Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Usability Assessment Heuristics in New Genre Videogames

In this paper, we introduce a new set of heuristics that can be used to carry out usability studies on new genre video games. The definition new genre games refers to videogames that use specific and unique equipment or are part of a general software category such as platforms of social networking. Based on videogame usability problems stated in game reviews on relevant websites and in earlier scientific researches, heuristics were developed to help resolve usability problems in gameplay and game interface level. In addition usability problems concerning new genre videogames were identified through an integrated experimental procedure that took place in HOU’s quality assessment laboratory or in players’ own place by using suitable software developed by the Software Quality Research Group (SQRG) to simulate laboratory functions. Once the heuristics had been developed, they were applied on the observation procedure during the players’ encounters with the games Wii Sports and Pet Society (used inside the famous networking platform Facebook). The validity of heuristics is tested through two different usability evaluating methods; users logging and heuristic evaluation.
Preliminary results of noncontact respiration and heartbeat detection using IR-UWB radar

This paper addresses a biomedical application of customized signal processing using the ultra-wideband impulse (IR-UWB) radar which realizes the noncontact heartbeat and respiration rate detection. Microwave radar technology offers a noncontact, quick cardiopulmonary monitoring technique and has potential for biomedical applications. We studied the effect of suppression to remove the stationary background clutter, and separated the respiratory signal with weak heartbeat signal using the high order band pass filters. The experimental results have shown the accuracy and robustness of our system in respiration and heartbeat detection with noncontact distances from 0.2 m to 1.0 m.
High-curvature domains of the ER are important for the organization of ER exit sites in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Summary Protein export from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) to the Golgi apparatus occurs at specialized regions known as the ER exit sites (ERES). In Saccharomyces cerevisiae, ERES appear as numerous scattered puncta throughout the ER. We examined ERES within the peripheral ER, finding that the proteins comprising the ERES localize on high-curvature ER domains where curvature-stabilizing protein Rtn1 is present. &Dgr;rtn1 &Dgr;rtn2 &Dgr;yop1 cells have fewer high-curvature ER domains, but ERES accumulate at the remaining high-curvature ER domains on the edge of expanded ER sheets. We propose that membrane curvature is a key geometric feature for the regulation of ERES localization. We also investigated a spatial relationship between ERES and Golgi cisternae. Golgi cisternae in S. cerevisiae are unstacked, dispersed, and moving in the cytoplasm with cis-cisternae positioned adjacent to ERES, whereas trans-cisternae are not. Morphological changes in the ER of &Dgr;rtn1 &Dgr;rtn2 &Dgr;yop1 cells resulted in aberrant Golgi structures, including cis- and trans-markers, and there was reduced movement at ERES between expanded ER sheets and the plasma membrane.
Reactive Motion Planning for Mobile Robots

