Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
GDCA: A Distributed Channel Assignment Mechanism for Multi-radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks

C hannel assignment is one of the most important problem in the research of the multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks ((MRMC-WMN) . Aiming at minimizing the overall network interference and optimizing the usage of channel resource, channel assignment problem must obey the constraint of limited radios and available channels for MRMC-WMN. The above optimization problem is known to be NP-complete. This paper focuses on the study of channel assignment in MRMC- WMN . We propose a new grid-loop-based mechanism for dynami c c hannel a ssignment . Our mechanism exploits the group which we called grid-loop, which is constructed on distributed minimum spanning tree by self-organized. Our new GDCA scheme has many advantages over cluster-based scheme. The analysis and comparison demonstrates its feasibility, stability, cost-saving and efficiency.
A Biological Model for Influenza Transmission: Pandemic Planning Implications of Asymptomatic Infection and Immunity

Background The clinical attack rate of influenza is influenced by prior immunity and mixing patterns in the host population, and also by the proportion of infections that are asymptomatic. This complexity makes it difficult to directly estimate R0 from the attack rate, contributing to uncertainty in epidemiological models to guide pandemic planning. We have modelled multiple wave outbreaks of influenza from different populations to allow for changing immunity and asymptomatic infection and to make inferences about R0. Data and Methods On the island of Tristan da Cunha (TdC), 96% of residents reported illness during an H3N2 outbreak in 1971, compared with only 25% of RAF personnel in military camps during the 1918 H1N1 pandemic. Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) methods were used to estimate model parameter distributions. Findings We estimated that most islanders on TdC were non-immune (susceptible) before the first wave, and that almost all exposures of susceptible persons caused symptoms. The median R0 of 6.4 (95% credibility interval 3.7–10.7) implied that most islanders were exposed twice, although only a minority became ill in the second wave because of temporary protection following the first wave. In contrast, only 51% of RAF personnel were susceptible before the first wave, and only 38% of exposed susceptibles reported symptoms. R0 in this population was also lower [2.9 (2.3–4.3)], suggesting reduced viral transmission in a partially immune population. Interpretation Our model implies that the RAF population was partially protected before the summer pandemic wave of 1918, arguably because of prior exposure to interpandemic influenza. Without such protection, each symptomatic case of influenza would transmit to between 2 and 10 new cases, with incidence initially doubling every 1–2 days. Containment of a novel virus could be more difficult than hitherto supposed.
The influence of health-risk perception and distress on reactions to low-level chemical exposure

The general aim of the current study was to investigate how perceived health risk of a chemical exposure and self-reported distress are related to perceived odor intensity and odor valence, symptoms, cognitive performance over time as well as reactions to blank exposure. Based on ratings of general distress, 20 participants constituted a relatively low distress group, and 20 other participants a relatively high distress group. Health risk perception was manipulated by providing positively and negatively biased information regarding n-butanol. Participants made repeated ratings of intensity, valence and symptoms and performed cognitive tasks while exposed to 4.7 ppm n-butanol for 60 min (first 10 min were blank exposure) inside an exposure chamber. Ratings by the positive and negative bias groups suggest that the manipulation influenced perceived health risk of the exposure. The high distress group did not habituate to the exposure in terms of intensity when receiving negative information, but did so when receiving positive information. The high distress group, compared with the low distress group, rated the exposure as significantly more unpleasant, reported greater symptoms and performed worse on a cognitively demanding task over time. The positive bias group and high distress group rated blank exposure as more intense. The main findings suggest that relatively distressed individuals are negatively affected by exposures to a greater degree than non-distressed.
The MOBO City: A Mobile Game Package for Technical Language Learning

In this research we produced a mobile language learning game that is designed within a technical context. After conceptual analysis of the subject matter i.e. computer's motherboard, the game was designed. The action within the game is consistent to the theme. There is a story, simplifying and exaggerating real life. Elements of control, feedback and sense of danger are incorporated into our game. By producing an engaging learning experience, vocabularies were learned incidentally. Deliberate vocabulary learning games were also added to our package to help students solve their common errors. Index Terms—Mobile learning, Educational games, Language learning, Vocabulary learning
Enabling comfortable sports therapy for patient: A novel lightweight durable and portable ECG monitoring system

