Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Paradigms for Parallel Distributed Programming

The work proposes a new classiication of parallel algorithm schemes to program multicomputer systems, these schemes being called paradigms. The proposed classiication is intended to improve the programmabil-ity and portability of distributed parallel algorithms derived with these paradigms. In order to design algorithms and to implement applications based on these paradigms, a language that directly supports them has been implemented on the Occam-Transputer platform. This language is based on a class of distributed active objects (ODAs) allowing a exible and safe implementation of diierent algorithms.
Quantifying the Effect of U sing Kanban vs . Scrum : A Case Study

Many claims about the usefulness of various processes or methods, such as Scrum and Kanban, have been stated in agile and lean software communities. However, these claims are rarely supported by objective data or empirical investigations. In contrast, this article aims to demonstrate that the effect of processes or methods (here: Scrum versus Kanban) can be evaluated and compared on the basis of objective data. We analyzed data of more than 12,000 work items collected over the years 2009-2011 in a medium-sized software company. The company used Scrum from 2007 to autumn 2010, at which point they changed to Kanban. By using Kanban instead of Scrum, the company almost halved the lead time, reduced the number of weighted bugs by 10%, improved productivity by 21% for PBIs, and reduced productivity by 11% for bugs. Consequently, Kanban seems to outperform Scrum in this company. However, the results should be interpreted with caution because the use of Kanban succeeded the use of Scrum. To acquire more knowledge about the performance of different agile or lean methods, scholars should conduct similar studies in different organizations in different application domains and with people of different cultures and competences.
Improving the performance of 2D Discrete Wavelet Transform using data-level parallelism

The JPEG2000 standard uses the 2D Discrete Wavelet Transform (2D DWT), while the JPEG standard uses the 2D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). However, the 2D DWT has higher computational requirements than the 2D DCT and consumes a significant part of the total JPEG2000 encoding time. One way to improve the performance of the 2D DWT is using parallel techniques on an SIMD-enhanced architecture. In this paper, we apply data-level parallelism technique to exploit available parallelism of the 2D DWT. We focus on the two algorithms to traverse an image to implement the 2D Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), namely Row-Column Wavelet Transform (RCWT) and Line-Based Wavelet Transform (LBWT). Our experimental results show that the SIMD implementation of the LBWT algorithm is more complicated than the SIMD implementation of the RCWT algorithm, while the former algorithm is 1.60 times faster than the latter algorithm for an image of size 4096 × 4096.
New Multi-Band Microstrip Antenna Design for Wireless Communications

This paper presents a new approach for the design of a multi-wideband microstrip-patch antenna. The radiating elements in this antenna are composed of rectangular slots following a Chebyshev distribution of order 10 around a center rectangular slot, and an additional triangular slot. These slots are engraved in the rectangular and triangular patch, joined together in one structure, and fed by one probe feed. A sample antenna was analyzed, simulated, fabricated, and tested. There was good agreement between the computed and test results. The new antenna can be used for several applications, especially in the GSM domain, and for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and several other applications, as detailed in this paper.
Study of an interdisciplinary didactic model in a secondary education music class

ABSTRACT This study was carried out within the framework of a pedagogical project. It compares the results obtained from the application of two different didactic models for learning and practicing musical composition in a Secondary Education class: the traditional teacher centred method (designated as the control group, CG), and an interdisciplinary model based on a holistic style (designated as the experimental group, EG). Both methodologies focused on identical musical composition content, but latter applied an open ended interdisciplinary approach, based on synchronised learning in several subjects. A quasi-experimental design was used in this research. Pre- and post-test questionnaires were applied to measure the progress in composing skills in both groups. The questions focused on various tasks with verbal and figurative content to evaluate the progress of the student's ability to explore sound parameters, their knowledge and acquisition of musical elements and the improvement of flexible understanding the students developed during the process. Data were analyzed by means of standardised quantitative tests and by qualitative triangulation. Analysis of this data provided evidence that students were able to obtain meaningful understanding by connecting the Music contents with other school subjects and their own personal realities. The integrative qualities of the experience fostered the self-sufficiency and self-confidence and fostered by the student's creativity and motivation. Moreover, interdisciplinary learning led to an improvement in critical thinking skills.
Genetic Algorithm based bargaining agent for Implementing Dynamic Pricing on Internet

