Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatiotemporal Data-Cube Retrieval and Processing with xWCPS

Management and processing of big data is inherently interweaved with the exploitation of their metadata, also "big" on their own, not only due to the increased number of datasets that get generated with continuously increased rates, but also due to the need for deeper and wider description of those data, which yields metadata of higher complexity and volume. Taking into account that generally data cannot be processed unless enough description is provided on their structure, origin, etc, accessing those metadata becomes crucial not only for locating the appropriate data but also for consuming them. The instruments to access those metadata shall be tolerant to their heterogeneity and loose structure. In this direction, xWCPS (XPath-enabled WCPS) is a novel query language that targets the spatiotemporal data cubes domain and tries to bring together metadata and multidimensional data processing under a single syntax paradigm limiting the need of using different tools to achieve this. It builds on the domain-established WCPS protocol and the widely adopted XPath language and yields new facilities to spatiotemporal datacubes analytics. Currently in its 2nd release, xWCPS, represents a major revision over its predecessor aiming to deliver improved, clearer, syntax and to ease implementation
Thinking: A Study of Videogames in High School History Classes

This paper answers the question, how do three History teachers implement videogames in the classroom in order to engage students in critical thinking? My essay incorporates a large amount of research that shows the unique benefits of using games as pedagogical tools. I focus on the textual and interactive properties of narratively driven games, and how they differ from more traditional educational resources. The study involved interviews with three different high school history teachers who implement games in different ways to teach historical material. With the information gathered in my Literature Review and interviews, I explain that games engage students in critical thinking through the agency, simulation, and literacy that they provide. I argue that though other resources can provide these opportunities for students, none offer these different techniques in quite the way that good videogames do. My essay incorporates philosophical and literary considerations as a means to answering my research question. I also use these critical lenses to respond to certain criticisms regarding the videogame genre.
A combined texture-shape descriptor for enhanced 3D feature matching

Motivated by the increasing availability of 3D sensors capable of delivering both shape and texture information, this paper presents a novel descriptor for feature matching in 3D data enriched with texture. The proposed approach stems from the theory of a recently proposed descriptor for 3D data which relies on shape only, and represents its generalization to the case of multiple cues associated with a 3D mesh. The proposed descriptor, dubbed CSHOT, is demonstrated to notably improve the accuracy of feature matching in challenging object recognition scenarios characterized by the presence of clutter and occlusions.
Rationality and illusions of health.

RATIONALITY AND ILLUSIONS OF HEALTH MAY 2000 PAUL NORRIS, B.F. A. , RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN B. ARCH., RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN M.S., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Seymour Epstein People use two different modes of thinking: rational or analytic, and experiential or heuristic. Individuals who describe themselves as highly rational report low levels of psychological dysfunction. But some highly rational individuals may be classifiable as repressors, denying a high level of psychological distress because they regard it as socially undesirable. It was hypothesized that highly rational individuals who are low in experientiality will typically demonstrate heightened reactivity to stress in the absence of self-reported psychological distress, while highly rational individuals who are also high in experientiality will not. 42 male and 34 female college students replied to standard self-report inventories and underwent mildly psychologically stressful tasks. Heart rate and blood pressure were measured before and after the stressor. Analysis of physiological measures and mood-adjective checklists revealed significant differences between the high rational/high experiential group and the overall mean for all subjects, though in the direction opposite to that hypothesized. Although the hypothesis had not been supported, there was evidence that high levels of rationality may be associated with illusory mental health.
Occurrence of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis among Iran-Iraq war veterans

Background: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurological disorder with high mortality and morbidity. Some risk factors have been implicated for ALS such as exposure to high magnetic fields, and trace elements like selenium, cadmium and lead. A few studies have been carried out throughout the world to evaluate the prevalence of ALS among veterans. This study was aimed to evaluate ALS frequency among Iran – Iraq war veterans. Methods: Medical records of 52580 veterans were studied and those with suspected neuromuscular disorders were referred to a blind neurologist. ALS was verified according to World Federation of Neurology criteria. Student t-test and chi-square test were used for analysis and a P value less than 0.01 was considered significant. Results: Eleven definite ALS and two possible ALS cases were identified among the subjects. The mean age of onset of the disease was 43.7±9.7 years. All subjects had a record of at least three months involvement in action and symptoms began to show up after 16.5±3.6 years. The mean interval between exhibition of symptoms and the definitive diagnosis of the disease was 16.5 months. Conclusion: The prevalence of ALS in our population was significantly greater than that of international surveys (P<0.01). The onset of the disease occurred at a significantly lower age than typical ALS (P<0.01). Military service might therefore be a risk factor for ALS.
Wheelchair Detection Using Cascaded Decision Tree

