Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Socio-Technical Indicator Model: Socially-Sensitive CMC Technology, with an Implementation of Representative Moderation

— Computer-mediated communication technologies which provide for virtual communities have typically evolved in a cross-dichotomous manner, such that technical constructs of the technology have evolved independently from the social environment of the community. The present paper analyses some limitations of current implementations of computer-mediated communication technology that are implied by such a dichotomy, and discusses their inhibiting effects on possible developments of virtual communities. A Socio-Technical Indicator Model is introduced that utilizes integrated feedback to describe, simulate and operationalise increasing representativeness within a variety of structurally and parametrically diverse systems. In illustration, applications of the model are briefly described for financial markets and for eco-systems. A detailed application is then provided to resolve the aforementioned technical limitations of moderation on the evolution of virtual communities. The application parameterises virtual communities to function as self-transforming social-technical systems which are sensitive to emergent and shifting community values as products of on-going communications within the collective.
Genetic Bases of Estrogen-Induced Pituitary Tumorigenesis

Estrogens stimulate proliferation and enhance survival of the prolactin (PRL)-producing lactotroph of the anterior pituitary gland and induce development of PRL-producing pituitary tumors in certain inbred rat strains but not others. The goal of this study was to elucidate the genetic bases of estrogen-induced pituitary tumorigenesis in reciprocal intercrosses between the genetically related ACI and Copenhagen (COP) rat strains. Following 12 weeks of treatment with the synthetic estrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES), pituitary mass, an accurate surrogate marker of absolute lactotroph number, was increased 10.6-fold in ACI rats and 4.5-fold in COP rats. Composite interval mapping analyses of the phenotypically defined F2 progeny from the reciprocal crosses identified six quantitative trait loci (QTL) that determine the pituitary growth response to DES. These loci reside on chromosome 6 [Estrogen-induced pituitary tumor (Ept)1], chromosome 3 (Ept2 and Ept6), chromosome 10 (Ept9), and chromosome 1 (Ept10 and Ept13). Together, these six Ept loci and one additional suggestive locus on chromosome 4 account for an estimated 40% of the phenotypic variance exhibited by the combined F2 population, while 34% of the phenotypic variance was estimated to result from environmental factors. These data indicate that DES-induced pituitary mass behaves as a quantitative trait and provide information that will facilitate identification of genes that determine the tumorigenic response of the pituitary gland to estrogens.
Haplotype-based localization of an alcohol dependence gene to the 5q34 {gamma}-aminobutyric acid type A gene cluster.

CONTEXT Pharmacobehavioral and pharmacogenetic evidence links gamma-aminobutyric acid type A (GABA(A)) receptors and chromosomal regions containing GABA(A) receptor genes to ethanol-related responses. The GABA(A) gene cluster on chromosome 5q34 is of particular interest in the genetics of alcohol dependence because of the gamma2 subunit requirement for ethanol's modulatory action on GABA(A) receptors, previous linkage findings in mice and humans implicating both GABRA6 and GABRG2, and reported associations of GABRA6, GABRB2, and GABRG2 alleles with alcohol dependence. OBJECTIVE To determine whether variation at the 5q34 GABA(A) gene cluster is implicated in differential susceptibility to alcohol dependence. METHODS Two large psychiatrically interviewed samples, a Southwestern Native American population sample (N = 433) and a Finnish sample (N = 511) with alcohol-dependent subjects and unaffected individuals, were genotyped for 6 single nucleotide polymorphisms at the 5q34 GABA(A) gene cluster. In addition to sib-pair linkage and case-control association analyses, linkage disequilibrium mapping with haplotypes was used. RESULTS Sib-pair linkage of GABRG2 to alcohol dependence was observed in Finns (P = .008). Association of the GABRB2 1412T allele with alcohol dependence was detected in both populations (Finns, P = .01; Southwestern Native Americans, P = .008), and the GABRA6 1519T allele was associated in both Finns (P = .01) and Southwestern Native Americans (P = .03). Linkage disequilibrium mapping with 3-locus haplotypes yielded evidence for an alcohol-dependence locus at the GABA(A) gene cluster region in both populations. The most highly significant signals were at 3-locus haplotypes that included 1 or more GABRA6 polymorphisms, with the peak signal at a GABRA6 3-locus haplotype (Finns, empirical P = .004; Southwestern Native Americans, empirical P = .02). CONCLUSIONS We detected sib-pair linkage of 5q34 GABA(A) receptor genes to alcohol dependence in Finns and found association both in Finns and in Southwestern Native Americans. In both populations, the haplotype localization implicates the region containing the Pro385Ser GABRA6 polymorphism and 2 other polymorphisms at GABRA6.
Chronicle Recognition for Mobility Management Triggers