Motion planning refers to the ability of a system to automatically plan its motions. It is considered central to the development of autonomous robots. In the last decade, much research effort was done on the application of probabilistic roadmaps methods (PRM) for different types of problems (Kavraki et al., 1996; Svestka & Overmars, 1997; Bohlin & Kavraki, 2000; Sanchez & Latombe, 2002). There are two main classes of PRM planners: multiple-query and single-query planners. A multiple-query planner pre-computes a roadmap and then uses it to process many queries (Kavraki et al., 1996; Svestka & Overmars, 1997). In general, the query configurations are not known in advance and the roadmap must be distributed over the entire free configuration space (C-space). On the other hand, a single-query planner computes a new roadmap for each query (Bohlin & Kavraki, 2000; Sanchez & Latombe, 2002; Sanchez et al., 2002). Its only goal is to find a collision-free path between two query configurations. Looking for the smallest space to explore before finding a path. Planners that can answer single queries very quickly and with a little preprocessing are of particular interest. Such planners can be used to re-plan paths in applications where the configuration space obstacles can change. This occurs, for instance, when the robot changes tools, grasps an object, or a new obstacle enters in the workspace. These kinds of planners are more suitable in environments with frequent changes. The adaptation of PRM planners to environments with both static and moving obstacles has been limited so far (Jaillet & Simeon, 2004). The planner proposed by Jaillet and Simeon (Jaillet & Simeon, 2004), uses a combination of single and multiple queries techniques. The proposed planner builds a roadmap of valid paths, considering only the static obstacles, when dynamic changes occurs, the planner uses lazy-evaluation mechanisms combined with a single-query technique as local planner to rapidly update the roadmap. A novel real-time motion planning framework was proposed in (Brock & Kavraki, 2001). It is particularly well suited for planning problems and it decomposes the original planning into simpler sub-problems. The paradigm addresses the planning problems in which a minimum clearance to obstacles can be guaranteed along the solution path. A method for generating collision-free paths for robots operating in changing environments was presented in (Leven & Hutchinson, 2000). The method begins by constructing a graph that represents a roadmap in the configuration space, but this graph is not constructed for a specific workspace. Later, the method constructs the graph for an obstacle-free workspace, and encodes the mapping from workspace cells to nodes and arcs in the graph. When the
3-D FEM and Lumped-Parameter Network Transient Thermal Analysis of Induction and Permanent Magnet Motors for Aerospace Applications

Three dimensional (3–D), finite–element (FE) models and original lumped–parameter networks are developed for the transient thermal analysis of a permanent magnet motor (PMM) and an induction motor (IM) specifically designed and optimized for a demanding aerospace actuation application. A systematic comparison between the two different thermal modeling approaches is carried out using different loading conditions.
Removing Shadow for Hand Segmentation Based on Background Subtraction

Hand segmentation is an important stage for accurate hand detection and background subtraction is one of the best solutions to detect the hand motion accurately, however the shadow is the critical problem in this technique which is not easy to separate the hand region from the shadow area. Removing shadow using an automatic threshold will be a good solution to detect the hand region where the variety of skin color and lighting condition affect the hand segmentation. The proposed approach involves three stages: First, we convert RGB color model to YUV space to get the benefit of separation the luminance channel (Y) from the chrominance channels (U, V) to reduce the effect of shadow, reflections and, etc. In the second stage, we applied background subtraction technique to the V channel to remove the unwanted background noise and to get the hand and shadow pixels. Finally, we used shareholding technique by considering a mean value of the pixels of foreground image (the hand and shadow pixels) as automatic threshold value and other tow static thresholds to distinguish the hand region from shadow pixels. After background subtraction, we used the famous morphology techniques (Erosion and Dilation) to enhance the accuracy of hand detection. We measure the accuracy for the results by compare the detect hand pixels to the actual hand pixels quantitatively. From the results, we noticed that our proposed approach is accurate and suitable for real time application systems.
A cache-oblivious engineering of the G2V algorithm for computing Gröbner bases

This paper is devoted to present a revised algorithm that permits to preserve the beautiful relation between the classical Euclidean algorithm and the block diagonalization of Hankel matrices for two noncoprime polynomials. Our algorithm for Greatest Common Divisor (GCD) computation which has a cost of O(n2) arithmetic operations is tested for several sets of polynomials. A complexity comparison is given with respect to other existing methods based on structured matrix computations.
Perspectives of change: Municipal park and recreation directors perceptions of the importance of specified organizational goals 1983--2008

