Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bringing Semantic Services to Real-World Objects

The last few years have seen the emergence of two parallel trends: the first of such trends is set by technologies such as Near Field Communication, 2D Bar codes and RFID that support the association of digital information with virtually every object. By using these technologies, ordinary objects such as coffee mugs or advertisement posters provide digital information that can be easily processed. The second trend is set by (semantic) Web services that provide a way to automatically invoke functionalities across the Internet lowering interoperability barriers. The PERCI system, discussed in the article, provides a bridge between these two technologies allowing the invocation of Web services using the information gathered from the tags to effectively transform every object in a service proxy.
Coping with False Accusations in Misbehavior Reputation Systems for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Some misbehavior detection and reputation systems in mobile ad-hoc networks rely on the dissemination of information of observed behavior, which makes them vulnerable to false accusations. This vulnerability could be removed by forbidding the dissemination of information on observed behavior in the first place, but, as we show here, this has more drawbacks than a solution that allows dissemination and copes with false accusations. We propose a method for reducing the impact of false accusations. In our approach, nodes collect first-hand information about the behavior of other nodes by direct observation. In addition, nodes maintain a rating about every other node that they care about, in the form of a continuous variable per node. From time to time nodes exchange their first-hand information with others, but, using the Bayesian approach we designed and present in this paper, only second-hand information that is not incompatible with the current rating is accepted. Ratings are slightly modified by accepted information. The reputation of a given node is the collection of ratings maintained by others about this node. By means of simulation we evaluated the robustness of our approach against several types of adversaries that spread false information, and its efficiency at detecting malicious nodes. The simulation results indicate that our system largely reduces the impact of false accusations, while still benefiting from the accelerated detection of malicious nodes provided by second-hand information. We also found that when information dissemination is not used, the time until malicious nodes are detected can be unacceptable.
DISTURBANCE OBSERVER-BASED TRAJECTORY FOLLOWING CONTROL OF NONLINEAR ROBOTIC MANIPULATORS

Robotic manipulators are highly nonlinear and coupled dynamic systems, which may be subject to different types of unknown disturbances such as joint frictions and end-effector external payloads. Such disturbances, when unaccounted for, cause poor tracking performance of the robot and may even destabilize the robot control system. In this paper we propose a novel nonlinear control scheme for robotic manipualtors subject to disturbances using the concept of disturbance observer-based control by modifying the disturbance observers proposed in [1] and [2]. The proposed control scheme and disturbance observer guarantee global asymptotic position and disturbance tracking and remove the previous restrictions on the number of degrees of freedom (DOFs), joint types, or manipulator configuration. Computer simulations are presented for a 4-DOF SCARA manipulator to show the effectiveness of the proposed disturbance observer-based control scheme.
Parallel Programming Templates for Massive Remote Sensing Data Processing

—Remote Sensing (RS) data processing is characterized by massive remote sensing images and increasing amount of algorithms of higher complexity. Parallel programming for data-intensive applications like massive remote sensing image processing on parallel systems is bound to be especially trivial and challenging. We propose a C++ template mechanism enabled generic parallel programming skeleton for these remote sensing applications in high performance clusters. It provides both programming templates for distributed RS data and generic parallel skeletons for RS algorithms. Through one-side communication primitives provided by MPI, the distributed RS data template could provide a global view of the big RS data whose sliced data blocks are scattered among the distributed memory of cluster nodes. Moreover, by data serialization and RMA (Remote Memory Access), the data templates could also offer a simple and effective way to distribute and communicate massive remote sensing data with complex data structures. Furthermore, the generic parallel skeletons implement the recurring patterns of computation, performance optimization and pass the user-defined sequential functions as parameters of templates for type genericity. With the implemented skeletons, Developers without extensive parallel computing technologies can implement efficient parallel remote sensing programs without concerning for parallel computing details. Through experiments on remote sensing applications, we confirmed that our templates were productive and efficient.
Displacement , Strain and Stress Green Tensors

