Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Turing test for free will

Before Alan Turing made his crucial contributions to the theory of computation, he studied the question of whether quantum mechanics could throw light on the nature of free will. This paper investigates the roles of quantum mechanics and computation in free will. Although quantum mechanics implies that events are intrinsically unpredictable, the ‘pure stochasticity’ of quantum mechanics adds randomness only to decision-making processes, not freedom. By contrast, the theory of computation implies that, even when our decisions arise from a completely deterministic decision-making process, the outcomes of that process can be intrinsically unpredictable, even to—especially to—ourselves. I argue that this intrinsic computational unpredictability of the decision-making process is what gives rise to our impression that we possess free will. Finally, I propose a ‘Turing test’ for free will: a decision-maker who passes this test will tend to believe that he, she, or it possesses free will, whether the world is deterministic or not.
Patch-based Video Browsing

Interacting with video content can be very time-consuming, and solutions are needed to support people in the process of browsing a video so that they can efficiently interact with the video content. Based on information foraging theory, we have developed a video content browsing tool. Video content is accessed by means of “patches”, which provide interaction with the video document that partly surpasses the burden of video’s time-based nature. Patches can be of various types and can be combined using logical operators. Within-patch and between-patches browsing behaviour is well supported. The browsing process is considered to be the (fast) alternation between metadata-driven and data-driven interaction. The current application’s priority is to support this browsing process. Preliminary test results indicate that a “patch–approach” is very fruitful. Important research issues are identified related to video content descriptions and browsing behaviour.
Audio-based Emotion Recognition for Advanced Automatic Retrieval in Judicial Domain

Thanks to the recent progresses in judicial proceedings management, especially related to the introduction of audio/video recording systems, semantic retrieval has now become a realistic key challenge. In this context emotion recognition engine, through the analysis of vocal signature of actors involved in judicial proceedings, could provide useful annotations for semantic retrieval of multimedia clips. With respect to the generation of semantic emotional tag in judicial domain, two main contributions are given: (1) the construction of an Italian emotional database for Italian proceedings annotation; (2) the investigation of a hierarchical classification system, based on risk minimization method, able to recognize emotional states from vocal signatures. In order to estimate the degree of affection we compared the proposed classification method with the traditional ones, highlighting in terms of classification accuracy the improvements given by a hierarchical learning approach.
Stability and elastic properties of B2 CoX (X = Ti, Zr and Hf) intermetallic compounds as a function of pressure

Abstract By means of first-principles calculations within the generalised gradient approximation (GGA), phase stability, elastic properties and electronic structures of B2 CoX (X = Ti, Zr and Hf) compounds as a function of pressure have been investigated. The formation energy indicates that CoTi is the most stable phase in these three B2 phases under different pressures. The elastic properties of B2 Co (X = Ti, Zr and Hf), calculated via the Voigt–Reuss–Hill (VRH) approximation, increase with increasing pressure. The mechanical anisotropies are characterised by the universal anisotropy index (AU) and the Zener anisotropy index (AZ). The sound velocities, Debye temperatures and melting temperature under applied pressure are also evaluated. Electronic structure show that the changes in the charge distribution are moderate under applied pressure, resulting in the general characteristics of the bonding between X (X = Ti, Zr and Hf) and Co remain unchanged.
Iterative total-variation reconstruction versus weighted filtered-backprojection reconstruction with edge-preserving filtering

Iterative image reconstruction with the total-variation (TV) constraint has become an active research area in recent years, especially in x-ray CT and MRI. Based on Green's one-step-late algorithm, this paper develops a transmission noise weighted iterative algorithm with a TV prior. This paper compares the reconstructions from this iterative TV algorithm with reconstructions from our previously developed non-iterative reconstruction method that consists of a noise-weighted filtered backprojection (FBP) reconstruction algorithm and a nonlinear edge-preserving post filtering algorithm. This paper gives a mathematical proof that the noise-weighted FBP provides an optimal solution. The results from both methods are compared using clinical data and computer simulation data. The two methods give comparable image quality, while the non-iterative method has the advantage of requiring much shorter computation times.
Synthesis of reduced Graphene Oxide (rGO) using different treatments of Graphene Oxide (GO)

