Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TRECVID 2009 – Goals , Tasks , Data , Evaluation Mechanisms and Metrics

The TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVID) 2009 was a TREC-style video analysis and retrieval evaluation, the goal of which was to promote progress in content-based exploitation of digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. Over the last 9 years TRECVID has yielded a better understanding of how systems can effectively accomplish such processing and how one can reliably benchmark their performance. TRECVID is funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
Fault-tolerant controller design using Petri nets with minimum initial state specifications

This paper develops an algorithm for the optimal design of fault-tolerant Petri net controllers with minimum initial state specifications. Given a system controller that is modeled as a Petri net, a fault-tolerant Petri net controller can be obtained by incorporating additional places, tokens, and connections with the original controller. The main contribution of this paper is to develop an algorithm that is able to design this fault-tolerant controller systematically in an optimal sense. The optimality is in terms of minimizing the number of resources required for fault detection and identification at initialization (i.e., the fault-tolerant controller has the minimum initial state). An example of deriving a fault-tolerant controller with minimum initial state for a communication network is also provided to illustrate our approach.
The Effect of Kinesio Tex Tape on Muscular Strength of the Forearm Extensors on Collegiate Tennis Athletes

Context: Tennis players, as a group, exhibit a 40% to 50% chance of being diagnosed with lateral epicondylitis at some point in their career. Kinesio Tape (KT) is a popular therapeutic application that is used by athletic trainers, physical therapists and physicians to increase stimulation of mechanoreceptors in order to facilitate muscular power/strength and decrease pain, edema, and inflammation. However, there is minimal research to support the therapeutic benefit of KT. Objective: To determine if KT used in healthy collegiate tennis athletes is effective at decreasing fatigue by maintaining strength of the forearm extensors, which are commonly associated with lateral epicondylitis. Design: Repeated-measures, counterbalanced design. Setting: University Tennis Facility. Patients or Other Participants: Fourteen (8 females, 6 males) healthy Division I tennis athletes. Intervention(s): KT using a Y strip and no tape intervention. Main Outcome Measure(s): The MicroFET2 was used to test the strength of the forearm extensors at pretest, mid-test, and post-test of 65 slice backhands and 75 forehands preformed by each athlete. Results: RM ANOVA for the interaction of measurement period by group showed that strength in the control condition was significantly decreased when compared to strength in the KT condition (F=5.79, p=.032). Percent change in strength between groups across measurement periods, using a Bonferonni correction, did not yield statistically significant differences: preto mid-test (p=.094), midto post-test (p=.210), or preto post-test (p=.019). Conclusion: Our research indicates that KT, when applied to healthy collegiate tennis athletes, is associated with less of a decrease in muscular strength than that seen in a “no tape” condition. More research must be done to test if KT has a therapeutic benefit for athletes with chronic lateral epicondylitis.
Efficient Algorithms for Personalized PageRank

We present new, more efficient algorithms for estimating random walk scores such as Personalized PageRank from a given source node to one or several target nodes. These scores are useful for personalized search and recommendations on networks including social networks, user-item networks, and the web. Past work has proposed using Monte Carlo or using linear algebra to estimate scores from a single source to every target, making them inefficient for a single pair. Our contribution is a new bidirectional algorithm which combines linear algebra and Monte Carlo to achieve significant speed improvements. On a diverse set of six graphs, our algorithm is 70x faster than past state-of-the-art algorithms. We also present theoretical analysis: while past algorithms require $\Omega(n)$ time to estimate a random walk score of typical size $\frac{1}{n}$ on an $n$-node graph to a given constant accuracy, our algorithm requires only $O(\sqrt{m})$ expected time for an average target, where $m$ is the number of edges, and is provably accurate. In addition to our core bidirectional estimator for personalized PageRank, we present an alternative algorithm for undirected graphs, a generalization to arbitrary walk lengths and Markov Chains, an algorithm for personalized search ranking, and an algorithm for sampling random paths from a given source to a given set of targets. We expect our bidirectional methods can be extended in other ways and will be useful subroutines in other graph analysis problems.
DECIDE: a scheme for decentralized identity escrow

Anonymity is one of the most controversial issues related to the Internet. It greatly encourages misdeeds such as piracy, defamation, and fraud. However, anonymity is important to protect the privacy of individuals and to support the freedom of speech. Identity escrow is a potential solution to achieving a balance between anonymity and identity. The basic idea is to utilize a two-tiered identity: the first-tier identity carries the minimal amount of information for normal use, and the second-tier identity bears precise information regarding the individual to be disclosed when necessary. In this paper, we introduce a decentralized identity escrow scheme called DECIDE. It has three identity tiers: anonymity, pseudonymity, and identity, and it has a high decentralization capability. We also present an analysis on three service models - online discussion community, whistleblowing, school networking - to explore the public acceptance of the proposed scheme.
Structural Pathways of Cytokines May Illuminate Their Roles in Regulation of Cancer Development and Immunotherapy