This paper proposes a bargaining agent which uses genetic algorithm for implementing dynamic pricing on the Internet. Dynamic pricing is about charging different price from different customers. Auction and bargain are two main ways of implementing dynamic pricing on Internet. As compared to auction, online bargaining is a "win-win" situation for both the seller and buyer because the mutually agreed deal price is higher than the seller's reserved price but lower than the buyer's reserved price. This problem of online bargaining eventually boils down to an optimization problem where the seller's task is to :- a)offer the best price to buyer so as to reach a deal b) to make maximum profit. The work presented in this paper proposes a simple and elegant way to implement online bargaining using genetic algorithm (GA). With an efficient design of fitness function, crossover and mutation operators, this paper shows how online bargaining can be implemented to sell products on the Internet
A Logarithmic Opinion Pool Based STAPLE Algorithm for the Fusion of Segmentations With Associated Reliability Weights

Pelvic floor dysfunction is common in women after childbirth and precise segmentation of magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the pelvic floor may facilitate diagnosis and treatment of patients. However, because of the complexity of its structures, manual segmentation of the pelvic floor is challenging and suffers from high inter and intra-rater variability of expert raters. Multiple template fusion algorithms are promising segmentation techniques for these types of applications, but they have been limited by imperfections in the alignment of templates to the target, and by template segmentation errors. A number of algorithms sought to improve segmentation performance by combining image intensities and template labels as two independent sources of information, carrying out fusion through local intensity weighted voting schemes. This class of approach is a form of linear opinion pooling, and achieves unsatisfactory performance for this application. We hypothesized that better decision fusion could be achieved by assessing the contribution of each template in comparison to a reference standard segmentation of the target image and developed a novel segmentation algorithm to enable automatic segmentation of MRI of the female pelvic floor. The algorithm achieves high performance by estimating and compensating for both imperfect registration of the templates to the target image and template segmentation inaccuracies. A local image similarity measure is used to infer a local reliability weight, which contributes to the fusion through a novel logarithmic opinion pooling. We evaluated our new algorithm in comparison to nine state-of-the-art segmentation methods and demonstrated our algorithm achieves the highest performance.
Melody pitch estimation based on range estimation and candidate extraction using harmonic structure model

This paper proposes an algorithm to estimate the melody pitch line (the most dominant pitch sequence) of a given polyphonic audio based on melody range estimation and pitch candidate extraction using a harmonic structure model similar to that proposed by Goto. This paper defines melody pitch candidate as a list of pitch candidates that produces the best-fit harmonic models to the polyphonic audio. In many melody extraction algorithms proposed in the past, multiple-pitch extractor (MPE) is often performed for extracting melody pitch candidates; however, the MPE serves the purpose of estimating all pitches within a frame of a polyphonic audio and does not necessarily provide melody pitch candidates. The estimated weights of the harmonic structure model which must be obtained for extracting the pitch candidates are liable to octave error and strong low frequency interference, and therefore, certain refinement after the estimation must be performed. As a refinement, the algorithm measures the degree of harmonic fitness of each candidate. Furthermore, a melody pitch range is estimated to reduce false-positive pitch candidates. The melody pitch range is estimated based on the distribution of the best pitch candidates with long duration. Experimental results show that the proposed extraction algorithm performed better than many of the algorithms proposed in the past.
Applications of the Ashtekar gravity to four-dimensional hyperkähler geometry and Yang–Mills instantons

The Ashtekar–Jacobson–Smolin–Mason–Newman equations are used to construct the hyperkahler metrics on four-dimensional manifolds. These equations are closely related to anti-self-dual Yang–Mills equations of the infinite-dimensional gauge Lie algebras of all volume-preserving vector fields. Several examples of hyperkahler metrics are presented through the reductions of anti-self-dual connections. For any gauge group anti-self-dual connections on hyperkahler manifolds are constructed using the solutions of both Nahm and Laplace equations.
Energy-aware algorithms for tasks and bandwidth co-allocation under real-time and redundancy constraints

The energy consumption in distributed systems depends on several inter-related factors, including task partitioning, process redundancy, fault tolerance, task and message scheduling, and communication bandwidth allocation. Although some of these issues have been considered in the literature in isolation, a systematic approach considering all the constraints is still missing. This paper addresses the problem of allocating a task set and the required communication bandwidth on a distributed embedded system, aiming at reducing energy consumption while guaranteeing timing and redundancy constraints. Two heuristic approaches are proposed and compared against a complete method and simulated annealing. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.
Practical anonymous subscription system with privacy preserving data mining