In this work, a combined chemical and mechanical method was used for the production of graphene instead of chemical method only. The use of mechanical sonication was to assists exfoliation graphene oxide (GO) besides the used of chemical reagents. Then, the reduction of GO into graphene was carried out using L-ascorbic acid. The effects sonication cause synthesis of GO undergoes peeling graphitic layer and at the same time expose the layer with oxidizing agent. The properties of GO and reduced-graphene oxide (rGO) using various routes were investigated using XRD and FTIR. The main characteristics peak was observed at 7°and 9° for GO prepared using sonication and without sonication, respectively. The decreased of 2-theta degree of GO prepared using sonication indicates that the d-value becomes bigger. Estimation of average diameter rGO (with sonication) was 24.49 nm while rGO (without sonication) was 126.2 nm. The reduction of both GO was then carried out using an environmentally reducing agent, ascorbic acid. It was found that the L-ascorbic acid was effective in removing oxygenated functional groups. The conductivity values obtained for rGO-s was 7640 S/m while rGO-ws was is 678 S/m.
Liver transplantation and subsequent risk of cancer: Findings from a Canadian cohort study

Characterization of the long‐term cancer risks among liver transplant patients has been hampered by the paucity of sufficiently large cohorts. The increase over time in the number of liver transplants coupled with improved survival underscores the need to better understand associated long‐term health effects. This is a cohort study whose subjects were assembled with data from the population‐based Canadian Organ Replacement Registry. Analyses are based on 2034 patients who received a liver transplant between June 1983 and October 1998. Incident cases of cancer were identified through record linkage to the Canadian Cancer Registry. We compared site‐specific cancer incidence rates in the cohort and the general Canadian population by using the standardized incidence ratio (SIR). Stratified analyses were performed to examine variations in risk according to age at transplantation, sex, time since transplantation, and year of transplantation. Liver transplant recipients had cancer incidence rates that were 2.5 times higher than those of the general population [95% confidence interval (CI) = 2.1, 3.0]. The highest SIR was observed for non‐Hodgkin's lymphoma (SIR = 20.8, 95% CI = 14.9, 28.3), whereas a statistically significant excess was observed for colorectal cancer (SIR = 2.6, 95% CI = 1.4, 4.4). Risks were more pronounced during the first year of follow‐up and among younger transplant patients. In conclusion, our findings indicate that liver transplant patients face increased risks of developing cancer with respect to the general population. Increased surveillance in this patient population, particularly in the first year following transplantation, and screening for colorectal cancer with modalities for which benefits are already well recognized should be pursued. Liver Transpl 14:1588–1597, 2008. © 2008 AASLD.
Improving Vietnamese Sentence Compression by Segmenting Meaning Chunks

This paper proposes an approach for sentence compression that only requires the part-of-speech information. The method is based on an observation of the human compression: adjacent words which form a meaning chunk usually are removed or retained together. We incorporate meaning chunk as a feature for a CRF-based sequence labeling system. Experimental results on English and Vietnamese compression datasets show that the proposed approach achieved better performance than the state-of-the-art systems.
Resolving the Nature of the Rosette HH 1 Jet Facing Strong UV Dissipation

The Rosette HH 1 jet is a collimated flow immersed in the strong UV radiation field of the Rosette Nebula. We investigate the physical properties of the Rosette HH 1 jet using high-quality narrowband images and high-dispersion spectroscopy. The new images show that the axis of the jet is not precisely aligned with the star near the base of the jet. The high resolution of the spectra allows us to accurately determine the contributions from the H II region, jet, and star. The approaching and receding sides of the expanding shell of the Rosette Nebula are at heliocentric velocities of 13 and 40 km s-1, while the jet reaches a maximum velocity offset at a heliocentric velocity of -30 km s-1. The [S II] doublet ratios indicate an electron density of ~1000 cm-3 in the jet and ≤100 cm-3 in the H II region. With a careful subtraction of the nebular and jet components, we find the stellar Hα line is dominated by a broad absorption profile with little or no emission component, indicating a lack of substantial circumstellar material. The circumstellar material has most likely been photoevaporated by the strong UV radiation field in the Rosette Nebula. The evaporation timescale is 103-10 4 yr. The Rosette HH 1 jet source provides evidence for an accelerated evolution from a CTTS to a WTTS due to the strong UV radiation field; therefore, both CTTSs and WTTSs can be spatially mixed in regions with massive star formation.
Caching multidimensional queries using chunks

Caching has been proposed (and implemented) by OLAP systems in order to reduce response times for multidimensional queries. Previous work on such caching has considered table level caching and query level caching. Table level caching is more suitable for static schemes. On the other hand, query level caching can be used in dynamic schemes, but is too coarse for “large” query results. Query level caching has the further drawback for small query results in that it is only effective when a new query is subsumed by a previously cached query. In this paper, we propose caching small regions of the multidimensional space called “chunks”. Chunk-based caching allows fine granularity caching, and allows queries to partially reuse the results of previous queries with which they overlap. To facilitate the computation of chunks required by a query but missing from the cache, we propose a new organization for relational tables, which we call a “chunked file. ” Our experiments show that for workloads that exhibit query locality, chunked caching combined with the chunked file organization performs better than query level caching. An unexpected benefit of the chunked file organization is that, due to its multidimensional clustering properties, it can significantly improve the performance of queries that “miss” the cache entirely as compared to traditional file organizations.
Morphological, rheological and electrical study of PLA reinforced with carbon-based fillers for 3D printing applications