This study examines specified goals park and recreation directors have previously determined are important for their organizations, and how those goals rank in importance in their present estimations, and how those goals rank in future importance. It compares a similar study of goals from 1983, and reports on changes in levels of importance from 1983 to 2008. Directors' perceptions of goal importance of 2008 present levels and 2008 future levels were determined to be significantly different in 23 of 26 cases. Goals were grouped in four categories, (a) management/adaptation,/positional, having to do with management tasks, (b) groups served, those targeted populations, (c) services provided, services of varying kinds provided to other groups, organizations, and individuals, and (d) desired outcomes, those benefits or changes occurring as a result of participation. A factor analysis was performed which confirmed that grouping of goals in these four categories remains relevant. Goals were grouped and ranked in each of the four categories, and then ranked overall. Directors' perceptions of 2008 future levels of goal importance increased significantly over 2008 present levels in 23 of 26 cases. Changes in rank ordering of goals indicate potential shifts in priorities and attendant shifts in allocation of resources. A comparison of 2008 present goals with 1983 future goals was performed. Significant changes in rank ordering of specific goals were discovered in 16 of 26 goals. Park and recreation directors' perceptions from 1983 to 2008 have moved from organizational concerns to concern for service to specific targeted groups. Children ranked as the top priority, with teens, seniors and adults all in the top ten rankings in 2008. Special needs populations and management activities goals fell in the rankings, as did programs for people with special needs. Programs for ethnic and cultural minorities rose slightly, but remained in the bottom ten. A discussion of implications of these perceived priorities among park and recreation directors was conducted, with consideration of both survival and expansion of recreation programs considered. Recommendations for further study and an outline of a study agenda were made to improve the quality and relevance of goals studies overall.
Almost holomorphic embeddings in Grassmannians with applications to singular simplectic submanifolds

We use Donaldson's approximately holomorphic techniques to build embeddings of a closed symplectic manifold with symplectic form of integer class in the grassmannians Gr(r,N). We assure that these embeddings are asymptotically holomorphic in a precise sense. We study first the particular case of embeddings in the projective space $CP^N$ obtaining control on N. The main reason of our study is the construction of singular determinantal submanifolds as the intersection of the embedding with certain ``generalized Schur cycles'' defined on a product of grassmannians. It is shown that the symplectic type of these submanifolds is quite more general that the ones obtained by Auroux as zero sets of approximately holomorphic sections of ``very ample'' vector bundles.
24-hour IOP telemetry in the nonhuman primate: implant system performance and initial characterization of IOP at multiple timescales.

PURPOSE IOP is the most common independent risk factor for development and progression of glaucoma, but very little is known about IOP dynamics. Continuous IOP telemetry was used in three nonhuman primates to characterize IOP dynamics at multiple time scales for multiple 24-hour periods. METHODS An existing implantable telemetric pressure transducer system was adapted to monitoring anterior chamber IOP. The system records 500 IOP, ECG, and body temperature measurements per second and compensates for barometric pressure in real time. The continuous IOP signal was digitally filtered for noise and dropout and reported using time-window averaging for 19, 18, and 4 24-hour periods in three animals, respectively. Those data were analyzed for a nycthemeral pattern within each animal. RESULTS Ten-minute time-window averaging for multiple 24-hour periods showed that IOP fluctuated from 7 to 14 mm Hg during the day, and those changes occurred frequently and quickly. Two-hour time-window averages of IOP for multiple 24-hour periods in three animals showed a weak nycthemeral trend, but IOP was not repeatable from day-to-day within animals. CONCLUSIONS The measured IOP was successfully measured continuously by using a new, fully implantable IOP telemetry system. IOP fluctuates as much as 10 mm Hg from day to day and hour to hour in unrestrained nonhuman primates, which indicates that snapshot IOP measurements may be inadequate to capture the true dynamic character of IOP. The distributions, magnitudes, and patterns of IOP are not reproducible from day to day within animals, but IOP tends to be slightly higher at night when IOP data are averaged across multiple 24-hour periods within animals.
FEATURE COMBINATION FOR MEASURING SENTENCE SIMILARITY