In developing countries, people's living pressure is increasing with the society's development by inefficient economic growth mode. Recently, the number of people who suffer from sudden cardiac death is progressively increasing, and cardiovascular disease (CVD) has become one great killer which threats the life and health of people. However, at present, we are confronted with one problem: when a patient has chest distress or chest pain, etc., he/she hurries to the hospital to go through electrocardiograph (ECG) examination but the abnormal ECG signal disappears. Therefore, the opportunity to timely capture the ECG status of a patient and make an accurate judgment is lost. Thus, extensive efforts have been made to design various systems for patient monitoring at anytime and anywhere, in order to have real-time records and analysis on vital signal of patents, so as to provide early detection before the occurrence of adverse effect. However, the mobility of the patient is limited in most existing healthcare systems. While sporting is beneficial to improve patient's health, designing a comfortable and durable healthcare system for facilitating patient's movement is a critical issue. This paper presents a novel comfortable and durable portable ECG monitoring system to have real-time monitoring and analysis on a moving user. In the meantime, its special low power and on-demand data collection design alleviates the problem that the current wearable ECG monitoring equipment could not be used for a long time due to the constraint of its battery life.
Non-negative Matrix Factorization, A New Tool for Feature Extraction: Theory and Applications

Despite its relative novelty, non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) method knew a huge interest from the scientific community, due to its simplicity and intuitive decomposition. Plenty of applications benefited from it, including image processing (face, medical, etc.), audio data processing or text mining and decomposition. This paper briefly describes the underlaying mathematical NMF theory along with some extensions. Several relevant applications from different scientific areas are also presented. NMF shortcomings and conclusions are considered.
A voice activity detector based on cepstral analysis

This paper proposes a new approach to speech end-point detection based on cepstral analysis. The algorithm is based on explicit (static) modelling of speech and non-speech, and decisions are made on each incoming (overlapped) cepstral frame, according to model similarity scores. The cepstral analysis provides excellent level-independence, meaning that parameter adjustment , decision thresholds etc, are unnecessary. A high degree of robustness to additive noise is demonstrated, even though the models are static. Accurate end-points are recovered with SNR levels of 0dB.
Public Transport Dispatch and Decision Support System Based on Multi-Agent

In order to raise the level of automatization and intelligentization of urban public transport management, regarding the research and current status on application of urban public transport dispatch system as well as the weakness of it, from decision support point of view, a public transport dispatch and decision support system based on multi-agent is brought forward and developed in this paper. Based on the standard philosophy of system design, the architecture of the system is defined firstly. And the structure and functions of each kind of agents in the system are designed in detail. Finally, implementation of the system is introduced briefly. This system has a certain practical applicability and intelligence, and it can provide public transport dispatch scheme automatically.
Physical activity patterns and correlates among adults from a developing country: the Sri Lanka Diabetes and Cardiovascular Study

Abstract Objective To evaluate patterns of physical activity (PA), the prevalence of physical inactivity and the relationships between PA and sociodemographic, clinical and biochemical parameters among Sri Lankan adults. Design Descriptive cross-sectional study. Setting Nationally representative population-based survey conducted in Sri Lanka. Subjects Data on PA and associated details were obtained from 5000 adults. PA was assessed using the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (short-form). A binary logistic regression analysis was performed using the dichotomous variable ‘health-enhancing PA’ (0 = ‘active’, 1 = ‘inactive’). Results Sample size was 4485. Mean age was 46·1 (sd 15·1) years, 39·5 % were males. The mean weekly total MET (metabolic equivalents of task) minutes of PA among the study population was 4703 (sd 4369). Males (5464 (sd 5452)) had a significantly higher weekly total MET minutes than females (4205 (sd 3394); P < 0·001). Rural adults (5175 (sd 4583)) were significantly more active than urban adults (2956 (sd 2847); P < 0·001). Tamils had the highest mean weekly total MET minutes among ethnicities. Those with tertiary education had lowest mean weekly total MET minutes. In all adults 60·0 % were in the ‘highly active’ category, while only 11·0 % were ‘inactive’ (males 14·6 %, females 8·7 %; P < 0·001). Of the ‘highly active’ adults, 85·8 % were residing in rural areas. Results of the binary logistic regression analysis indicated that female gender (OR = 2·1), age >70 years (OR = 3·8), urban living (OR = 2·5), Muslim ethnicity (OR = 2·7), tertiary education (OR = 3·6), obesity (OR = 1·8), diabetes (OR = 1·6), hypertension (OR = 1·2) and metabolic syndrome (OR = 1·3) were all associated with significantly increased odds of being physically ‘inactive’. Conclusions The majority of Sri Lankan adults were ‘highly active’ physically. Female gender, older age, urban living, Muslim ethnicity and tertiary education were all significant predictors of physical inactivity. Physical inactivity was associated with obesity, diabetes, hypertension and metabolic syndrome.
An Empirical Study on Classification of Non-Functional Requirements

The classification of NFRs brings about the benefits that NFRs with respect to the same type in the system can be considered and implemented aggregately by developers, and as a result be verified by quality assurers assigned for the type. This paper conducts an empirical study on using text mining techniques to classify NFRs automatically. Three kinds of
Perceptions of asthma among physicians: an exploratory study with the ISAAC video