Three dimensional printing (3DP) is a technique that, assisted by a computer-aided design (CAD), allows fast, direct and accurate fabrication of composites with complex 3D features and a broad range of sizes. However, poor mechanical stability and the impossibility to print electrically conductive objects remain critical problems to be solved because of the thermoplastic polymer used with a 3D printer based on fused-deposition modeling (FDM). In the present work, in order to overcome such limitations, the use of polylactic acid (PLA) reinforced with two types of highly conductive nano-carbon fillers, i.e. multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) and graphene nanoplates (GNPs) as a novel materials for 3D printing is proposed. In particular, a morphological, rheological and electrical characterization is carried out to support their potential applicability.
Scaling question answering to the Web

The wealth of information on the web makes it an attractive resource for seeking quick answers to simple, factual questions such as &quote;who was the first American in space? &quote; or &quote;what is the second tallest mountain in the world? &quote; Yet today's most advanced web search services (e.g., Google and AskJeeves) make it surprisingly tedious to locate answers to such questions. In this paper, we extend question-answering techniques, first studied in the information retrieval literature, to the web and experimentally evaluate their performance.First we introduce Mulder, which we believe to be the first general-purpose, fully-automated question-answering system available on the web. Second, we describe Mulder's architecture, which relies on multiple search-engine queries, natural-language parsing, and a novel voting procedure to yield reliable answers coupled with high recall. Finally, we compare Mulder's performance to that of Google and AskJeeves on questions drawn from the TREC-8 question answering track. We find that Mulder's recall is more than a factor of three higher than that of AskJeeves. In addition, we find that Google requires 6.6 times as much user effort to achieve the same level of recall as Mulder.
Generating robust parsers using island grammars

Source model extraction, the automated extraction of information from system artifacts, is a common phase in reverse engineering tools. One of the major challenges of this phase is creating extractors that can deal with irregularities in the artifacts that are typical for the reverse engineering domain (for example, syntactic errors, incomplete source code, language dialects and embedded languages). The paper proposes a solution in the form of island grammars, a special kind of grammar that combines the detailed specification possibilities of grammars with the liberal behavior of lexical approaches. We show how island grammars can be used to generate robust parsers that combine the accuracy of syntactical analysis with the speed, flexibility and tolerance usually only found in lexical analysis. We conclude with a discussion of the development of MANGROVE, a generator for source model extractors based on island grammars and describe its application to a number of case studies.
Debugging Multithreaded Programs that Incorporate User-Level Locking

A multithreaded program with a bug may behave nondeterministically, and this nondeterminism typically makes the bug hard to localize. This thesis presents a debugging tool, the Nondeterminator-2, which automatically finds certain nondeterminacy bugs in programs coded in the Cilk multithreaded language. Specifically, the Nondeterminator-2 finds "dag races," which occur when two logically parallel threads access the same memory location while holding no locks in common, and at least one of the accesses writes the location. The Nondeterminator-2 contains two dynamic algorithms, All-Sets and Brelly, which check for dag races in the computation generated by the serial execution of a Cilk program on a given input. All-Sets is asymptotically faster than previous race-detection algorithms, and Brelly is an even faster algorithm that can be used to detect races in programs intended to obey the "umbrella" locking discipline, a programming methodology that precludes races. In this thesis, we formally define several "levels" of nondeterminism, and we show that the Nondeterminator-2''s two algorithms can verify the determinacy of a deadlock-free program running on a given input if the program is "abelian," meaning that its critical sections "commute. " Finally, we describe our experiences using the Nondeterminator-2 to help parallelize a real-world radiosity program.
Participatory Search

Participatory search can be defined as a search service framework where each participant takes care of gathering information and contributing indexes to a central location where the indexes are integrated and deployed for running a search service. Participatory search has distinguishing characteristics with respect to other search service architectures, among these the ability to share with others material that is not available to traditional search engine crawlers. We present the architecture for participatory search and a protocol for index exchange that we are developing. A deployment niche for participatory search is the implementation of search services for community networks.
Comparison of escitalopram and citalopram efficacy: A meta-analysis

