arbitrary diffusion. While the main focus of this paper is on the maximum-likelihood estimation of interest rate models with otherwise unknown transition functions, applications to the valuation of derivative securities are also briefly discussed. Copyright The American Finance Association 1999.
The Distribution of Ortho-H2D+(11,0-11,1) in L1544: Tracing the Deuteration Factory in Prestellar Cores

Prestellar cores are unique laboratories for studying the chemical and physical conditions preceding star formation. We observed the prestellar core L1544 in the fundamental transition of ortho-H2D+ (11,0-11,1) at different positions over 100'' and found a strong correlation between its abundance and the CO depletion factor. We also present a tentative detection of the fundamental transition of para-D2H+ (11,0-10,1) at the dust emission peak. Maps in N2H+, N2D+, HCO+, and DCO+ are used and interpreted with the aid of a spherically symmetric chemical model that predicts the column densities and abundances of these species as a function of radius. The correlation between the observed deuterium fractionation of H, N2H+, and HCO+ and the observed integrated CO depletion factor across the core can be reproduced by this chemical model. In addition, a simpler model is used to study the H2D+ ortho-to-para ratio. We conclude that, in order to reproduce the observed ortho-H2D+ observations, the grain radius should be larger than 0.3 μm.
Disease-Related Variables and Depression Among Iranian Patients with Parkinson Disease

Background: The factors affecting the correlation between Parkinson disease (PD) and depression have remained unclear. Objectives: We assessed the prevalence of depression among patients with PD and the association between PD-related variables and depression severity. Patients and Methods: This is a cross-sectional study performed in Kermanshah Province of Iran. Sampling was based on recruitment of subjects according to inclusion and exclusion criteria. Patients with confirmed Parkinson disease who were referred to clinics of Kermanshah University of Medical Sciences participated in this study. Depression was evaluated with Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II). Clinical characteristics of PD, including tremor, rigidity, impaired posture, loss of autonomic movement, changes in speech and handwriting, masked face, and hyposmia were indexed. Anhedonia was assessed with Farsi version of Snaith-Hamilton Pleasure Scale. Data were collected between April 2010 and March 2014. Results: A total of 350 patients (52.9% men and 47.1% women) participated in this investigation. Female gender (36.5% in women vs. 13.0% in men, P < 0.0001), impaired posture (27.2% in affected individuals vs. 18.8%, P = 0.002), masked face (39.0% vs. 5.2%, P < 0.0001), and hyposmia (48.7% vs. 21.0%, P = 0.001) were associated with higher susceptibility to profound depression. Lower scores of all domains of Farsi version of Snaith-Hamilton Pleasure Scale (including interest/pastimes, social interaction, sensory experience, and food/drink) were related to more severe depression (P < 0.0001 for all subscales). Severe and profound depression was found in 44% of the participants. Conclusions: This study estimated that the prevalence of major depression among Iranian individuals with PD living in Kermanshah as 44%. Major determinants of depression were female gender, rigidity, impaired posture, masked face, hyposmia, and anhedonia.
Linear dependency modeling for feature fusion

This paper addresses the independent assumption issue in fusion process. In the last decade, dependency modeling techniques were developed under a specific distribution of classifiers. This paper proposes a new framework to model the dependency between features without any assumption on feature/classifier distribution. In this paper, we prove that feature dependency can be modeled by a linear combination of the posterior probabilities under some mild assumptions. Based on the linear combination property, two methods, namely Linear Classifier Dependency Modeling (LCDM) and Linear Feature Dependency Modeling (LFDM), are derived and developed for dependency modeling in classifier level and feature level, respectively. The optimal models for LCDM and LFDM are learned by maximizing the margin between the genuine and imposter posterior probabilities. Both synthetic data and real datasets are used for experiments. Experimental results show that LFDM outperforms all existing combination methods.
Intensity JND comes from Poisson neural noise: implications for image coding

