Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hardware accelerated watershed based echocardiographic image segmentation

The proposed poster presents a hardware accelerated left ventricle detection algorithm. Based on marker controlled watershed segmentation method, the algorithm core works sequentially: detection result from a given frame is taken as the segmentation marker to process the next frame. The complete algorithm is written in Matlab. It performs more then 20 elementary operations and needs tens of minutes to compute one movie. As this is a serious disadvantage in clinical application, hardware acceleration has been proposed. Authors built an experimental PC based system equipped with data translation frame-grabber and Alpha-Data ADM-XRC-II board with high capacity Virtex II field programmable gate array. Hardware implementation of particular algorithm stages shows significant speedup due to the possibility of computation concurrency in FPGA Virtex II device
Interlocution Scenarios for Problem Solving in an Educational MUD Environment

This paper presents an analysis of computer mediated collaboration on a problem-solving task in a virtual world. The theoretical framework of this research combines research in Computer Mediated Communication with a social psychology theory of conflict. An experiment was conducted involving university students performing a problem solving task with a peer in an Educational MUD. Each performance was guided by a predefined script, designed based on the ‘common speech’ concepts. All the performances were analyzed in terms of identity perception, conflict perception and cooperation. By looking at the relationship among the CMC environment features, the social influence activated on this environment, the conflict elaboration, and the problem solving strategies, a distinctive 'interlocution scenario' emerged. The results are discussed using contributions from the two theoretical approaches embraced.
Measuring Architecture Sustainability

It's difficult to express a software architecture's sustainability in a single metric: relevant information is spread across requirements, architecture design documents, technology choices, source code, system context, and software architects' implicit knowledge. Many aspects influence economic sustainability, including design decisions facilitating evolutionary changes, adherence to good modularization practices, and technology choices. An approach that focuses on a single artifact or perspective is likely to neglect important factors. ABB Corporate Research is tracking the architecture sustainability of a large-scale industrial control system currently under development. A former version of the system grew to several million LOC and suffered from architecture erosion and high maintenance costs. A multiperspective approach called Morphosis will help avoid such a situation in the future by focusing on requirements, architecture design, and source code. It includes evolution scenario analysis, scoring of technology choices, architecture compliance checks, and tracking of architecture-level code metrics.
Commensal-Induced Regulatory T Cells Mediate Protection against Pathogen-Stimulated NF-κB Activation

Host defence against infection requires a range of innate and adaptive immune responses that may lead to tissue damage. Such immune-mediated pathologies can be controlled with appropriate T regulatory (Treg) activity. The aim of the present study was to determine the influence of gut microbiota composition on Treg cellular activity and NF-κB activation associated with infection. Mice consumed the commensal microbe Bifidobacterium infantis 35624 followed by infection with Salmonella typhimurium or injection with LPS. In vivo NF-κB activation was quantified using biophotonic imaging. CD4+CD25+Foxp3+ T cell phenotypes and cytokine levels were assessed using flow cytometry while CD4+ T cells were isolated using magnetic beads for adoptive transfer to naïve animals. In vivo imaging revealed profound inhibition of infection and LPS induced NF-κB activity that preceded a reduction in S. typhimurium numbers and murine sickness behaviour scores in B. infantis–fed mice. In addition, pro-inflammatory cytokine secretion, T cell proliferation, and dendritic cell co-stimulatory molecule expression were significantly reduced. In contrast, CD4+CD25+Foxp3+ T cell numbers were significantly increased in the mucosa and spleen of mice fed B. infantis. Adoptive transfer of CD4+CD25+ T cells transferred the NF-κB inhibitory activity. Consumption of a single commensal micro-organism drives the generation and function of Treg cells which control excessive NF-κB activation in vivo. These cellular interactions provide the basis for a more complete understanding of the commensal-host-pathogen trilogue that contribute to host homeostatic mechanisms underpinning protection against aberrant activation of the innate immune system in response to a translocating pathogen or systemic LPS.
A 3D Vision-Based Ambient User Interface

This article proposes a 3-dimensional (3D) vision-based ambient user interface as an interaction metaphor that exploits a user's personal space and its dynamic gestures. In human-computer interaction, to provide natural interactions with a system, a user interface should not be a bulky or complicated device. In this regard, the proposed ambient user interface utilizes an invisible personal space to remove cumbersome devices where the invisible personal space is virtually augmented through exploiting 3D vision techniques. For natural interactions with the user's dynamic gestures, the user of interest is extracted from the image sequences by the proposed user segmentation method. This method can retrieve 3D information from the segmented user image through 3D vision techniques and a multiview camera. With the retrieved 3D information of the user, a set of 3D boxes (SpaceSensor) can be constructed and augmented around the user; then the user can interact with the system by touching the augmented SpaceSensor. In the user's dynamic gesture tracking, the computational complexity of SpaceSensor is relatively lower than that of conventional 2-dimensional vision-based gesture tracking techniques, because the touched positions of SpaceSensor are tracked. According to the experimental results, the proposed ambient user interface can be applied to various systems that require real-time user's dynamic gestures for their interactions both in real and virtual environments.
A Thermodynamic Entropy Based Approach for Prognosis and Health Management