To date, one interesting research topic in constructing anonymous subscription systems is how to allow client profiling, while keeping customers anonymous when they access one service. Though several solutions have been proposed, the service providers are only endowed with limited ability of utilizing and analyzing accumulated transaction transcripts at the cost of weakened privacy protection. To overcome this obstacle, we put forth the first anonymous subscription system with privacy preserving data mining, which is derived by applying the technique of Kiayias-Xu-Yung data mining group signature to the underlying multi-service subscription system by Canard and Jambert. The most prominent benefit of the new system is that service providers can obtain the desired output by a quorum of trusted data mining servers, and at the same time the customers can preserve maximum possible anonymity. Performance comparison shows that the proposed system is more practical than several related schemes published recently.
Water relations of four perennial plant species at the southern periphery of the Taklimakan desert

The investigations started from the assumption that perennial plants in the foreland of river oases in the Taklimakan desert are able to take up water from soils of low water content and low water potential during long drought periods. In order to check this assumption, P-V curves were established and selected water relation parameters were derived. Alhagi sparsifolia, Calligonum caput-medusae, Tamarix ramosissima, and Populus euphratica, growing in the foreland of Qira oasis were investigated. Contrary to the expectation, the osmotic potentials both at plant water saturation and at incipient plasmolysis are high in comparison with other desert plants and reveal that the investigated plants do not need to take up water against a low soil water potential. The osmotic potential at incipient plasmolysis is moderately decreasing during the growing season in three of the species, but this seems to be an endogenous process that is not caused by drought stress. Small differences between osmotic potentials at incipient plasmolysis and the minimum plant water potentials that are reached during daily courses point to a transpiration control that accepts very low turgor potentials. A plasmolysis risk is possibly diminished by an increase of cell wall elasticity during the growing season. The results support the conclusion that all investigated species have permanent access to groundwater and live as phreatophytes in the foreland of Qira oasis.
An overview of Emerging Trend Detection ( ETD

What is an emerging trend? An emerging trend is a topic area that is growing in interest and utility over time. For example, Extensible Markup Language (XML) emerged as a trend in the mid 1990’s. Table 1 shows the results of a INSPEC®[Inspec] database search on the keyword ‘XML’ from 1994 to 1999 (no records appeared before 1994). As you can see from this table, XML was emerging from 1994 to 1997; by 1998 it was well represented as a topic area in computer science.
Discovering the important bloggers in blogspace

Blog is increasingly becoming an important source of information. Some bloggers take important role in the blogspace, they write many high quality posts or good at summary, which impact fellow blogger in various ways. So discovering this important bloggers help the searcher to accuracy detect resource. In this paper, we develop a novel weighted link-based rank approach that integrates blogger and post in a unified framework (a bipartite graph model). The importance of blogger and post can mutually reinforce each other in an iterative way. We also take into post semantic content and time delay of citation considertion. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model through several case studies using real-world data collected from the blogosphere.
Genetic and Antigenic Characterization of Enterovirus 71 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 2011

Enterovirus 71 (EV71) frequently causes fatal infections in young children in Asia. In 2011, EV71 epidemics occurred in southern Vietnam. We conducted genetic and antigenic analysis of the EV71 isolates and found that 94% of them were genotype C4a related to two lineages circulating in China and 6% were genotype C5 which have circulated in Vietnam since 2003. Antigenic variants were not detected. EV71 vaccines are being developed. Longitudinal enterovirus surveillance data are critical to formulate vaccination policy in Vietnam.
Service Learning in the Middle Grades: Learning by Doing and Caring

Abstract Although service learning has been documented as a promising pedagogy for middle grades learners, it remains the exception rather than the rule in many middle schools. This qualitative study examined fifth grade students’ experience of a service-learning class. Using the tenets of service learning and experiential learning theory as the theoretical framework, we describe the findings of the study, identifying the importance of a culture of “doing” and problem solving; an integrated curriculum that was based in caring for others; a joyful environment in which to learn; and opportunities for competence and independence. We present the findings in relation to the theoretical framework and discuss the implications of this research for middle grades practice, teacher education, and future research.
Association between Polymorphisms of the IKZF3 Gene and Systemic Lupus Erythematosus in a Chinese Han Population