While problems of image coding and audio coding have frequently been assumed to have similarities, specific sets of relationships have remained vague. One area where there should be a meaningful comparison is with central masking noise estimates, which define the codec's quantizer step size. In the past few years, progress has been made on this problem in the auditory domain (Allen and Neely, J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 102, 1997, 3628-46; Allen, 1999, Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Vol. 17, p. 422-437, Ed. Webster, J.G., John Wiley & Sons, Inc, NY). It is possible that some useful insights might now be obtained by comparing the auditory and visual cases. In the auditory case it has been shown, directly from psychophysical data, that below about 5 sones (a measure of loudness, a unit of psychological intensity), the loudness JND is proportional to the square root of the loudness (Delta) pounds sterling(pounds sterling) varies direct as (root)pounds sterling(I). This is true for both wideband noise and tones, having a frequency of 250 Hz or greater. Allen and Neely interpret this to mean that the internal noise is Poisson, as would be expected from neural point process noise. It follows directly that the Weber fraction (the relative loudness JND), decreases as one over the square root of the loudness, namely (Delta) pounds sterling/pounds sterling varies direct as 1/(root)pounds sterling. Above pounds sterling equals 5 sones, the relative loudness JND (Delta) pounds sterling/pounds sterling approximately equals 0.03 (i.e., Ekman law). It would be very interesting to know if this same relationship holds for the visual case between brightness (Beta) (I) and the brightness JND (Delta) (Beta) (I). This might be tested by measuring both the brightness JND and the brightness as a function of intensity, and transforming the intensity JND into a brightness JND, namely (Delta) (Beta) (I) equals (Beta) (I + (Delta) I) - (Beta) (I) approximately equals (Delta) Id(Beta) /dI. If the Poisson nature of the loudness relation (below 5 sones) is a general result of central neural noise, as is anticipated, then one would expected that it would also hold in vision, namely that (Delta) (Beta) ((Beta) ) varies direct as (root)(Beta) (I). It is well documented that the exponent in the S.S. Stevens' power law is the same for loudness and brightness (Stevens, 1961) (i.e., both brightness (Beta) (I) and loudness pounds sterling(I) are proportional to I0.3). Furthermore, the brightness JND data are more like Riesz's near miss data than recent 2AFC studies of JND measures.
An Improved Robust and Adaptive Watermarking Algorithm Based on DCT

This paper proposes an improved watermarking algorithm based on DCT(Discrete Cosine Transform). We carried out the algorithm as described as follows. First, we extended both rows and ranks of the watermark by using the proposed method before the embedding stage. After expansion, Sine chaotic system is employed in encrypting the watermark. In the embedding stage, an effective and adaptive embedding method is proposed to embed the watermark into the blocked DCT coefficients. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm in this paper works well in resisting both geometry attack and noise attack. It also does well in recovering the watermark after stego image suffered from JPEG compression.
Experience-Dependent versus Experience-Independent Postembryonic Development of Distinct Groups of Zebrafish Olfactory Glomeruli

Olfactory glomeruli are innervated with great precision by the axons of different olfactory sensory neuron types and act as functional units in odor information processing. Approximately 140 glomeruli are present in each olfactory bulb of adult zebrafish; these units consist of either highly stereotypic large glomeruli or smaller anatomically indistinguishable glomeruli. In the present study, we investigated developmental differences among these types of glomeruli. We observed that 10 large and individually identifiable glomeruli already developed before hatching, at 72 h after fertilization, in configurations that resembled their mature organization. However, the cross-sectional area of these glomeruli increased throughout larval development, and they eventually comprised the largest units in postlarval olfactory bulbs. In contrast, small and anatomically indistinguishable glomeruli formed only after hatching, apparently by segregating from five larger precursors that were identifiable during embryonic development. The differentiation of these small glomeruli proceeded with conspicuous variation in number and arrangement, both among larvae and between olfactory bulbs of the same individuals. To determine factors that might contribute to this variability, we investigated the effects of olfactory enrichment on the development of amino acid-responsive lateral glomeruli, which include both large and small units. Larvae reared in an amino acid-enriched environment had normal large lateral glomeruli, but the small lateral glomeruli were more numerous and displayed reduced cross-sectional areas compared with glomeruli in control animals. Our results suggest that large and small glomeruli mature via distinct developmental processes that may be differentially influenced by sensory experience.
Efficient shadow removal technique for tracking human objects