An optimally working mobile system requires tight cooperation and an information stream that flows impeccably between its components. This, however, is not the current state of the art, as applications and system components must each, in isolation, acquire data, create a knowledge base, and maintain it with diligence. We introduce chronicle recognition to our trigger management framework and present the advantages of generating synthetic triggers based on events and measurements, establishing the theoretical foundation. We explain how, by using a time point algebra, we can reason with reified logic and obtain triggers that are unavailable otherwise. These triggers can be generated efficiently, as our results indicate, and are reliable in terms of event temporal correlation.
EFICIÊNCIA, DESREGULAMENTAÇÃO FINANCEIRA E CRESCIMENTO ECONÔMICO: UMA ABORDAGEM PÓS-KEYNESIANA

Este texto procura discutir a assertiva corrente na teoria economica convencional, segundo a qual politicas de desregulamentacao financeiras sao funcionais ao crescimento economico, uma vez que as mesmas eliminariam as restricoes a transferencia de poupanca ao mesmo tempo que criariam estruturas financeiras mais eficientes. Neste sentido, procura-se mostrar que tais politicas, ainda que facilitem o acesso de fundos pelo tomador, elevam sobremaneira a fragilidade dos sistemas financeiros, uma vez que as mesmas estao associadas a criacao de novos instrumentos (derivativos) que tem um carater intrinsecamente especulativo.
The Trilingual ALLEGRA Corpus: Presentation and Possible Use for Lexicon Induction

In this paper, we present a trilingual parallel corpus for German, Italian and Romansh, a Swiss minority language spoken in the canton of Grisons. The corpus called ALLEGRA contains press releases automatically gathered from the website of the cantonal administration of Grisons. Texts have been preprocessed and aligned with a current state-of-the-art sentence aligner. The corpus is one of the first of its kind, and can be of great interest, particularly for the creation of natural language processing resources and tools for Romansh. We illustrate the use of such a trilingual resource for automatic induction of bilingual lexicons, which is a real challenge for under-represented languages. We induce a bilingual lexicon for German-Romansh by phrase alignment and evaluate the resulting entries with the help of a reference lexicon. We then show that the use of the third language of the corpus ― Italian ― as a pivot language can improve the precision of the induced lexicon, without loss in terms of quality of the extracted pairs.
Task-Decomposition via Plan

Task-decomposition planners make use of schemata that define tasks in terms of partially ordered sets of tasks and primitive actions. Most existing taskdecomposition planners synthesize plans via a topdown approach, called taslc reduction, which uses schemata to replace tasks with networks of tasks and actions until only actions remain. In this paper we present a bottom-up plan pursing approach to task-decomposition. Instead of reducing tasks into actions, we use an incremental parsing algorithm to recognize which partial primitive plans match the schemata. In essence, our approach exploits the observation that schemata are a convenient means for reducing search. We compile the schemata into a declarative search control language (like that used in machine learning research), which rejects plan refinements that, cannot be parsed. We demonstrate that neither parsing nor reduction dominates the other on efficiency grounds and provide preliminary empirical results comparing the two. We note that our parsing approach allows convenient, comparison (and combination) of different search control technologies, generates minimal plans, and handles expressive languages (e.g., universal quantification and conditional effects) with ease.
Research on information management system of university students' mental health

At present, the mental health problems of college students has aroused widespread concern in society. The design and development of Mental health management system for university students has become increasingly important. Based on the characteristics of College Students' psychological health management, this paper explores the practical college mental health management system and through the B/S structure, using NET, WEB and SQL Technology. This paper constructs a set of mental health management system specifically for universities. The system can manage and analyze university students' mental health by means of computer technology effectively, so it can availably improve the management level of the university students' mental health.
Transport and mixing between airmasses in cold frontal regions during Dynamics and Chemistry of Frontal Zones (DCFZ)