Data-driven stochastic and probabilistic methods that underlie reliability prediction and structural integrity assessment remain unchanged for decades. This paper provides a method to explain the Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) in terms of fundamental concepts of science within the irreversible thermodynamic framework. The common definition of damage, which is widely used to measure the reduction of reliability over time, is based on observable markers of damage at different geometric scales. Observable markers are typically based on evidences of any change in the physical or spatial properties or the materials, and exclude unobservable and highly localized damages. Thermodynamically, all forms of damage share a common characteristic: “energy dissipation”. Energy dissipation is a fundamental measure of irreversibility that within the context of non-equilibrium thermodynamics is quantified by “entropy generation”. The definition of damage in the context of thermodynamics allows for incorporation of all underlying dissipative processes including unobservable markers of damage. Using a theorem relating entropy generation to energy dissipation associated with damage producing failure mechanisms, this paper presents an approach that formally describes and measures the resulting damage. Having developed the approach to derive the damage over time, one could assess the health of structures and components subject to known degradation processes. This paper presents a prognostic approach on the basis of thermodynamically derived cumulative damage, whereby the thermodynamic entropy, as a broad measure of damage, is assessed.
The Views of Nature of Science Expressed by In-Service Teachers Who were Learning History and Philosophy of Science

Abstract Science teachers need an adequate understanding of the nature and processes of science as the basis for their pedagogical content knowledge for effective classroom delivery. The aim of the study was to find out in-service teachers’ views on the nature of science (NOS) and how their views compared with informed understanding of the NOS. The study adopted an exploratory case study methodology, qualitative in nature, and used convenience sampling. A questionnaire was administered to 50 in-service teachers doing a bachelor of science honours degree at a selected university in Zimbabwe. The students had done a course in history and philosophy of science where there were exposed to some topics on the NOS. Frequency counts and mean scores were used to describe views of the participants. Analysis involved comparing in-service teachers’ responses with experts’ views. The findings reveal that the students had a naïve understanding of NOS in 5 out of 16 statements from the administered questionnaire. Despite these observations the participants generally had a fair understanding of the NOS as evidenced by the fact that the participants managed to correctly respond to 69% of the questions asked. As such we infer that teaching and learning of nature of science as part of history and philosophy of science had a positive impact on in-service teachers’ views. The few instances when participants’ responses revealed contradictions, suggest that teaching and learning history and philosophy of science may not be adequate to develop a full understanding of nature of science. Further research is recommended with large samples, using a revised Views Of Nature of Science (VNOS) questionnaire and interviews, and document analysis to reveal how nature of science is taught and learnt.
Nonlinearity effect of Power Amplifiers in wireless communication systems

High Power Amplifier in wireless communication systems exhibit nonlinear behavior which causes signal degradation. This is detrimental to the signals that pass through it. It appears in the form of Harmonic distortion, Gain compression, Inter-modulation distortion, Phase distortion, adjacent channel interference, etc. Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is considered to be better techniques for multicarrier wireless communication. It has tolerance to inter-symbol interference and good spectral efficiency but are subjected to nonlinearities of power amplifiers, due to their high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). In this paper, some of the basic PAPR reduction techniques like: Peak clipping, random phase shifting, selected mapping (SLM) and dummy sequence insertion (DSI) methods have been discussed. The results obtained has been compared with original PAPR which suggests improvement in nonlinearity with modest reduction in efficiency and increase in hardware implementations. Among the various techniques SLM method gives low PAPR than other methods.
An Improved HIK for Object Categorization

In this paper we applied a Histogram Intersection Kernel (HIK) method for categorization of the Caltech101 dataset. We analyzed the principles of HIK and propose an optimal linear combination of kernels used in Spatial Pyramid model (SPM). Sift algorithm is utilized to detect and describe image features based on Bag of Words model. The performance is compared between HIK and general RBF using SVM for the classification. The experimental results show that, based on the same image dataset, HIK outperforms RBF. Furthermore, HIK-SVM's performance is improved with the increasing layers of SPM. On the contrary, RBF-SVM's performance worsens when the layers of SPM increase.
Global phenotypic characterization of bacteria