Earthquake seismology is being nourished by a growing body of observational constraints on the structure of fault zones, including geological field studies of exhumed faults (Chester et al., 1993), classical and guided-wave fault-zone tomographic studies (Catchings et al., 2002; Thurber et al., 2003; Ben-Zion, 1998; Li et al., 2000), high-resolution microearthquake relocations (Got et al., 1994; Waldhauser and Ellsworth, 2002), and active fault-zone drilling projects such as the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth, the Corinth Rift Laboratory and the geophysical boreholes into the Nojima Fault Zone (Ohtani et al., 2000). These new constraints are driving fundamental investigations of fault-zone controls on earthquake processes, including both theoretical and observational studies of the dynamics of earthquake rupture on a fault separating two dissimilar materials. Source dynamics on such a bimaterial interface is enriched by the coupling between slip and normal stress, leading naturally to pulse-like rupture and directivity (Andrews and Ben-Zion, 1997; Cochard and Rice, 2000). Recently, Rubin and Gillard (2000) and Rubin (2002) observed a pronounced northwestsoutheast asymmetry in the distribution of microearthquake aftershocks along sections of the San Andreas fault that have a strong velocity contrast, up to twenty percent, across the fault zone. They attributed this along-strike aftershock asymmetry to bimaterial directivity effects. McGuire et al. (2002) have suggested that this mechanism may be a general feature of plate-boundary earthquakes, which may act to enhance the predominance of unilateral rupture on a global scale. From an observational standpoint, especially when dealing with microseismicity or teleseismic data, the details of earthquake kinematics are usually poorly resolved, and the seismic moment remains one of the few fundamental macroscopic properties of the source that can be reliably estimated from seismograms (e.g., Nadeau and Johnson, 1998). The moment tensor has been widely adopted as the preferred phenomenological description of an earthquake in the point-source approximation, ever since it was first introduced into seismology by Kostrov (1970) and Gilbert (1971). A shortcoming of this representation is the inherent ambiguity of the surficial moment density tensor in the case of
A model reference adaptive PID control for electromagnetic actuated micro-positioning stage

This paper presents a model reference adaptive PID controller for controlling a novel compliant flexures-based XY micro-positioning stage driven by electromagnetic actuators. The stage is specially designed by employing double four-bar parallelogram flexures and four non-contact electromagnetic force actuators to realize the kinematic decoupling and force decoupling respectively. Based on preliminary open loop experiments and simple PID controller based close-loop experiments, we found that the system is with typical hysteresis and nonlinear characteristics. As model reference adaptive control techniques possess great advantages to tackle robustness issues of nonlinear and model uncertainty systems, it is designed and adopted to control the micro-manipulator system. At first, a model reference adaptive PID controller design process is introduced. Then control parameters are systematically tuned based on intuitive desired performance and robustness. At last, experimental results verify the process for controlling the micro-positioning stage, which shows that the adopted controller can drive the mobile stage to track the desired reference path exactly.
The X-Ray Expansion of the Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A

We present the first X-ray expansion measurements of the young, bright supernova remnant Cas A. We have acquired a deep (232 ks) ROSAT high-resolution image of Cas A that is compared with archival images of similar quality taken 17 yr earlier with the Einstein Observatory. The average expansion rate between the two epochs is found to be 0.20%±0.01% yr-1, twice as fast as the expansion of the bright radio ring and two-thirds as fast as the ensemble of optical fast-moving knots. This argues that we are observing a fundamentally different hydrodynamical structure in each band, although all of these components are located on the same patchy ring. In addition, we detect significant variations in the expansion rate as a function of azimuth around the bright X-ray ring. These results are discussed in the context of two classes of models, one involving a preexisting circumstellar shell and the other having a uniform or gradiated density profile that decreases monotonically away from the center.
A history of inverse iteration