Objective It has been reported that IKAROS family of zinc finger 3 (IKZF3)-deficient mice spontaneously develop human systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE)-like phenotypes and produce anti-dsDNA Ab leading to immune complex-mediated glomerulonephritis. Polymorphism of the IKZF3 gene corresponds with the susceptibility to several immune-related diseases. Our intention was to establish an association between polymorphisms in the IKZF3 gene and SLE in the Chinese Han population. Methods The study involved obtaining blood samples for DNA extraction and genotyping the 4 selected single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in IKZF3, including rs12150079, rs9909593, rs907091, and rs2872507, by performing PCR restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis (PCR-RFLP). A group of 366 SLE patients were compared to 455 healthy controls. Results A significant decrease in frequencies of the rs907091 CC genotype and C allele appeared in the SLE patients unlike that observed in the controls (p = 0.001 and 0.015, respectively). The frequencies of the rs12150079 genotype and allele were different between the SLE patients and the control individuals, although the significance was only marginal (p = 0.046 and 0.049, respectively). In addition, a significantly low frequency of the GGCG haplotype was observed in the SLE patients, suggesting that it may provide protection against SLE (p = 0.011). Conclusion To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to demonstrate an important association between polymorphisms in IKZF3 and SLE in the Chinese Han population. A strong association between rs907091 in the IKZF3 gene and SLE was identified.
Analysis of shape from shading algorithms for fast and realistic 3D face reconstruction APCCAS2002

The aim of this paper is to attain a fast and realistic 3D face reconstruction, when only a limited set of images taken from multiple views, is available. Instead of relying merely on 2D images as suggested by image-based modeling approaches, we investigate several shape-from-shading (SFS) techniques, which have been studied extensively in computer vision research. This is because we believe that a nearly complete set of images required by image-based modeling techniques is rarely available in real world applications. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of three different SFS algorithms to provide partial 3D shapes of the face to be reconstructed. Each algorithm is selected from three different classes of SFS technique, i.e., linear, propagation, and minimization approaches. The reconstruction process is performed by our novel neural network learning scheme, which is able to successively refine the polygon vertices parameter of an initial 3D shape, based on depth maps of several calibrated images. To evaluate the reconstruction result based on those SFS techniques, we measure average vertex-error and pixel-error compared to actual 3D data obtained by 3D scanner device. We also compared these result with those obtained by using only 2D images. In addition, we also measure total computational time needed in the reconstruction process.
Image-model coupling: a simple information theoretic perspective for image sequences

Images are widely used to visualise physical processes. Models may be developed which attempt to replicate those processes and their effects. The technique of coupling model output to images, which is here called "image-model coupling", may be used to help understand the underlying physical processes, and better understand the limitations of the models. An information theoretic framework is presented for image-model coupling in the context of communication along a discrete channel. The physical process may be regarded as a transmitter of images and the model as part of a receiver which decodes or recognises those images. Image-model coupling may therefore be interpreted as image recognition. Of interest are physical processes which exhibit "memory". The response of such a system is not only dependent on the current values of driver variables, but also on the recent history of drivers and/or system description. Examples of such systems in geophysics include the ionosphere and Earth's climate. The discrete channel model is used to help derive expressions for matching images and model output, and help analyse the coupling.
Can Qubit Errors Be Corrected

This note examines assumptions at the basis of the recently proposed quantum error-correcting codes. It is shown that these codes can correct only a vanishingly small subset of errors, and are unable to correct small phase errors which can have disastrous consequences for a quantum computation. These codes are, therefore, not likely to be useful in real applications. Colours seen by candle-light Will not look the same by day. -Robert Browning
Energy-Efficient Transmission in Cognitive Radio Networks

Cognitive radio (CR) networks are designed to utilize the licensed spectrum when it is not llsed by the primary (licensed) users. In this paper, we investigate how a CR user senses multiple channels and determine the optimal transmission duration and power allocation. When performing optimization, we take energy efficiency, throughput, and interference with the primary users into consideration and find a closed-form solution for transmission duration for chosen channels. It is shown that the proposed optimization approach significantly improves energy efficiency and throughput of CR networks.
Improving Wireless Power Transfer via power beacons with circularly distributed antennas

Wireless Power Transfer is regarded as an alternative technology to power the next generation wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a novel Distributed Antenna Power Beacon (DA-PB) whose antennas are uniformly distributed on a circle with same height when performing wireless power transfer. Closed-form expression of antenna height for DA-PB is derived to make the radio frequency (RF) electromagnetic radiation power density at any location of the charging cell lower than the safety level given by Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In addition, we get the closed-form expression of average harvested Direct Current (DC) power per user in the charging cell for pass-loss exponent 2 and 4. Conventional Co-located Antenna Power Beacon (CA-PB) is also analyzed as a benchmark for our proposed DA-PB. Simulation results verify our derived theoretical results. And it is shown that the proposed DA-PB indeed achieves larger average harvested DC power per user than conventional CA-PB.