The measure of the quality of a systems biology model is how well it can reproduce and predict the behaviors of a biological system such as a microbial cell. In recent years, these models have been built up in layers, and each layer has been growing in sophistication and accuracy in parallel with a global data set to challenge and validate the models in predicting the content or activities of genes (genomics), proteins (proteomics), metabolites (metabolomics), and ultimately cell phenotypes (phenomics). This review focuses on the latter, the phenotypes of microbial cells. The development of Phenotype MicroArrays, which attempt to give a global view of cellular phenotypes, is described. In addition to their use in fleshing out and validating systems biology models, there are many other uses of this global phenotyping technology in basic and applied microbiology research, which are also described.
A Hierarchical Framework for Relational Competence Theory

This article outlines and updates a formal, hierarchical theory of relational competence about socialization in intimate relationships, comprising: (1) three requirements: verifiability, applicability, and redundancy; (2) three meta-theoretical assumptions about the Width and Depth of relationships in Settings where relational competence is socialized; (3) three theoretical assumptions about abilities to love and to control through Presence Performance, and Production; (4) five models which include identity differentiation, styles, interactions, selfhood, and priorities; and (5) four applied models derived from meta-theoretical and theoretical assumptions: distance regulation, pathogenic roles, intimacy, and negotiation. Empirical verification of these models has occurred through self-report paper-and-pencil instruments in the laboratory, through enrichment programs in primary prevention, targeted written practice exercises in secondary prevention, and prescribed tasks in tertiary prevention or psychotherapy.
Enrichring the Ita-TimeBank with Narrative Containers

English. This paper reports on an annotation experiment to enrich an existing temporally annotated corpus of Italian news articles with Narrative Containers, annotation devices representing temporal windows in text and marking up very informative temporal relations between temporal entities. The annotation has shown that the distribution of Narrative Containers is sensitive to the text genre and may be used to facilitate the creation of informative timelines. Italiano. Questo lavoro illustra i risultati di un esperimento di annotazione per l’identificazione di Contenitori Narrativi, ovvero marcatori di “finestre” temporali in un testo, come strategia per arricchire un corpus di articoli di quotidiano in lingua italiana, già annotato con informazioni temporali. L’annotazione ha mostrato che la distribuzione dei Contenitori Narrativi è legata al genere testuale e può essere usata per facilitare la creazione di linee temporali di eventi più informa-
A new method for denoising SONAR images

The SONAR images are perturbed by a multiplicative noise called speckle, due to the coherent nature of the scattering phenomenon. The use of speckle reduction filters is necessary to optimize the images exploitation procedures. This paper presents a new speckle reduction method in the wavelets domain using a novel Bayesian-based algorithm, which tends to reduce the speckle, preserving the structural features (like the discontinuities) and textural information of the scene. First, the different wavelet transforms are investigated and arguments to select the dual tree complex wavelet transform are presented. Next, accurate models for the subband decompositions of SONAR images, that permit the construction of maximum a posteriori filters, with closed-form input-output relations, are investigated. A blind speckle-suppression method that performs a nonlinear operation on the data is obtained. Finally, some simulation examples prove the performances of the proposed denoising method. These performances are compared with the results obtained applying state-of-the-art speckle reduction techniques.
Digital video recorder dodgers – Sport-viewing habits in the face of changing media reality

In an era in which viewers can record television content to be watched at any time of convenience using a variety of broadcast media, delayed viewing has emerged as a self-evident and natural option for many content-consumers. An interesting exception to this trend, however, is sport – football, in particular – which supporters insist on watching exclusively in real-time. The present study has sought to understand the obsessive dedication of sports fans with watching sport content only in real-time. This peculiar insistence results in the viewer giving up some rather useful technological amenities. Through in-depth interviews conducted with 34 soccer fans, this study aimed to explore the apparent and adamant fan refusal to "delay gratification" – that is, only watching broadcast sport content in real-time. The interview analysis offers some salient explanations for the phenomenon. For example, football fans self-identify as members of a community in a quasi-religious sense, deeply committed to rules and ceremonies to be ritualistically performed at appropriate and specific times. Indeed, to exceed these rules is to violate the norms of the community. Many fans also believe they can somehow influence the match and its outcome by their viewing presence, and must, therefore, be in front of the screen in real-time. In fact, the bond between fan and team is analogous to a relationship characterized by deep and intimate emotions. This bond can be stretched by any fan who is absent from the real-time screen-viewing experience of the sporting event, engendering feelings of treachery and betrayal of the fan-team love relationship. The dynamics of this relationship have social, media, and economic implications, as well.
New Acyclic and Star Coloring Algorithms with Application to Computing Hessians