OBJECTIVE Escitalopram is a new selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) indicated for the treatment of major depressive disorder (MDD) and panic disorder. Escitalopram is the therapeutically active enantiomer of citalopram. Its efficacy in the treatment of MDD was compared to that of citalopram. METHODS A quantitative meta-analysis was applied to 1262 patients in four randomised clinical trials; the comparison was based on response rate and mean change from baseline in the Montgomery–Åsberg depression rating scale (MADRS) total score at week 8. Complementary analyses were performed on early MADRS change from baseline (week 1), in very severely depressed patients (baseline MADRS total score ≥35) and on the influence of the level of severity at baseline. RESULTS Compared with citalopram, escitalopram-treated patients showed significantly higher response rates and increased mean change from baseline in MADRS at weeks 1 and 8. The superiority of escitalopram over citalopram was more pronounced in very severely depressed patients. This superiority was further shown to increase with degree of severity of the depression. The robustness of meta-analysis results was supported by sensitivity analyses. The clinical superiority of escitalopram versus citalopram is consistent with the results of preclinical pharmacological studies. CONCLUSION Escitalopram was shown to be an effective therapeutic treatment for MDD, presenting significant advantages over citalopram.
Analyzing Manifestos in their Electoral Context A New Approach Applied to Austria, 2002–2008*

We present a new method to analyze party manifestos to benefit the placement of political parties per se and to advance the study of elections. Our method improves on existing manual coding approaches by (1) generating semantically complete units based on syntax, (2) standardizing units into a subject–predicate–object structure, and (3) employing a fine-grained and flexible hierarchical coding scheme. We evaluate our approach by comparing estimates for the 2002, 2006, and 2008 Austrian national elections with those yielded by previous studies that employ the entire range of available measurement strategies. We also demonstrate how we link our new manifesto data with other kind of data produced in theAustrian National Election Study, especially mass and elite (party candidate) surveys.
Virtual Enterprise and Corporate Memory

In Concurrent Engineering, several designers in different fields and from different enterprise collaborate to build a product. This organization is a temporal organizational structure, called virtual enterprise. In fact, once the project is realized, the virtual enterprise is dissolved, so the deal in such organization is to keep the volatile knowledge. In this paper, we propose a guide to elaborate a corporate memory in Concurrent Engineering by identifying the type of memory needed, the contents of memory according to its use during the Concurrent Engineering process.
Monobit Digital Receivers for QPSK: Design, Analysis and Performance

Future communication system requires large bandwidth to achieve high data rate up to multigigabit/ sec, which makes analog-to-digital (ADC) become a key bottleneck for the implementation of digital receivers due to its high complexity and large power consumption. Therefore, monobit receivers for BPSK have been proposed to address this problem. In this work, QPSK modulation is considered for higher data rate. First, the optimal receiver based on monobit ADC with Nyquist sampling is derived, and its corresponding performance in the form of deflection ratio is calculated. Then a suboptimal but more practical monobit receiver is obtained, along with iterative demodulation and small sample removal. The effect of the imbalances between the In-phase (I) and Quadrature-phase (Q) branches, including the amplitude and phase imbalances, is carefully investigated too. To combat the performance loss caused by IQ imbalances, monobit receivers based on double training sequences are proposed. Numerical simulations show that the low-complexity suboptimal receiver suffers only 3dB signal to noise ratio (SNR) loss in AWGN channels and 1dB SNR loss in multipath static channels compared with the matched filter based monobit receiver with full channel state information (CSI). The impact of the phase difference between the transmitter and receiver is presented. It is observed that the performance degradation caused by the amplitude imbalance is negligible. Receivers based on double training sequences can efficiently compensate the performance loss in AWGN channel. Thanks to the diversity offered by the multipath, the effect of imbalances on monobit receivers in fading channels is slight. I
Low-temperature co-pyrolysis behaviours and kinetics of oily sludge: effect of agricultural biomass

ABSTRACT Pyrolysis is potentially an effective treatment of oily sludge for oil recovery, and its kinetics and efficiency are expected to be affected by additives. In the present study, the pyrolysis parameters, including heating rate, final pyrolysis temperature, and pyrolysis time of oily sludge in the presence of agricultural biomass, apricot shell, were systematically explored. As a result, maximum oil recovery is achieved when optimizing the pyrolysis conditionas15 K/min, 723 K, and 3 h for heating rate, final pyrolysis temperature, and pyrolysis time, respectively. Thermogravimetric experiments of oily sludge samples in the presence of various biomasses conducted with non-isothermal temperature programmes suggest that the pyrolysis process contains three stages, and the main decomposition reaction occurs in the range of 400–740 K. Taking Flynn–Wall–Ozawa analysis of the derivative thermogravimetry and thermogravimetry results, the activation energy (E a) values for the pyrolysis of oily sludge in the presence and absence of apricot shell were derived to be 35.21 and 39.40 kJ mol−1, respectively. The present work supports that the presence of biomass promotes the pyrolysis of oily sludge, implying its great potential as addictive in the industrial pyrolysis of oily sludge.