Sentence similarity is one of the core elements of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as Recognizing Textual Entailment, and Paraphrase Recognition. Over the years, different systems have been proposed to measure similarity between fragments of texts. In this research, we propose a new two phase supervised learning method which uses a combination of lexical features to train a model for predicting similarity between sentences. Each of these features, covers an aspect of the text on implicit or explicit level. The two phase method uses all combinations of the features in the feature space and trains separate models based on each combination. Then it creates a metafeature space and trains a final model based on that. The thesis contrasts existing approaches that use feature selection, because it does not aim to find the best subset of the possible features. We show that this two step process significantly improves the results achieved by single-layer standard learning methodology, and achieves the level of performance that is comparable to the existing state-of-the-art methods.
DLPS: Dynamic laser power scaling for optical Network-on-Chip

Optical Network-on-Chip (NoC), offering the advantages of low energy consumption, high bandwidth, and low latency, is a promising solution for on-chip communications of multi-core systems. However, on-chip lasers, a key element in optical NoCs, are a dominant source of power consumption. In this paper, we propose dynamic laser power scaling (DLPS), a finegrained control strategy for minimizing laser power consumption while meeting the communication bandwidth required for the application. The proposed DLPS strategy intelligently switches among multiple operation modes based on the communication traffic pattern. Our experiments show that by introducing two new modes (standby, and intermediate data rate), DLPS can further reduce the communication energy for communication-intensive applications, compared to a simple on-off control strategy that dynamically turns lasers either completely on or off.
Efficient Deployement Algorithms for Mobile Sensor Networks

Sensor deployment problem is one of the important problems in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) since it represents the first phase that most of the network operations depends on. Sensor deployment strategies can be classified into two classes which are deterministic and autonomous (random) deployment. In the deterministic deployment, the deployment field is assumed accessible as well as the number of sensors is small to be manually deployed in specific locations. On the other hand, with large number of sensors and in inaccessible fields, the random deployment to the sensors turns out to be the solution. However, random deployment requires sensors to be automatically located (move) for coverage and connectivity purposes. In addition, after a period of time, the sensors topology might change due to some sensor hardware failure or deplaned energy. Therefore, redeployment and/or sensors relocation process is essential. Nevertheless, mobility consumed energy as well as sensor load balancing are essential factors to be considered during the initial deployment and relocation processes. This paper proposes two deployment algorithms to manage those situations. Those algorithms achieve sensor energy balancing and small amount of deployment energy consumption. A set of simulation experiments are conducted to compare between the proposed algorithm and the existing work in terms of coverage performance, average moving distance, and message complexity. Keywords—mobile sensor networks, deployment, clustering, potential field, redundant sensors.
AMPK-NF-κB Axis in the Photoreceptor Disorder during Retinal Inflammation

Recent progress in molecular analysis has revealed the possible involvement of multiple inflammatory signaling pathways in pathogenesis of retinal degeneration. However, how aberrant signaling pathways cause tissue damage and dysfunction is still being elucidated. Here, we focus on 5′-adenosine monophosphate (AMP)-activated protein kinase (AMPK), originally recognized as a key regulator of energy homeostasis. AMPK is also modulated in response to inflammatory signals, although its functions in inflamed tissue are obscure. We investigated the role of activated AMPK in the retinal neural damage and visual function impairment caused by inflammation. For this purpose, we used a mouse model of lipopolysaccharide-induced inflammation in the retina, and examined the effects of an AMPK activator, 5-aminoimidazole-4-carboxamide ribonucleoside (AICAR). During inflammation, activated AMPK in the neural retina was decreased, but AICAR treatment prevented this change. Moreover, the electroretinogram (ERG) a-wave response, representing photoreceptor function, showed visual dysfunction in this model that was prevented by AICAR. Consistently, the model showed shortened photoreceptor outer segments (OSs) with reduced levels of rhodopsin, a visual pigment concentrated in the OSs, in a post-transcriptional manner, and these effects were also prevented by AICAR. In parallel, the level of activated NF-κB increased in the retina during inflammation, and this increase was suppressed by AICAR. Treatment with an NF-κB inhibitor, dehydroxymethylepoxyquinomicin (DHMEQ) preserved the rhodopsin level during inflammation, suppressing NF-κB. These findings indicated that AMPK activation by AICAR and subsequent NF-κB inhibition had a protective effect on visual function, and that AMPK activation played a neuroprotective role during retinal inflammation.
International Conference on Information Systems ( ICIS ) ICIS 2008 Proceedings Association for Information Systems Year 2008 Decision Making Paths in Self-Organizing Technology-Mediated Distributed Teams