The passage of two cold front systems over the United Kingdom are compared and contrasted, using the results of a detailed aircraft and ground-based study. The measurements are interpreted by means of three-dimensional, reverse-domain-filling trajectories using both global models and limited-area mesoscale models. This method provides a three-dimensional picture of the interleaving air-masses in the frontal zone as defined by their Lagrangian histories. The two systems studied differ in that the first is associated with an intense surface low in January and the second is associated with a relatively weak surface low in April. In the intense surface low case the trajectory study suggests that a dry intrusion with stratospheric characteristics penetrated deep into the troposphere along the upper level front. Measurements indeed revealed an unsaturated layer with anomalously high ozone. This layer was intersected at four levels in the troposphere (at 8.5, 7.1, 5.2 and 3.7 km), and the lower the intersection, the lower the measured anomalous ozone and the higher the water vapor content. It is argued that this is best explained by the dry-intrusion layer becoming mixed with background air by three-dimensional turbulence, also encountered by the aircraft, along the upper level front. Evidence for this mixing is apparent on tracer-tracer scatterplots. In the weak surface low case, by contrast, the dry intrusion has a more complex structure, with up to three separate layers of enhanced ozone and low humidity. Strong evidence for mixing was apparent only in the lowest layer. The weaker system may therefore be much more efficient at transporting upper tropospheric/stratospheric ozone to the lower troposphere. The transport of boundary layer air to the upper troposphere in the warm conveyor belt (WCB), however, was found to be around 8 times stronger in the intense system. Sonde measurements suggested that the WCB was ventilated by convection from the surface front in some regions to about 5-6 km, while it was stably stratified in other regions, suggesting layerwise long-range transport.
Semantic Templates for Designing Recommender Systems

In this paper we describe ongoing research into a flexible way of designing CBR systems in jCOLIBRI 2 using a library of templates obtained from a set of previously designed CBR systems (i.e. a case base of CBR design experience). In case-based fashion, jCOLIBRI will retrieve templates from the library; the designer will choose one template, and adapt it. jCOLIBRI will also suggest suitable substitutions from the semantic annotations in the components. In this paper we focus on one of the main bottlenecks of this approach: obtaining and representing an appropriate set of templates. We are working on templates within a successful set of CBR systems: case-based recommender systems and other memory-based recommender systems. We also describe the graphical template editor and how we represent the templates using Semantic Web technologies.
A Method and Implementation of Control Flow Obfuscation Using SEH

Control flow obfuscation is an important way of software copyright protection, the main purpose is to make the static analysis tools produce wrong control flow graph, and then prevent malicious use of reverse engineering against software. In this paper we ropose an approach to implement control flow obfuscation using Windows structured exception handling mechanism. Programs are obfuscated by replacing branch instructions with exception code and inserting fake branch instruction after the exception code. Furthermore, exception code random technology is used to improve the resilience of the obfuscated code. Experimental results show that disassemble tools fail to identify 56.7% control flow of the obfuscated code, and have a misunderstanding of 40% control flow. The increase in program size and execute time of the obfuscated code is also modest.
Application of exemplar-based inpainting in depth image based rendering

Depth Image Based Rendering (DIBR) is a technology which converts two dimensional images to three dimension using colour image and its associated depth image. The performance of any DIBR system depends on the perfection of the depth image. Holes/disocclusion will occur in the virtual views generated if the depth map is not perfect. Since holes occur in the virtual views when the intensity changes abruptly in the depth map, smoothening methods were proposed. Since smoothening of the entire depth image destroys the original intensities of the depth map, Adaptive Compensation method (ADC) was proposed. The depth map is classified into three modes depending on the amount of holes. Since texture based inpainting of regions having large number of holes does not produce plausible result, exemplar-based inpainting is proposed. Adaptive edge-based smoothening is done for regions having moderate number of holes and regions with no holes are retained as such. This method results in an increased PSNR and SSIM values compared to existing methods. Apart from reducing the number of holes in the virtual views generated, this method also results in high visual quality virtual views. The increase in PSNR and SSIM comes at the expense of increase in execution time.
Efficient Distributed "Hormone" Graph Gradients

Several researchers have attempted extract the principles behind hormone gradients found in biological system, and apply them to control physically manifested distributed systems. This paper presents an efficient implementation of a graph-based version of hormone gradient mechanisms. The algorithm is based on hop-counting of the topological distance between any given vertex and the hormone emitting vertex, and can deal with dynamic changes to the topology of the system. Performance of the described algorithm is documented through a number of experiments. The algorithm was developed for use in self-reconfigurable robotics, but might very well be useful for many other applications. The use of the algorithm to provide a common coordinate system for a collection of self-recon figurable robot modules is described, that provides pose relative to the emitting module for all modules affected by the hormone.
CrowdQ : A Search Engine with Crowdsourced Query Understanding

Providing direct answers to web search queries rather than links to related documents has been shown to increase user satisfaction [3]. However, most search engines only provide answers to a few simple query types and keyword queries provide little semantic information. To support direct answers for more complex and less common queries, we have developed CrowdQ, a novel hybrid human-machine system that leverages the crowd to gain knowledge of query structure and entity relationships without the need for expert query annotation. Keyword query understanding techniques provide candidate semantic interpretations of queries which are generalized as structured query templates. Where existing query understanding techniques result in ambiguity we utilize web users for disambiguation via tasks on a crowdsourcing platform. We describe our prototype of CrowdQ, demonstrating that we can answer a wide range queries with high precision in interactive latencies, and evaluate the quality of the crowd interface, correctness of template answers and responsiveness of live template matching and query execution.
A comparison of AC/DC piezoelectric transformer converters with current doubler and voltage doubler rectifiers