One of the major goals of healthcare systems is to automatically monitor patients of special needs and alarm the caregivers for providing assistant. In this paper, an efficient single-camera multidirectional wheelchair detector based on a cascaded decision tree (CDT) is proposed to detect a wheelchair and its moving direction simultaneously from video frames for a healthcare system. Our approach combines a decision tree structure and boosted-cascade classifiers to construct a new CDT that can perform early confidence decisions in a hierarchical manner to rapidly reject nonwheelchairs and decide the moving directions. We also impose the tracking history to guide detection routes in the CDT to further reduce detection time and increase detection accuracy. The experiments show over 92% detection rate under cluttered scenes.
60 and 28GHz delay spread measurements and simulation at indoor

Millimeter-wave has been used for high transmission rate fixed communication in line of sight and short range without problems due to multipath reflections. But if it is used for mobile communications, such as WLAN using at 60GHz and 5G using at 28GHz, the delay spread made of multipath reflections limits the transmission rate. The delay spread characteristics were measured in an empty office room with only a partition for nonline of sight (NLOS), and compared the measured and simulated results of ray-tracing method at 60GHz. Finally, we suggested a method to study the delay spread characteristics at 28GHz for 5G service.
Multi-Engine Machine Translation with an Open-Source SMT Decoder

We describe an architecture that allows to combine statistical machine translation (SMT) with rule-based machine translation (RBMT) in a multi-engine setup. We use a variant of standard SMT technology to align translations from one or more RBMT systems with the source text. We incorporate phrases extracted from these alignments into the phrase table of the SMT system and use the open-source decoder Moses to find good combinations of phrases from SMT training data with the phrases derived from RBMT. First experiments based on this hybrid architecture achieve promising results.
Systematic Uncertainties in Stellar Mass Estimation for Distinct Galaxy Populations

We show that different stellar mass estimation methods yield overall mass scales that disagree by factors up to ~2 for the z = 0 galaxy population and, more importantly, relative mass scales that sometimes disagree by factors ≳3 between distinct classes of galaxies (spiral/irregular types, classical E/S0s, and E/S0s whose colors reflect recent star formation). This comparison considers stellar mass estimates based on (1) two different calibrations of the correlation between K-band mass-to-light ratio and B - R color and (2) detailed fitting of UBRJHK photometry and optical spectrophotometry using two different population synthesis models (Bruzual-Charlot and Maraston), with the same initial mass function in all cases. We also compare stellar+gas masses with dynamical masses. This analysis offers only weak arguments for preferring a particular stellar mass estimation method, given the plausibility of real variations in dynamical properties and dark matter content. These results help to calibrate the systematic uncertainties inherent in mass-based evolutionary studies of galaxies, including comparisons of low- and high-redshift galaxies.
Our best juniors still struggle with Gauss's Law: Characterizing their difficulties

We discuss student conceptual difficulties with Gauss’s law observed in an upper‐division Electricity and Magnetism (EM we present further quantitative and qualitative evidence that upper‐division students still struggle with Gauss’s law. This evidence is drawn from analysis of upper‐division E&M conceptual post‐tests, traditional exams, and formal student interviews. Examples of student difficulties include difficulty with the inverse nature of the problem, difficulty articulating complete symmetry arguments, and trouble recognizing that in situations without sufficient symmetry it is impossible (rather than “difficult”) to calculate the electric field using Gauss’s law. One possible explanation for some of these conceptual difficulties is that even students at the upper level may struggle to connect mathematical expressions to physical meanings.
CONSISTENT MULTIVIEW TEXTURING OF DETAILED 3 D SURFACE MODELS