Cytokines are messengers between tissues and the immune system. They play essential roles in cancer initiation, promotion, metastasis, and immunotherapy. Structural pathways of cytokine signaling which contain their interactions can help understand their action in the tumor microenvironment. Here, our aim is to provide an overview of the role of cytokines in tumor development from a structural perspective. Atomic details of protein-protein interactions can help in understanding how an upstream signal is transduced; how higher-order oligomerization modes of proteins can influence their function; how mutations, inhibitors or antagonists can change cellular consequences; why the same protein can lead to distinct outcomes, and which alternative parallel pathways can take over. They also help to design drugs/inhibitors against proteins de novo or by mimicking natural antagonists as in the case of interferon-γ. Since the structural database (PDB) is limited, structural pathways are largely built from a series of predicted binary protein-protein interactions. Below, to illustrate how protein-protein interactions can help illuminate roles played by cytokines, we model some cytokine interaction complexes exploiting a powerful algorithm (PRotein Interactions by Structural Matching—PRISM).
The smart number plate

Although much has been professed about the fruitfulness of smart cars, road crash statics cast a shadow on the veracity of those claims. Gruesome reports on car crashes and related deaths are affirmation to the fact that we are nowhere near to the smart car paradigm. The two most prominent causes for these deaths are over-speeding on the part of driver and a delayed response by emergency service providers in case of a mishap. The given paper proposes a Smart Number Plate as a solution to these problems. The number plate is equipped with an accelerometer that continuously measures the acceleration of the car and if the acceleration is greater than 4g (g=9.8 m/s2) it alerts the relatives of the driver and the emergency service providers by sending an SMS consisting of location coordinates obtained via GPS module. The number plate is also equipped with GPRS module that sends vehicle's location coordinates and details (number and model) on a server in case vehicle exceeds the speed limit. This data can be accessed by police control room via website and expeditious action can be taken against the defaulters. A website consisting of a Google map to display location coordinates of vehicle is also developed. Additionally, the Smart Number Plate is provided with an ultrasonic proximity sensor to assist vehicle in parking it appropriately. The Smart Number Plate is also tested for its ability to resist false positive detections of accidents under simulated environment. The paper adds an element of smartness in the vehicle's number plate and takes us a step closer to the smart vehicle paradigm.
Creating effective undergraduate research programs in science : the transformation from student to scientist

This is the first comprehensive, data-based study of the benefits to students who actively participate in authentic science research programs. The book features contributors from a variety of institutions who bring together studies of undergraduate research programs. They focus on identifying the successful elements of each program, and then draw valuable conclusions on the effects those programs have on the students.Providing much-needed information about the organization and administration of programs and the challenges to creating and sustaining viable research opportunities, this essential resource features a variety of perspectives, including those of external evaluators, longtime program directors, participants, and administrators, identifies the characteristics of effective programs and the kinds of gains that faculty and administrators can expect from them, examines the barriers to research opportunities, including lack of departmental and institutional resources and inadequate faculty compensation, and can be used as a primer for creating programs and for determining their effectiveness.
Optimized Use of Parallel Programming Interfaces in Multithreaded Embedded Architectures

Thread-level parallelism (TLP) exploitation for embedded systems has been a challenge for software developers: while it is necessary to take advantage of the availability of multiple cores, it is also mandatory to consume less energy. To speed up the development process and make it as transparent as possible, software designers use parallel programming interfaces (PPIs). However, as will be shown in this paper, each one implements different ways to exchange data, influencing performance, energy consumption and energy-delay product (EDP), which varies across different embedded processors. By evaluating four PPIs and three multicore processors, we demonstrate that it is possible to save up to 62% in energy consumption and achieve up to 88% of EDP improvements by just switching the PPI, and that the efficiency (i.e., The best possible use of the available resources) decreases as the number of threads increases in almost all cases, but at distinct rates.
LIPOSOME: METHODS OF PREPARATION AND APPLICATIONS

