Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
RescueDP: Real-time spatio-temporal crowd-sourced data publishing with differential privacy

Nowadays gigantic crowd-sourced data collected from mobile phone users have become widely available, which enables the possibility of many important data mining applications to improve the quality of our daily lives. While providing tremendous benefits, the release of these data to the public will pose a considerable threat to mobile users' privacy. To solve this problem, the notion of differential privacy has been proposed to provide privacy with theoretical guarantee, and recently it has been applied in streaming data publishing. However, most of the existing literature focus on either event-level privacy on infinite streams or user-level privacy on finite streams. In this paper, we investigate the problem of real-time spatiotemporal crowd-sourced data publishing with privacy preservation. Specifically, we consider continuous publication of population statistics for monitoring purposes and design RescueDP-an online aggregate monitoring scheme over infinite streams with privacy guarantee. RescueDP's key components include adaptive sampling, adaptive budget allocation, dynamic grouping, perturbation and filtering, which are seamlessly integrated as a whole to provide privacy-preserving statistics publishing on infinite time stamps. We show that RescueDP can achieve w-event privacy over data generated and published periodically by crowd users. We evaluate our scheme with real-world as well as synthetic datasets and compare it with two w-event privacy-assured representative benchmarks. Experimental results show that our solution outperforms the existing methods and improves the utility with strong privacy guarantee.
Clinical planning support system-CliPSS

Clinical planning support system (CliPSS), which is software developed to support neurosurgical planning and to enable a surgeon to generate 3-D computed images interactively and simulate sterotactic surgery on them, is discussed. The basic functions of CliPSS, involving section display, editing, extraction, and rendering, are reviewed. A method of thinning the volume of polygonal data for a surface-rendered image, which improves CliPPS's performance and interactivity, is presented. <<ETX>>
The Emergence of Norms from Conflicts over Just Distributions

Why is it that well-intentioned actions can create persistent conflicts? While norms are widely regarded as a source for cooperation, this article proposes a novel theory in which the emergence of norms can be understood as a bargaining process in which normative conflicts explain the finally emerging norm. The theory is tested with a dynamical experiment on conflicts over the consideration of equality, effort or efficiency for the distribution of joint earnings. Normative conflict is measured by the number of rejected offers in a recursive bargaining game. The emerging normative system is analyzed by feedback cycles between micro- and macro-level. It is demonstrated that more normative cues cause more normative conflict. Further, under the structural conditions of either simple or complex situations, the convergence towards a simple and widely shared norm is likely. In contrast, in moderately complex situations, convergence is unlikely and several equally reasonable norms co-exist. The findings are discussed with respect to the integration of sociological conflict theory with the bargaining concept in economic theory.
Turkish Electronic Living Lexicon (TELL): A Lexical Database

The purpose of the TELL project is to create a database of Turkish lexical items which reflects actual speaker knowledge, rather than the normative and phonologically incomplete dictionary representations on which most of the existing phonological literature on Turkish is based. The database, accessible over the internet, should greatly enhance phonological, morphological, and lexical research on the language. The current version of TELL consists of the following components: • Some 15,000 headwords from the 2d and 3d editions of the Oxford Turkish-English dictionary, orthographically represented. • Proper names, including 175 place names from a guide of Istanbul, and 5,000 place names from a telephone area code directory of Turkey. • Phonemic transcriptions of the pronunciations of the same headwords and place names embedded in various morphological contexts. (Eliciting suffixed forms along with stems exposes any morphophonemic alternations that the headwords in question are subject to.) • Etymological information, garnered from a variety of etymological sources. • Roots for a number of morphologically complex headwords. The paper describes the construction of the current structure of the TELL database, points out potential questions that could be addressed by putting the database into use, and specifies goals for the next phase of the project.
Fast and easy development of pronunciation lexicons for names 1

We show that a good approach for the grapheme-to-phoneme conversion of Dutch proper names (e.g. person names, toponyms, etc), is to use a cascade of a general purpose grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) converter and a special purpose phoneme-to-phoneme (P2P) converter. The G2P produces an initial transcription that is then transformed by the P2P. The P2P is automatically trained on reference transcriptions of names belonging to the envisaged name category (e.g. toponyms). The P2P learning process is conceived in such a way that it can take account of high order determinants of pronunciation, such as specific syllables, name prefixes and name suffixes. The proposed methodology was successfully tested on person names and toponyms, but we believe that it will also offer substantial reductions of the cost for building pronunciation lexicons of other name categories.
Cirrus Radiative Properties in the Tropical Western Pacific