This paper deals with the shadow removal algorithm for tracking human object with the background subtraction and occlusion detection technique. This is implemented by initially considering a reference frame and using its background information. When a new object enters into the frame, the foreground image and background image are derived using the reference frame which was taken earlier as background image. Most of the times, the shadow from background information mixes with the foreground object hence results in intricate tracking process. The algorithm used involves modeling of the desired background as a reference model which is later used in background subtraction to produce foreground pixels which are the deviation of the current frame from the reference one. Here, morphological operations will be used for identifying and removing the shadow. The occlusion is one of the most common events in object tracking and centroid of each object are used for detecting the occlusion and identifying each object separately. Video sequences are captured and detected with the proposed algorithm.
Y-means: a clustering method for intrusion detection

As the Internet spreads to each comer of the world, computers are exposed to miscellaneous intrusions from the World Wide Web. We need effective intrusion detection systems to protect our computers from these unauthorized or malicious actions. Traditional instance-based learning methods for intrusion detection can only detect known intrusions since these methods classify instances based on what they have learned. They rarely detect the intrusions that they have not learned before. In this paper, we present a clustering heuristic for intrusion detection, called Y-means. This proposed heuristic is based on the K-means algorithm and other related clustering algorithms. It overcomes two shortcomings of K-means: number of clusters dependency and degeneracy. The result of simulations run on the KDD-99 data set shows that Y-means is an effective method for partitioning large data space. A detection rate of 89.89% and a false alarm rate of 1.00% are achieved with Y-means.
Modeling speech perception in noise : the stop consonants as a case study

This study develops procedures for predicting perceptual confusions of speech sounds in noise by integrating knowledge of the acoustic properties which signal phonetic contrasts of speech sounds with principles of auditory masking theory. The methodology that was followed had three components: 1) quantifying acoustic correlates of some phonological features in naturally-spoken utterances and using the results to generate synthetic utterances, 2) developing a perceptual metric to predict the level and spectrum of the noise which will mask these acoustic correlates, and 3) performing a series of perceptual experiments to evaluate the theoretical predictions. The focus of the study was the perceptual role of the formant trajectories in signalling the place of articulation for the stop consonants /b,d/ in consonant-vowel syllables , where the vowel was either /a/ or //. Nonsense syllables were chosen for the perceptual study so that lexical effects such as word frequency did not bias subjects' responses. Computer-generated, rather than naturally-spoken, syllables were used to provide better control of the stimuli. In the analysis/synthesis stage, the acoustic properties of the stop consonants /b,d/ imbedded in naturally-spoken CV syllables were quantified and the results were then used to synthesize these utterances with the formant synthesizer KLSYN88 (Klatt, and Klatt, 1990). In the context of the vowel /a/, the two synthetic syllables differed in the F2 trajectory: the F2 trajectory was falling for /dd/ and was relatively flat for /ba/. In the C/c/ context, both F2 and F3 trajectories were different for the consonants: F2 and F3 were flat for /de/, whereas they were rising for /be/. A metric was then developed to predict the level of noise needed to mask a spectral peak corresponding to a formant peak. The metric was based on a combination of theoretical and empirical results. Two types of masking were studied: within-band masking (where the formant was within the bandwidth of the noise masker) and above-band masking (where the formant was above the upper cutoff frequency of the masker). Results of auditory masking theory, which was established primarily for pure tones, were used successfully to predict within-band masking of formant peaks. The predictive measure 2 in this case was the signal-to-noise ratio in a critical band around the formant frequency. The applicability of the results of masking theory to formant peaks was tested by conducting a series of discrimination and detection experiments with synthetic, steady-state vowels. In the above-band masking case, it was …