The current study examined the perception and interpretation of asthma symptoms among practitioners using standardised audiovisual presentations of asthma. Two groups of practitioners (n = 70) in Chennai, India, were shown the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) video questionnaire and asked to describe the symptoms and signs they observed and to identify possible diagnoses for each presentation. The number of practitioners who correctly described the principal symptom(s) of asthma depicted in the five video sequences ranged from 26.1% for scene 5 (wheezing and dyspnoea), to 94.2% for scene 4 (nocturnal cough). The number who identified asthma as a possible cause of the presentations ranged from 17.4% for scene 4, to 67.1% for scene 2 (wheeze after exercise). Practitioners with postgraduate medical education were significantly more likely to identify asthma as a possible cause of the presentations, as were practitioners with postgraduate training in respiratory diseases. In conclusion, the perceptions of asthma and asthma symptoms among many physicians in Chennai, India, do not match the presentations of asthma depicted in the International Study of Asthma and Allergies in Childhood (ISAAC) video. These differences may be limiting the diagnosis and apparent prevalence of asthma, and suggest the need for additional attention to asthma in the education and training of practitioners in India.
An Event-Based Framework for Process Inference

We focus on a class of models used for representing the dynamics between a discrete set of probabilistic events in a continuous-time setting. The proposed framework offers tractable learning and inference procedures and provides compact state representations for processes which exhibit variable delays between events. The approach is applied to a heart sound labeling task that exhibits long-range dependencies on previous events, and in which explicit modeling of the rhythm timings is justifiable by cardiological principles.
Glial Scar Expression of CHL1, the Close Homolog of the Adhesion Molecule L1, Limits Recovery after Spinal Cord Injury

The Ig superfamily adhesion molecule CHL1, the close homolog of the adhesion molecule L1, promotes neurite outgrowth, neuronal migration, and survival in vitro. We tested whether CHL1, similar to its close homolog L1, has a beneficial impact on recovery from spinal cord injury using adult CHL1-deficient (CHL1−/−) mice and wild-type (CHL1+/+) littermates. In contrast to our hypothesis, we found that functional recovery, assessed by locomotor rating and video-based motion analyses, was improved in CHL1−/− mice compared with wild-type mice at 3–6 weeks after compression of the thoracic spinal cord. Better function was associated with enhanced monoaminergic reinnervation of the lumbar spinal cord and altered pattern of posttraumatic synaptic rearrangements around motoneurons. Restricted recovery of wild-type mice was likely related to early and persistent (3–56 d after lesion) upregulation of CHL1 in GFAP-positive astrocytes at the lesion core. In both the intact spinal cord and cultured astrocytes, enhanced expression of CHL1 and GFAP was induced by application of basic fibroblast growth factor, a cytokine involved in the pathophysiology of spinal cord injury. This upregulation was abolished by inhibitors of FGF receptor-dependent extracellular signal-regulated kinase, calcium/calmodulin-dependent kinase, and phosphoinositide-3 kinase signaling pathways. In homogenotypic and heterogenotypic cocultures of neurons and astrocytes, reduced neurite outgrowth was observed only if CHL1 was simultaneously present on both cell types. These findings and novel in vitro evidence for a homophilic CHL1–CHL1 interaction indicate that CHL1 is a glial scar component that restricts posttraumatic axonal growth and remodeling of spinal circuits by homophilic binding mechanisms.
Perceptions of parental involvement in schooling, student milieu and student achievement in mathematics

This study builds on recent research that has found that teacher perceptions of parental involvement in schooling are an important influence on student outcomes, in addition to the effects of parent reports of their involvement. Using data from TIMSS 2003, this study explores the relationship between principal perceptions of parental involvement and student milieu and the impact of both on student achievement in mathematics. Moderated multiple regression analyses were used to explore these relationships. A significant relationship was found for mean school mathematics achievement regressed on principals’ perceptions of parental support and involvement at both Grades 4 and 8. However, statistically significant evidence of milieu moderating those relationships was not found. This may be because low statistical power is often associated with moderated hierarchical regression analyses. Significant interaction terms suggested that moderation may be found with more power. Further investigation into these relationships is suggested.
A network selection strategy in resources mobility environment

Various wireless networks have emerged and constituted a complex radio access network environment. In cognitive environment, network resources are always varying with time and space. When a mobile cognitive user with a multi-mode terminal generates a call request, how to select the best network? Considering that the traffic load varying with time, we introduce back propagation (BP) neural network to predict its changing trend. At the same time, because parameters obtained through measurement or prediction are imprecise and uncertain, we introduce fuzzy logic to deal with such uncertainty. Then synthesizing technology preference, operator preference and user demand, we propose a multi-attribute decision making (MADM) network strategy based on BP neural network and fuzzy logic. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our strategy through simulations. The results show that our strategy can effectively increase users' utility-price and reduce their dropping probability.
Injection, Saturation and Feedback in Meta-Heuristic Interactions