Cirrus clouds in tropical regions are often located high in the cold upper troposphere and have low optical depths. In addition, tropical cirrus often extend in large sheets up to 1000 km horizontally, which may have a large influence on the energy budget of the atmosphere. Characterizing the location and radiative properties of cirrus clouds is an important step in understanding the processes that generate and maintain these cold, thin cirrus clouds and their impact on upper tropospheric dynamics.
New algorithm for fetal QRS detection in surface abdominal records

The proposed method detects fetal R waves on abdominal non-invasive records. An exponentially averaged pattern of the mother PQRST segment is obtained and subtracted. Subsequently the fetal R detector based on a Smoothed Nonlinear Energy Operator (SNEO) is applied to the residual signal. Finally, criteria about amplitude, heart rate and backward search are settled to correct false detections. To evaluate the fetal R detector, 10 multichannel records were used, acquired between gestation week 22 and 40. The position of the fetal R waves were manually marked (N=1490), and these reference marks were compared with the ones from the detector. It was obtained a 88.83% of sensitivity and a 91.32% of positive prediction value. The application of the detector to all the abdominal channels will probably allow improving the obtained results.
The VC model: A universal pragmatic framework for GSS-enabled strategic planning

This paper has two broad objectives: (i) To develop a model of GSS-enabled strategic planning based on Habermas' theory of communicative action; (ii) To apply the model as a problem-structuring device to the conceptual problem of designing the strategic evaluation of a comprehensive urban plan. The model, known as the VC or validity-claims model, provides separate evaluative criteria for personal, social and technical aspects. The criteria for successful GSS-enabled strategic planning may be summarized as: "personal commitment validated by personal truthfulness or sincerity to a social consensus validated by rightness for informed action validated by objective truth". Detailed criteria (viz., goal, strategy, procedure, issues, and problems) are developed for each type of validity claim and matched to the technologies available. The result is a detailed brief for the design of GSS-enabled strategic urban planning interventions, including a sample agenda for the GSS-supported meeting and the GSS tools that will be employed.
Seven Aspects of Loan Size

Attempts to gauge the depth of outreach of microfinance organizations usually start--and often end--with the measurement of loan size. But just what is loan size? Loan size has at least seven aspects, each of which matters not only for depth of outreach but also for profitability. The aspects are: (1) term to maturity, (2) dollars disbursed, (3) average balance, (4) dollars per installment, (5) time between installments, (6) number of installments, and (7) dollar-years of resources. This paper defines the aspects, explains why each matters, and gives examples of their measurement.
VDESIGN: Toward image segmentation and composition in cave using finger interactions

The Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) system is a fully immersive virtual reality system, which can provide users with a realistic experience and a large freedom of interactions. In this paper, we propose vDesign, a CAVE-based virtual design environment using finger interactions. Specifically, we focus on the function of image segmentation and composition in the vDesign system. In vDesign, the user wears a marker on each hand. The interactions of the user are triggered based on the real-time positions of the markers. We design multiple finger interactions for image segmentation and image composition. In image segmentation, the user can use the right finger to select the interested object and the left finger to select the unrelated background. Based on the user's selection, a graph-cut based image segmentation is employed to extract the interested object from the image. In image composition, the user can move, rotate, and scale the segmented objects with fingers and combine them together into a final image. We implemented the vDesign prototype and conducted experiments to compare the finger interactions and the traditional wand interactions. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed finger interactions can provide faster and more accurate interactions compared to the traditional wand interactions.
Gouvernance des organisations et institutions : la prise en compte du contexte culturel et des traditions pour une gouvernance des entreprises de la filière cuir en Ethiopie

Alors qu’une majorite de travaux se concentre sur les mecanismes de controle ainsi que l’ethique autour des pratiques manageriales, peu d’etudes empiriques s’interessent a l’apparition, l’efficacite ou l’adequation de ces mecanismes dans le contexte dans lequel ils s’appliquent. Nous avons mene notre etude sur le cas particulier du secteur du cuir en Ethiopie afin de comprendre comment naissent les mecanismes de gouvernance et leur influence dans la performance des entreprises. La these a donc pour objectif la mise en evidence et l’analyse des mecanismes de gouvernance sur un territoire specifique en se concentrant sur les employes. Si les employes sont une partie prenante de l’entreprise, alors leur prise en compte dans les mecanismes de gouvernance doit influer sur la performance de l’entreprise. Se posent alors les problemes de qualification de la performance, des modalites de cette prise en compte et de l’evaluation de ses effets, ainsi que leur inclusion dans un contexte culturel concu dans sa profondeur historique.
Penguin: Objects for Programs, Relations for Persistence