AHISTORYOFINVERSEITERATIONILSEC.F. IPSENy1.TheMetho d.Inverseiterationisametho dforcomputingeigenfunctionsoflinearop erators.HereweconsiderinverseiterationforthesolutionofalgebraiceigenvalueproblemAx=x;whereAisarealorcomplexsquarematrix,thescalaraneigenvalue,andnon-zerovectorxisaneigenector.Inerseiterationthemetho dofchoicewhenonehasatone'sdisp osalapproximationstoasp eci edsubsetofeigenvaluesA,forwhichonewantstocomputeasso ciatedeigenvectors.Themetho disfrequentlyusedinstructuralmechanics,forinstance,whentheextremeeigenvaluesandcorresp ondingectorsofHermitianp ositive-(semi)de niteeigenproblemsaresought[2,312131830]. GivenanapproximationtoeigenvalueofA,inerseiterationgeneratesasequenceofvectorsxkfromagivenstartingector0bysolvingthelinearsystems1(A I)xk=s1;k1:Thescalarskisresp onsiblefornormalisingx.Usuallyonechosessothatk=1insomenorm.Ifeverythinggo eswell,thesequenceofiteratesxkconvergestoaneigenvectorasso ciatedwithalueclosestto. Inparticularwhenthereisonlyasingleeigenvalueclosestto,thenthexkconergeanectorasso ciatedwith,providedthestartingvectorx0containsatributionofthiseigenvector.Sincexkisamultipleoftheector(AI)ky0andsince1=isthelargesteigenvalueof(A I)1,contributioninxkeigendirectionasso ciatedwithincreasesfasterask! 1thanthecontributionsothereigenvalues.Inerseiterationismathematicallyidentical2tothep owermetho dappliedto(A I)1.In1979Wilkinsonremarked:`Inverseiterationisnowthemostwidelyusedmetho dforcomputingeigenvectorscorresp ondingtoselectedalueswhichhaealreadyb eencomputedmoreorlessaccurately'[26,p339]. Alo okatsoftwareinthepublicdomainshowsthatthisisstilltrueto day[1,25,28]. Yet,aftersomanyears,theb ehaviourofmetho disstillnotcompletelyundersto o d{neitherinexactnoroatingp ointarithmetic[4]. Asaconsequence,evenhighlysophisticated,stateoftheartsoftwarelikeLAPACKstillcomesacrossmatricesforwhichitcannotcomputeeigenvectorstohighaccuracywithoutadrasticsacri ceineciency.Thisarticledescrib esthee ortsundertakenonb ehalfofinverseiteration3fromitsToapp earin:HelmutWielandt,MathematischeWerke,MathematicalWorks,VolumeII:Ma-trixTheoryandAnalysis,Hupp ert,B.Schneider,H. ,eds.,WalterdeGruyter,Berlin.yDepartmentofMathematics,NorthCarolinaStateUniversity,P.O. Box8205,Raleigh,NC27695-8205,USA(ipsen@math.ncsu.edu) . Thisworkassupp ortedinpartbyNSFgrantCCR-9102853.1HereIdenotestheidentitymatrix. 2Mathematicalidentitymeansthatequalitholdsinexactarithmeticbutnotnecessarily niteprecisionarithmeticb ecausethetwometho dsdeterminetheiriteratesbymeansofdi erenop erations.3WeconcentrateonthesolutionofordinaryeigenvalueproblemratherthangeneralisedeigenvalueproblemAx=B x;andwedonotdiscusstechniquesforconergenceaccelerationsuchasRayleighquotientiterationwheretheshiftchangeswitheachiteration.1
Magnetic Actuator Design Using 2-D Genetic Algorithms and the Improved ON/OFF Method

The improved ON/OFF topology optimization with cell sensitivity redistribution and mutation of the genetic algorithms (GA) can obtain a new structure that could not be imaged beforehand. Stochastic algorithm, such as genetic algorithm (GA), can be used to reach the global extreme point in optimization. Based on the genetic algorithm and the improved ON/OFF method, this paper puts forward a hybrid optimization technique for topology design of electromagnetic devices. A two-dimensional (2-D) encoding technique and geometrical crossover method are applied in GA. The hybrid algorithm is used to optimization of magnetic actuator to verify its validity. The result indicates that the proposed hybrid optimization method can be used in the design and optimization of electromagnetic devices such as motors, transformers and so on.
Agglomerative algorithm to discover semantics from unstructured big data