This paper investigates decision making in self-organizing technology-mediated distributed teams. This context provides an opportunity to examine how the use of technological support to span temporal and organizational discontinuities affects decision-making processes. 258 softwaremodification decision episodes were collected from the public emailing lists of six Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects over a span of five years. Six decision-making paths were identified as 1) short-cut decision-making path; 2) implicit-development decision-making path; 3) implicit-evaluation decision-making path; 4) normative decision-making path; 5) dynamic decision-making path; and 6) interrupted/delayed decision-making path. We suggest that the nature of the tasks and the affordances of the technology used reduce the need for explicit coordination, resulting in a broader range of possible decision processes than are observed in face-to-face groups.
A noisy-channel approach to contextual advertising

Contextual advertising is a growing category of search advertising. It presents a particular challenge to ad placement systems because of the sparseness of the language of advertising. We present a system that is language independent and knowledge free based on SVM ranking. We evaluate it on a large number of advertisements appearing on real Web pages. Our contribution is two new classes of features of similarity between ads and Web pages based on machine translation technologies. We show that our features significantly improve performance over baseline techniques.
Number Needed to Treat to Benefit and to Harm for Intravenous Tissue Plasminogen Activator Therapy in the 3- to 4.5-Hour Window: Joint Outcome Table Analysis of the ECASS 3 Trial

Background and Purpose— Measures of a therapy’s effect size are important guides to clinicians, patients, and policy-makers on treatment decisions in clinical practice. The ECASS 3 trial demonstrated a statistically significant benefit of intravenous tissue plasminogen activator for acute cerebral ischemia in the 3- to 4.5-hour window, but an effect size estimate incorporating benefit and harm across all levels of poststroke disability has not previously been derived. Methods— Joint outcome table specification was used to derive number needed to treat to benefit (NNTB) and number needed to treat to harm (NNTH) values summarizing treatment impact over the entire outcome range on the modified Rankin scale of global disability, including both expert-dependent and expert-independent (algorithmic and repeated random sampling) array generation. Results— For the full 7-category modified Rankin scale, algorithmic analysis demonstrated that the NNTB for 1 additional patient to have a better outcome by ≥1 grades than with placebo must lie between 4.0 and 13.0. In bootstrap simulations, the mean NNTB was 7.1. Expert joint outcome table analyses indicated that the NNTB for improved final outcome was 6.1 (95% CI, 5.6–6.7) and the NNTH 37.5 (95% CI, 34.6–40.5). Benefit per 100 patients treated was 16.3 and harm per 100 was 2.7. The likelihood of help to harm ratio was 6.0. Conclusions— Treatment with tissue plasminogen activator in the 3- to 4.5-hour window confers benefit on approximately half as many patients as treatment <3 hours, with no increase in the conferral of harm. Approximately 1 in 6 patients has a better and 1 in 35 has a worse outcome as a result of therapy.
Unsupervised Compensation of Within-Speaker Variability

This paper presents a novel framework for unsupervi s d compensation of within-speaker variability in the c ontext of speaker diarization. Audio session is divided in to overlapping short segments, each one parameterized by a GMM-supervector. For each session independently within-speaker variability is estimated in an unsupervised manner, and is compensated using the nuisance attribute projection (NAP) method. The proposed method was evaluated in the context of speaker diarization in two-speaker telephone conversations and achieved a speaker error rate of 2.8% which is a 54% relative error reduction compared to a baseline BIC-based system.