Penguin is designed to support object-orientation for application programs while using relational databases as the persistent backing store. Objects are attractive to customers and programmers of applications because they structure information into a relevant and effective view. The use of relational databases that store of large amounts of base data for long periods of time enables Penguin to take advantage of mature solutions for sharing of information, concurrency, transactions, and recovery. We expect that application programs will be best designed with their own object schemata, so each object schema is supported as a series of views of the underlying relational databases. Penguin provides for multiple mappings to diverse object configurations, enhancing inter-application interoperation. This approach supports coexistence and sharing data among programs using relational technology with diverse application programs using object technology, as well as facilitating a migration to object technology.
Ethnic discrimination during résumé screening: Interactive effects of applicants’ ethnic salience with job context

Systematic research considering job context as affecting ethnic discrimination in hiring is limited. Building on contemporary literature on social categorization and cognitive matching, the interactive effect of context characteristics (client contact; industry status) and person characteristics (i.e. ethnic cues: Maghreb/Arab vs Flemish-sounding name; dark vs light skin tone) were investigated using an experimental field study among 424 white majority HR professionals. Findings showed that equally qualified applicants with a dark skin tone received lower job suitability ratings than applicants with a light skin tone, particularly when they were screened for high client contact/low industry status positions and low client contact/high industry status positions. It is concluded that some ethnic cues (such as skin tone) may be more salient compared with other cues and that job context may influence the salience of ethnic cues and steer hiring discrimination in subtle ways. Implications of these findings for hiring discrimination research and organizations are discussed.
Insights into the Cyanobacterial Deg/HtrA Proteases

Proteins are the main machinery for all living processes in a cell; they provide structural elements, regulate biochemical reactions as enzymes, and are the interface to the outside as receptors and transporters. Like any other machinery proteins have to be assembled correctly and need maintenance after damage, e.g., caused by changes in environmental conditions, genetic mutations, and limitations in the availability of cofactors. Proteases and chaperones help in repair, assembly, and folding of damaged and misfolded protein complexes cost-effective, with low energy investment compared with neo-synthesis. Despite their importance for viability, the specific biological role of most proteases in vivo is largely unknown. Deg/HtrA proteases, a family of serine-type ATP-independent proteases, have been shown in higher plants to be involved in the degradation of the Photosystem II reaction center protein D1. The objective of this review is to highlight the structure and function of their cyanobacterial orthologs. Homology modeling was used to find specific features of the SynDeg/HtrA proteases of Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803. Based on the available data concerning their location and their physiological substrates we conclude that these Deg proteases not only have important housekeeping and chaperone functions within the cell, but also are needed for remodeling the cell exterior.
Chapter 4. Conceptualizing learner characteristics in a complex, dynamic world

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Directional Indicator on Neural Oscillations as a Measure of Synaptic Plasticity in Chronic Unpredictable Stress Rats

To examine whether the directionality index of neural information flow (NIF) over specific oscillatory bands is useful in measuring synaptic plasticity, we employed the IM approach to determine the direction of NIF between the cortex and thalamus in normal and stressed animals. The experiment was performed by inducing long-term potentiation (LTP) of the thalamocortical pathway after recording local field potential (LFP). Additionally, comparison of IM measurement between broad- and narrowbands was performed, while a numerical study was also carried out for assessing the number of data points. The results show that the instantaneous phases extracted from narrowband vary monotonically, while these phases are jagged in broadband. Our data show that there is a predominant driving effect (coupling directional index d >0) from the thalamus to the frontal cortex in normal animals; however, the value of d is significantly reduced in the chronic stressed group in both the delta and theta bands. Furthermore, the field LTP data show that chronic stress decreases medial prefrontal cortex synaptic plasticity, which is certainly in line with the LFP findings. Together, these data suggest that using an IM algorithm, the directionality index of NIF in specific oscillatory frequency bands will probably be used as a measure of synaptic plasticity.
AUTHORSHIP PATTERN IN DIFFERENT DISCIPLINES

References appended to 92 Doctoral theses submitted to the Departments of mathematics, physics, mechanical engineering, philosophy and political science, University of Burdwan, India from 1981 to 1990 are taken as the object of study. Extent of multiple authorship, degree of authorship collaboration and their change with time are studied. Within broad subjects, multiple authored articles are found to be maximum in physics (62.24%) while 36.6% of the articles in mechanical engineering, 36.3% in mathematics, 12.3% in philosophy and only 3.85% in political science. Within specific subjects, multiple authorship is highest in nuclear physics (72.52%). The multiple authorship trend has increased steadily through decades (1950 to 1990) in physics, mathematics and psychology. In mechanical engineering, philosophy excluding psychology and political science, the multiple authorship trend has increased in the first few decades but then the trend has decreased for certain period. In mechanical engineering the multiple authorship was highest during 1951-1960. In philosophy excluding psychology, it was highest during 1971-1980 and in political science the multiple authorship was highest during 1961-1970
Perceptron learning rule derived from spike-frequency adaptation and spike-time-dependent plasticity