Acyclic and star coloring problems are specialized vertex coloring problems that arise in the efficient computation of Hessians using automatic differentiation or finite differencing, when both sparsity and symmetry are exploited. We present an algorithmic paradigm for finding heuristic solutions for these two NP-hard problems. The underlying common technique is the exploitation of the structure of two-colored induced subgraphs. For a graph $G$ on $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, the time complexity of our star coloring algorithm is $O(n\overline{d}_2)$, where $\overline{d}_k$, a generalization of vertex degree, denotes the average number of distinct paths of length at most $k$ edges starting at a vertex in $G$. The time complexity of our acyclic coloring algorithm is larger by a multiplicative factor involving the inverse of Ackermann’s function. The space complexity of both algorithms is $O(m)$. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first practical algorithm for the acyclic coloring problem. For the star coloring problem, our algorithm uses fewer colors and is considerably faster than a previously known $O(n\overline{d}_3)$-time algorithm. Computational results from experiments on various large-size test graphs demonstrate that the algorithms are fast and produce highly effective solutions. The use of these algorithms in Hessian computation is expected to reduce overall runtime drastically.
Efficient and accurate urban outdoor radio wave propagation

Simulating Radio Wave Propagation using geometrical optics is a well known method. We introduce and compare a simplified 2D beam tracing and a very general 3D ray tracing approach, called photon path tracing. Both methods are designed for outdoor, urban scenarios. The 2D approach is computationally less expensive and can still model an important part of propagation effects. The 3D approach is more general, and not limited to outdoor scenarios, and does not impose constraints or assumptions on the scene geometry. We develop methods to adapt the simulation parameters to real measurements and compare the accuracy of both presented algorithms.
Medial Axis Approximation with Constrained Centroidal Voronoi Diagrams On Discrete Data

In this paper, we present a novel method for me- dial axis approximation based on Constrained Centroidal Voronoi Diagram of discrete data (image, volume). The pro- posed approach is based on the shape boundary subsampling by a clustering approach which generates a Voronoi Dia- gram well suited for Medial Axis extraction. The resulting Voronoi Diagram is further filtered so as to capture the cor- rect topology of the medial axis. The resulting medial axis appears largely invariant with respect to typical noise con - ditions in the discrete data. The method is tested on various synthetic as well as real images. We also show an applica- tion of the approximate medial axis to the sizing field for triangular and tetrahedral meshing.
Genetic algorithm in boosting for object class image segmentation

We describe how a task in computer vision can be effectively resolved by employing Genetic Algorithm. This paper focuses on the problem of semantic segmentation of digital images. We propose to use an improved genetic algorithm for the learning parameters of weak classifiers in a boosting learning set up. We propose a new encoding and genetic operators in accordance with this problem. Beside that, we employed multiple image features such as texture-layout, location, color and HoG for improving the accuracy of the system. Experiments are conducted extensively on MSRC, a widely used benchmark image datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the performance of our system is comparable to, or even outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in semantic segmentation.
Modelling sustainable urban growth in a rapidly urbanising region using a fuzzy-constrained cellular automata approach

This article presents an application of a fuzzy-constrained cellular automata model to simulate the spatio-temporal processes of urban growth in the rapidly growing Gold Coast City in Southeast Queensland, Australia. Urban growth has been captured in the model as a continuous process in space and over time, which has been affected by a set of primary and secondary transition rules. The primary transition rules deal with the propensity of a local area for development and the impact of its neighbouring cells on such development, while the secondary transition rules reflect the influences of environmental and institutional factors on urban growth. Application of the model demonstrates its re-applicability to different regions and the effectiveness of the cellular automata technique in studying urban dynamics. It also provides tools to explore sustainable urban growth options under different socio-environmental and planning control factors. A sustainable urban future of the region is achievable if development is managed to maintain a balance amongst ecological conservation, economic growth and the contemporary Australian lifestyle.
Optimal sanitization synthesis for web application vulnerability repair

We present a code- and input-sensitive sanitization synthesis approach for repairing string vulnerabilities that are common in web applications. The synthesized sanitization patch modifies the user input in an optimal way while guaranteeing that the repaired web application is not vulnerable. Given a web application, an input pattern and an attack pattern, we use automata-based static string analysis techniques to compute a sanitization signature that characterizes safe input values that obey the given input pattern and are safe with respect to the given attack pattern. Using the sanitization signature, we synthesize an optimal sanitization patch that converts malicious user inputs to benign ones with minimal editing. When the generated patch is added to the web application, it is guaranteed that the repaired web application is no longer vulnerable. We present refinements to previous sanitization synthesis algorithms that reduce the runtime sanitization cost significantly. We evaluate our approach on open source web applications using common input and attack patterns, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.