INTRODUCTION A liposome is a tiny bubble (vesicle), made out of the same material as a cell membrane. Liposomes can be filled with drugs, and used to deliver drugs for cancer and other diseases. Liposomes were first described by British haematologist Dr Alec D Bangham FRS in 1961 (published 1964), at the Babraham Institute, in Cambridge. They were discovered when Bangham and R. W. Horne were testing the institute's new electron microscope by adding negative stain to dry phospholipids. The resemblance to the plasmalemma was obvious, and the microscope pictures served as the first real evidence for the cell membrane being a bilayer lipid structure. The name liposome is derived from two Greek words: 'Lipos' meaning fat and 'Soma' meaning body. Structurally, liposomes are concentricbleedervesicles in which an aqueous volume is entirely enclosed by a membraneous lipid bilayer. Membranes are usually made of phospholipids, which are molecules that have a hydrophilic head group and a hydrophobic tail group. The head is attracted to water, and the tail, which is made of a long hydrocarbon chain, is repelled by water. 1
Robust IWFA for Open-Spectrum Communications

This correspondence considers a wireless open-spectrum communication system with N orthogonal narrowband tones and K users who compete to maximize their individual data rates. The correspondence proposes a robust version of the iterative water-filling algorithm (IWFA) that takes into account potential inaccuracies in the noise-plus-interference levels available at the transmitters. It is shown that, in comparison with the conventional version, the robust IWFA (RIWFA) can lead the users to behave in a less greedy fashion and to collaborate unintentionally in order to increase the network sum-rate. In particular, using an appropriately chosen RIWFA parameter, we show that RIWFA yields almost the same sum-rate as price-based IWFA (PIWFA) which requires collaboration of users.
Learning quadratic discriminant function for handwritten character classification

For handwriting recognition integrating segmentation and classification, the underlying classifier is desired to give both high accuracy and resistance to outliers. In a previous evaluation study, the modified quadratic discriminant function (MQDF) proposed by Kimura et al. (1987) was shown to be superior in outlier rejection but inferior in classification accuracy as compared to neural classifiers. The paper proposes a learning quadratic discriminant function (LQDF) to combine the advantages of MQDF and neural classifiers. The LQDF achieves high accuracy and outlier resistance via discriminative learning and adherence to Gaussian density assumption. The efficacy of LQDF was justified in experiments of handwritten digit recognition.
Inertial-aided state and slope estimation using a monocular camera

This paper aims at estimating the metric state of a quadrotor using a monocular camera and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) based on a homography model. Angular velocities are obtained from the on-board IMU and subtracted from the homography matrix. The reshaped vector from the homography matrix is directly fused with acceleration measurements using an Extended Kalman Filter. The visual inertial fusion framework is capable of estimating distance to the plane, speed, acceleration biases and surface normal. The feasibility of our method is proven using simulation and on real sensory data recorded from our quadrotor platform. It is shown that our approach is superior over traditional method that decomposes the homography matrix for the estimation of surface normal.
Security-enhanced energy-efficient data aggregation for cluster-based wireless sensor networks

Data aggregation is a process by which data collected and sent from sensor nodes to the base station via some sensor nodes called aggregators. Security plays a key role in data aggregation process to ensure privacy and confidentiality of aggregated data. In this paper, we proposed a data aggregation scheme for cluster-based WSN that enhances the security against attackers. Our scheme bases on accelerated homomorphism public key encryption which offers end-to-end concealment of and supports hop-to-hop verification. The analytical analysis and comparisons show that our approach has both higher security performance and lower computational cost compared to other approaches.
Denoising and extraction of electrocardiogram signal using Ensemble Pragmatic Mode Decomposition (EPMD)

Signal processing a major tool used for ECG analysis and interpretation in today's life. In ECG signal processing is used to improve the measurement accuracy and reproducibility comparatively. Separating respiration signals from ECG is one way of obtaining knowledge related to respiration especially when specialized equipments are not used to monitor the respiration continuously. There are chances of noises added to ECG signal when it is transferred via wireless medium. Some of these noises are baseline wander, power - line interference, etc. These types of noises corrupt the ECG signal resulting in a way unable to diagnose the disease. But removing the noise can only give the exact ECG signal. Here we are using Ensemble Pragmatic Mode Decomposition technique to remove the noises with single channel ECG based on higher order statistics and also to extract the QRS peak. The EPMD technique is altered from the NLWT algorithm in few aspects: the transform domain collaborative filtering and the block-based processing. NLWT is differed from EPMD by using Single channel ECG to reconstruct the respiratory signal waveform. To achieve the goal two techniques are used for the decomposing the ECG signal into suitable bases of functions namely Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) Analysis and the Ensemble Pragmatic Mode Decomposition (EPMD). The frequency information evolving with time scales and time locations provides the performance of HHT and Ensemble Pragmatic Mode Decomposition by an analysis of Intrinsic Mode Function (IMF). The signal to noise ratio is increased using EPMD technique and it overcomes the drawback of NLWT method by using single channel ECG signal instead of multichannel ECG signal in NLWT method.
Mediating Attention for Second Screen Companion Content