It is widely believed that sensory and motor processing in the brain is based on simple computational primitives rooted in cellular and synaptic physiology. However, many gaps remain in our understanding of the connections between neural computations and biophysical properties of neurons. Here, we show that synaptic spike-time-dependent plasticity (STDP) combined with spike-frequency adaptation (SFA) in a single neuron together approximate the well-known perceptron learning rule. Our calculations and integrate-and-fire simulations reveal that delayed inputs to a neuron endowed with STDP and SFA precisely instruct neural responses to earlier arriving inputs. We demonstrate this mechanism on a developmental example of auditory map formation guided by visual inputs, as observed in the external nucleus of the inferior colliculus (ICX) of barn owls. The interplay of SFA and STDP in model ICX neurons precisely transfers the tuning curve from the visual modality onto the auditory modality, demonstrating a useful computation for multimodal and sensory-guided processing.
Thermal stress comparison in modular power converter topologies for smart transformers in the electrical distribution system

A Smart Transformer (ST) can cover an important managing role in the future electrical distribution grid. For the moment, the reliability and cost are not competitive with traditional transformers and create a barrier for its application. This work conduct detail designs and analysis for a promising modular ST solution, which is composed of Modular Multi-level converter, Quad Active Bridge DC-DC converters, and two-level voltage source converters. The focus is put on the loading conditions and thermal stress of power semiconductor devices in order to discover critical parts of the whole system when performing various mission profiles in the realistic distribution grid. It is concluded that the thermal stress for all stages is low during normal operation and especially the isolation stage is stressed least.
Checkpointing an Operating System Using a Parapass-through Hypervisor

Many dynamic malware analysis systems based on hypervisors have been proposed. Although they support malware analysis effectively, many of them have a shortcoming that permits the malware to easily recognize the virtualized hardware and change its execution to prevent analysis. We contend that this drawback can be mitigated using a hypervisor that virtualizes the minimum number of hardware accesses. This paper proposes a hypervisor-based mechanism that can function as a building block for dynamic malware analysis systems. The mechanism provides the facility for checkpointing and restoring a guest OS. It is designed for a parapass-through hypervisor, that is, a hypervisor that runs directly on the hardware and does not execute a host OS or an administrative guest OS. The advantage of using a parapass-through hypervisor is that it provides a virtual machine whose hardware configuration and behavior is similar to the underlying physical machine, and hence, it can be stealthier than other hypervisors. We extend the parapassthrough hypervisor BitVisor with the proposed mechanism, and demonstrate that the resulting system can successfully checkpoint and restore the states of Linux and Windows OSes. We confirm that hypervisor detectors running on the system cannot identify the virtualized hardware, and determine that they are executing on a physical machine. We also confirm that the system imposes minimal overhead on the execution times of the benchmark programs.
Child Abuse and Neglect - A Multidimensional Approach

Definition, Incidence and Psychopathological Consequences of Child Abuse and Neglect / Muela, Alexander; Lopez de Arana, Elena; Barandiaran, Alexander; Larrea, Inaki; Vitoria, Jose Ramon -- The Cultural Reinforcers of Child Abuse / Al-Shail, Essam; Hassan, Ahmed; Aldowaish, Abdullah; Kattan, Hoda -- Recognizing the Co-Occurrence of Child and Domestic Abuse in Pregnancy and the First Postnatal Year / Lazenbatt, Anne -- Attachment Theory in the Assessment and Promotion of Parental Competency in Child Protection Cases / Cyr, Chantal; Dubois-Comtois, Karine; Michel, Genevieve ; Poulin, Caroline; Pascuzzo, Katherine; Losier, Valerie; Dumais, Marilyne; St-Laurent , Diane; Moss, Ellen -- Human Trafficking of Young Women and Girls for Sexual Exploitation in South Africa / Mandisa Lutya, Thozama -- Increasing Awareness of Brazilian Family Health Team Professionals on Reporting Child Abuse: A Case Study / Bannwart, Thais H. ; Williams, Lucia C.A. -- Residential Care as a Resource of the Childhood Welfare System : Current Strengths and Future Challenges / Martin, Eduardo -- Interaction Design for Preventing Child Abuse / Jung, Euichul; Im, Joonbin