The paper presents a graph model and an agglomerative algorithm for text document clustering. Given a set of documents, the associations among frequently co-occurring terms in any of the documents naturally form a graph, which can be decomposed into connected components at various levels. Each connected component represents a concept in the collection. These concepts can categorize documents into different semantic classes. The experiments on three different data sets from news, Web, and medical literatures have shown our algorithm is significantly better than traditional clustering algorithms, such as k-means, principal direction division partitioning, AutoClass and hierarchical clustering.
When silver glitters more than gold: Bootstrapping an Italian part-of-speech tagger for Twitter

We bootstrap a state-of-the-art part-of-speech tagger to tag Italian Twitter data, in the context of the Evalita 2016 PoSTWITA shared task. We show that training the tagger on native Twitter data enriched with little amounts of specifically selected gold data and additional silver-labelled data scraped from Facebook, yields better results than using large amounts of manually annotated data from a mix of genres.
Expression of adiponectin and its receptors in type 1 diabetes mellitus in human and mouse retinas

Purpose Recent studies have suggested that adiponectin (APN) is associated with several retinal diseases. We studied the expression of APN and its receptors (AdipoRs) in the human retina and in a mouse model of type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM). Methods Human eyeball specimens were obtained from the Chongqing Eye Bank. eNOS-knockout (eNOS−/−) mice were randomly divided into a T1DM group and a control group. The T1DM model was induced with an intraperitoneal injection of streptozotocin. To locate the AdipoRs in the retina, immunofluorescence was performed. Total APN protein and RNA were extracted from the neural retina and the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE)-choroid complex, and the APN protein was detected with enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The mRNA and the protein of AdipoRs in the retina were detected with qRT-PCR and western blotting, respectively. The unpaired Student t test was used to assess the significance between the T1DM and the control groups, with p<0.05 regarded as statistically significant. Results APN, AdipoR1, and AdipoR2 were identified in the neural retina and in the RPE-choroid of humans and mice. AdipoR1 was found in the internal limiting membrane and in the outer segments of the photoreceptors in human and mouse retinas, whereas no noticeable AdipoR2 expression was seen in the retinal frozen sections of human and mouse eyes. Compared to the control group, APN and AdipoR1 expression in the retina was elevated in the T1DM group, but AdipoR2 expression remained unchanged. Conclusions We demonstrated that APN, AdipoR1, and AdipoR2 exist in human and mouse retinas and that retinal APN and AdipoR1 protein levels are elevated in T1DM mice, implying that the APN-AdipoR1 axis may be activated in the diabetic retina. In contrast, AdipoR2 appears to play a minor role in this pathological process.
Sequestering Market Environmentalism: Geographies of Carbon Forestry and Unevenness in Uganda