There is increasing interest in providing content to users on secondary devices while they watch TV. This material, termed companion content, can be anything from textual information, to interactive quiz games. It can be delivered throughout a broadcast and often directly relates to specific scenes in a show. This new scenario has exposed a challenging design space for creators of both the content and the enabling technology. A key question when introducing content on a secondary device is how much it detracts from, or enhances, the show the user is currently engaged with. To examine this, we investigated methods for mediating attention from the TV and onto a secondary device. By examining a typical use case we have been able to gain new insights into how best to design additional stimuli to alert users to companion content from both a broadcasting, and an HCI perspective.
Variations on the analysis of architectural drawings

Lately, our team has begun investigating the analysis of architectural drawings. The paper presents our first results. After a brief introduction to the specificities of architectural drawings and a short review of existing work, we describe the low level processing steps we have implemented: segmentation, vectorization and detection of arcs, loops detection. In the present state of our work, we have investigated two complementary techniques for higher level analysis; one is based on geometric analysis and symbol recognition, the other relies on the idea that architecture is a combination of spaces, and is therefore based on spatial analysis. We present our current results with these two techniques, and we suggest a number of perspectives for the continuation of this work.
Directional Metric Regularity of Multifunctions

In this paper, we study relative metric regularity of set-valued mappings with emphasis on directional metric regularity. We establish characterizations of relative metric regularity without assuming the completeness of the image spaces, by using the relative lower semicontinuous envelopes of the distance functions to set-valued mappings. We then apply these characterizations to establish a coderivative type criterion for directional metric regularity as well as for the robustness of metric regularity.
A background interstage gain calibration for a 16-bit pipelined ADC

Pipelined analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are sensitive to distortion introduced by the residue amplifiers in their first few stages. This paper presents a background self-calibration technique that can correct linear errors in the interstage amplifier of pipeline ADCs. Pseudo-random sequence and stage redundancy in pipelined architecture are used to measure opamp gain errors. With this calibration architecture used in a 16-bit 160MHz pipelined ADC, the simulation results show that a signal-to-noise-and-distortion performance improves from 59.8126dB to 75.1042dB, and a spurious-free dynamic range performance from 83.97dB to 97.8319dB.
Data-driven bird simulation

Natural motion of living creatures such as human and animals has generated widespread interest in computer animation field. Many film and game industries want to present these virtual creatures on their products and exhibit natural and realistic motions as much as possible. Among them, flying animals such as birds have been particularly focused on because of their special condition moving in flight. Because they move in the sky with its wings and their motions are affected by subtle air flow, the principle for generating flying behavior has to be completely different from that for creating biped human's or quadruped animal's locomotion behavior.
Metatools for knowledge acquisition

Four prototype metatools, Protege, Dots, Dash, and Spark, which researchers are using to experiment with the automatic generation of knowledge-acquisition tools, are discussed. Protege and Dots are stand-alone metatools; Dash and Spark are subsystems. Dash is part of Protege II, a design environment for knowledge-based systems. Spark is part of the Spark, Burn, and Firefighter framework for the design of application systems. The two stand-alone tools, their environments, and their subsystems are compared. Protege demonstrates how one can instantiate knowledge-acquisition tools from a description of a problem-solving method. Dots, on the other hand, lets one design knowledge-acquisition tools for many applications. Spark, Burn, and Firefighter are similar to Protege II in that they emphasize developing problem-solving methods from reusable components, although Spark, Burn and Firefighter associate a knowledge-acquisition tool with each method in the library. Protege II uses Dash to generate knowledge-acquisition tools from domain ontologies. <<ETX>>
Parallel framework for ant-like algorithms

This paper describes the work of an objective framework designed to be used in the parallelization of a set of related algorithms. As a concrete application a parallel ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO) for the travelling salesman problem (TSP) is presented. The idea behind the system we are describing is to have a reusable framework for running several sequential algorithms in a parallel environment. The algorithms that the framework can be used with have several things in common: they have to run in cycles and the work should be possible to be split between several "processing units". The parallel framework uses the message-passing communication paradigm and is organized as a master-slave system. The ACO for TSP implemented by means of the parallel framework proves to have good performances: approximately linear speedup and low communication cost.