Meta-heuristics have proven to be an efficient method of handling difficult global optimization tasks. A recent trend in evolutionary computation is the use of several meta-heuristics at the same time, allowing for occasional information exchange among them in hope to take advantage from the best algorithmic properties of all. Such an approach is inherently parallel and, with some restrictions, has a straight forward implementation in a heterogeneous island model. We propose a methodology for characterizing the interplay between different algorithms, and we use it to discuss their performance on real-parameter single objective optimization benchmarks. We introduce the new concepts of feedback, saturation and injection, and show how they are powerful tools to describe the interplay between different algorithms and thus to improve our understanding of the internal mechanism at work in large parallel evolutionary set-ups.
I/O resource management through system call scheduling

A principal challenge in operating system design is controlling system throughput and responsiveness while maximizing resource utilization. Unlike previous attempts in kernel resource management, which often involve non-trivial changes in kernel subsystems, we focus on the kernel's edge. System calls are usually the default mechanism for user processes to get access to operating system services. System calls can therefore be used to control throughput and responsiveness and thus also affect resource utilization directly. We propose a simple, non-intrusive kernel-space mechanism for explicit, per-process system call scheduling already at kernel entry in order to control the time and rate at which system calls are executed, and, as a result, the per-process utilization of the involved resources. We have developed a high-performance Linux 2.6 kernel patch with SMP support that implements system call scheduling for network- and disk-related I/O calls with policies that resemble traffic shaping in network routers. Our experiments show that already simple and easy-to-use policies provide effective I/O-related process isolation with low overhead, and reduce thrashing in certain overload scenarios. While system call scheduling may still not be able to outperform resource management systems that use specifically tuned kernel subsystems, our experiments indicate that it may sufficiently support relevant soft real-time applications yet using a vastly simpler and more generic approach.
Generalization of Channel Inversion Algorithms for Multiuser MIMO Downlink Systems

Recently a number of transmission schemes have been introduced to achieve sum capacity for multiuser multi- input multi-output (MIMO) broadcast channels (BC). A block diagonalization (BD) is an attractive method which operates only a few dB away from the sum capacity. This scheme is a generalization of the zero-forcing channel inversion to the case where each receiver is equipped with multiple antennas. One of the limitation of the BD is that the sum rate does not grow linearly with the number of users due to the noise enhancement. In this paper, we propose a generalized minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) channel inversion algorithm for users with multiple antennas to overcome the drawbacks of the BD for multiuser MIMO systems. Simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme achieves performance improvement over the conventional BD scheme. Also, we present a preceding method for systems with channel estimation errors and show that the proposed algorithm is robust to the channel estimation errors.
Developing Robot Emotions through Interaction with Caregivers

In this chapter, the authors explore social constructivist theories of emotion, which suggest that emotional behaviors are developed through experience, rather than innate. The authors’ approach to artificial emotions follows this paradigm, stemming from a relatively young field called developmental or ‘epigenetic’ robotics. The chapter describes the design and implementation of a robot called MEI (multimodal emotional intelligence) with an emotion development system. MEI synchronizes to humans through voice and movement dynamics, based on mirror mechanism-like entrainment. Via typical caregiver interactions, MEI associates these dynamics with its physical feeling, e.g. distress (low battery or excessive motor heat) or flourishing (homeostasis). Our experimental results show that emotion clusters developed through robot-directed motherese (“baby talk”) are similar to adult happiness and sadness, giving evidence to constructivist theories.
Repurposing hand animation for interactive applications

In this paper we describe a method for automatically animating interactive characters based on an existing corpus of key-framed hand-animation. The method learns separate low-dimensional embeddings for subsets of the hand-animation corresponding to different semantic labels. These embeddings use the Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model to map high-dimensional rig control parameters to a three-dimensional latent space. By using a particle model to move within one of these latent spaces, the method can generate novel animations corresponding to the space's semantic label. Bridges link each pose in one latent space that is similar to a pose in another space. Animations corresponding to a transitions between semantic labels are generated by creating animation paths that move though one latent space and traverse a bridge into another. We demonstrate this method by using it to interactively animate a character as it plays a simple game with the user. The character is from a previously produced animated film and the data we use for training is the data that was used to animate the character in the film. The animated motion from the film represents an enormous investment of skillful work. Our method allows this work to be repurposed and reused for interactively animating the familiar character from the film.