The objective of this study was to develop recommendations for an optimal design of PT AC/DC converters. The paper presents a comprehensive comparison of the two commonly used rectifier topologies in a piezoelectric transformer (PT) based power converters: current doubler and voltage doubler rectifiers. The advantages and disadvantages of the two rectifiers were investigated and the area of their applications with respect to output current, voltage, power capability, load resistance etc. was delineated. Generic principles are proposed for choosing a PT for a given set of requirements, i.e. output voltage, input voltage and load resistance, as well the rectifier type suitable for the given PT and application. Simulation and experimental results support the theoretical study and are found to be in a good agreement with the analysis.
An Assessment of the Improvement Potential of Time-Frequency Masking for Speech Dereverberation

The effect of ideal time-frequency masking (ITFM)on the intelligibility of reverberated speech is tested using objective measurement, namely STI and PESQ scores. The best choice of ITFM threshold is determined for a range of reverberation times (RTs). Four existing dereverberation algorithms are also assessed. Objective test results and informal subjective listening show that IFTM provides great intelligibility improvement for all RTs and outperforms the existing dereverberation algorithms, one of which assumes perfect knowledge of the room impulse response. While ITFM provides only a best possible performance bound, our results demonstrate the potential improvement that could be obtained using time-frequency masking for speech dereverberation. Index Terms: Dereverberation, speech intelligibility, speech transmission index, speech quality, time-frequency masking
Integration of user interface design process

As embedded systems have increasingly become multifunctional, it has become necessary to clarify what sorts of experiences the user can have through these functions. It is the system's user interface (UI) that leads this user experience, therefore, UI design has increased in importance. However, conventional development processes, often set the UI design after defining the requirements, which causes operations to become more complex and leads to a lack of operational consistency. To overcome these problems, a development process was conceived whereby the user experience envisioned in the product planning phase is realized in the UI. Two workshops were held for development-related personnel to introduce the conceived process into actual development projects. The effectiveness of the process was acknowledged by all the participants, but they also pointed out the difficulty of incorporating the process into their organizations.
SAFE NAVIGATION OF A CAR-LIKE ROBOT WITHIN A DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENT

This paper addresses the problem of navigation of a carlike robot in dynamic environments. Such environments impose a hard real time constraint. However, computing a complete motion to the goal within a limited time is impossible to achieve in most real situations. Besides, the limited duration validity of the model used for planning requires the model and therefore the plan to be updated. In this paper, we present a Partial Motion Planning (PMP) approach as the answer to this problem. The issue of safety raised by this approach is addressed using the Inevitable Collision State formalism and effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated with several simulation examples. The quality of the generated trajectories is discussed and continuous curvature metric is integrated as a mean to improve it.
On adaptive critic architectures in feedback control

Two feedback control systems are designed that employ the adaptive critic architecture, which consists of two neural networks, one of which (the critic) tunes the other. The first application is a deadzone compensator, where it is shown that the adaptive critic structure is a natural consequence of the mathematical problem of inversion of an unknown function. In this situation the adaptive critic appears in the feedforward loop. The second application is the supervisory loop adaptive critic, where it is shown that the critic neural network requires additional dynamics that effectively give it a memory capability.
Behavioural responses of mice to predator odour components

Having means to detect and avoid potential predators is a necessity for prey species. Most mammalian prey species are able to detect odours emitted by predators and to adapt their behaviour accordingly. These odour cues are therefore considered to act as semiochemicals. Predator odours consist of several dozen different odourants. In order to assess if single odourants elicit aversive behavioural reactions, predator-naive CD-1 mice were presented with six odourants which are part of body-borne odours of different mammalian predator species. A two-compartment chamber was used in order to assess place-preference, motor activity and faecal excretions when the animals were simultaneously presented with a predator odourant and a blank control. Further trials were performed to assess whether the odourant concentrations had an influence on the behaviours. The only odourant that elicited a significant aversion was 3-methyl-1-butanethiol, a compound found in the anal gland secretion of skunks, when presented at a factor of 100 above the olfactory detection threshold of mice. Two other concentrations of 3-methyl-1-butanethiol did not elicit significant behavioural changes. Based on the present study, only one out of six selected predator odourants elicited a significant aversive response in CD-1 mice. This suggests that more than one odour component, or perhaps even the full mixture of odourants, may be necessary for CD-1 mice to respond to a predator odour with aversive behaviour.