Carbon forestry projects claim to be ‘win-win’ solutions to climate change, contributing to climate mitigation through carbon sequestration and to community development through carbon payments. This thesis seeks to evaluate this proposition; but in doing so, it looks beyond carbon forestry as a set of three differentiated types of projects (REDD+, Clean Development Mechanism, and Voluntary Carbon Market) taking place in isolated contexts, and seeks to debunk meta narratives of win-win, and essentialised understandings of the places, scales and institutions that underpin contemporary forestry governance and project implementation. Rather, I argue, we should understand carbon forestry as a project to 'sequester' not only carbon but also market environmentalism, through the extension of market logics and rationale to the governance of 'nature' and the environment. Taking up a geographic lens, I seek to show what market environmentalism does in particular places, and how it works spatially. In so doing I claim that carbon forestry, as a component of market environmentalism, should be evaluated as an extension, and deepening, of a substantive change to the ‘conduct of conduct’ of forestry governance itself. In order to think through how market environmentalism literally 'takes place', I draw from both political economy critiques and post-structuralist perspectives in geography. I utilise the concepts of assemblage and territoriality, and apply them to a case study on neoliberal environmental governance in Uganda. I use assemblage – denoting how extended social structures are drawn together from heterogeneous elements (or actors) – to understand how forestry is controlled through an arborescent, trans-national hierarchy, which I term the Market Environmental Governance Assemblage (MEGA). I use the concept of territoriality to explore what this arrangement does to forestry territories in Uganda, where particular meanings, power relations and constructions of social space comprise what are considered as forest ‘natures’. A key argument of this thesis is that there are three movements that are crucial to understanding and evaluating carbon forestry and market environmentalism in Uganda; firstly territorialisation, which refers, simplistically, to the establishment and defence of particular territory, and subsequently reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation. Through the concept of territorialisation I explore the emergence of what is codified and 'managed' as the ‘forest estate’ in Uganda and chart its relationship to the complex set of political and social
Experimental implementations of priority inheritance semaphore on ITRON-specification kernel

Using priority inheritance protocols is an effective approach to solve the problem of uncontrolled priority inversion, which is among the major sources of deadline violations in hard real-time systems. In this paper, some approaches to incorporate priority inheritance to the ITRON specification are discussed. As the result, we propose two specifications of priority inheritance semaphore functions with which the basic priority inheritance protocol can be realized, and implement both of them for evaluation. The run-time performance and memory requirements of the functions are evaluated with the implementations. <<ETX>>
Optimal dynamic replica placement in content delivery networks

Content delivery networks (CDN) design entails the placement of server replicas to bring the content close to the users, together with an efficient and content aware request routing. In this paper we address the problem of dynamic replica placement to account for users demand variability while optimizing the costs paid by a CDN provider and the overall performance of the distributed replica servers architecture. We formulate the dynamic replica placement problem as a semi Markov decision process accounting for the traffic conditions, the users level of satisfaction, as well as the costs paid to install, maintain or remove a replica from a site. The proposed model applies to general network topologies and considers realistic constraints on network and servers capacity. The optimal strategy derived by means of the decision model provides the ground for designing a centralized heuristic and is used as a benchmark for the heuristic evaluation. Simulation results show that the proposed heuristic has a behavior close to that of the optimal strategy and achieves very good performance in terms of low average distance from a user to the serving replica, low average number of replicas and high probability of being able to serve a request.
Semi-automatic Cervical Cancer Segmentation Using Active Contours without Edges

This work presents a digital imaging system able to assist physicians to track cervical cancer. The goal is to automatically extract the region where the cervical cancer starts to occur. This region called Acetowite Epithelium Zone (AEZ) is highlighted by physicians using a diluate acetic acid on the surface of the cervix. Recent digital images processing works suggested to extract this region with methods based on active contour models. These methods are performant, they require manually selecting an area in the AEZ region, but have the disadvantage to be very sensitive to the size and localization of the selected area. To remove these inconveniences, we propose to use the Active Contours Without Edges method. This method is based on the intensity of the overall pixels of the selected region, therefore, it can extract the region contour even if additive noises are present and/or the contour is not well defined. Experimental results show the robustness of this method to delimit Acetowite Epithelium Zone.
Latent Poisson Process Allocation

We introduce a probabilistic model for the factorisation of continuous Poisson process rate functions. Our model can be thought of as a topic model for Poisson point processes in which each point is assigned to one of a set of latent rate functions that are shared across multiple outputs. We show that the model brings a means of incorporating structure in point process inference beyond the state-of-the-art. We derive an efficient variational inference scheme for the model based on sparse Gaussian processes that scales linearly in the number of data points. Finally, we demonstrate, using examples from spatial and temporal statistics, how the model can be used for discovering hidden structure with greater precision than standard frequentist approaches.