Texture mapping techniques are used to achieve a high degree of realism for computer generated large-scale and detailed 3D surface models by extracting the texture information from photographic images and applying it to the object surfaces. Due to the fact that a single image cannot capture all parts of the scene, a number of images should be taken. However, texturing the object surfaces from several images can lead to lighting variations between the neighboring texture fragments. In this paper we describe the creation of a textured 3D scene from overlapping aerial images using a Markov Random Field energy minimization framework. We aim to maximize the quality of the generated texture mosaic, preserving the resolution from the original images, and at the same time to minimize the seam visibilities between adjacent fragments. As input data we use a triangulated mesh of the city center of Munich and multiple camera views of the scene from different directions.
Learning-based cursive handwriting synthesis

In this paper an integrated approach for modeling, learning and synthesizing personal cursive handwriting is proposed. Cursive handwriting is modeled by a tri-unit handwriting model, which focuses on both the handwritten letters and the interconnection strokes of adjacent letters. Handwriting strokes are formed from generative models that are based on control points and B-spline curves. In the two-step learning process, a template-based matching algorithm and a data congealing algorithm are first proposed to extract training vectors from handwriting samples, and then letter style models and concatenation style models are trained separately. In the synthesis process, isolated letters and ligature strokes are generated from the learned models and concatenated with each other to produce the whole word trajectory, with guidance from a deformable model. Experimental results show that the proposed system can effectively learn the individual style of cursive handwriting and has the ability to generate novel handwriting of the same style.
Finding and Analyzing Compiler Warning Defects

Good compiler diagnostic warnings facilitate software development as they indicate likely programming mistakes or code smells. However, due to compiler bugs, the warnings may be erroneous, superfluous or missing, even for mature production compilers like GCC and Clang. In this paper, we (1) propose the first randomized differential testing technique to detect compiler warning defects and (2) describe our extensive evaluation in finding warning defects in widely-used C compilers.At the high level, our technique starts with generating random programs to trigger compilers to emit a variety of compiler warnings, aligns the warnings from different compilers, and identifies inconsistencies as potential bugs. We develop effective techniques to overcome three specific challenges: (1) How to generate random programs, (2) how to align textual warnings, and (3) how to reduce test programs for bug reporting? Our technique is very effective — we have found and reported 60 bugs for GCC (38 confirmed, assigned or fixed) and 39 for Clang (14 confirmed or fixed). This case study not only demonstrates our technique’s effectiveness, but also highlights the need to continue improving compilers’ warning support, an essential, but rather neglected aspect of compilers.
Counting and Enumeration of Self-assembly pathways for Symmetric macromolecular Structures

We consider the problem of explicitly enumerating and counting the assembly pathways by which an icosahedral viral shell forms from identical constituent protein monomers. This poorly understood assembly process is a remarkable example of symmetric macromolecular self-assembly occuring in nature and possesses many features that are desirable while engineering self-assembly at the nanoscale. We use the new model of 24;25 that employs a static geometric constraint graph to represent the driving (weak) forces that cause a viral shell to assemble and hold it together. The model was developed to answer focused questions about the structural properties of the most probable types of successful assembly pathways. Specifically, the model reduces the study of pathway types and their probabilities to the study of the orbits of the automorphism group of the underlying geometric constraint graph, acting on the set of pathways. Since these are highly symmetric polyhedral graphs, it seems a viable approach to explicitly enumerate these orbits and count their sizes. The contribution of this paper is to isolate and simplify the core combinatorial questions, list related work and indicate the advantages of an explicit enumerative approach.
Febrl: a freely available record linkage system with a graphical user interface

Record or data linkage is an important enabling technology in the health sector, as linked data is a cost-effective resource that can help to improve research into health policies, detect adverse drug reactions, reduce costs, and uncover fraud within the health system. Significant advances, mostly originating from data mining and machine learning, have been made in recent years in many areas of record linkage techniques. Most of these new methods are not yet implemented in current record linkage systems, or are hidden within 'black box' commercial software. This makes it difficult for users to learn about new record linkage techniques, as well as to compare existing linkage techniques with new ones. What is required are flexible tools that enable users to experiment with new record linkage techniques at low costs. This paper describes the Febrl (Freely Extensible Biomedical Record Linkage) system, which is available under an open source software licence. It contains many recently developed advanced techniques for data cleaning and standardisation, indexing (blocking), field comparison, and record pair classification, and encapsulates them into a graphical user interface. Febrl can be seen as a training tool suitable for users to learn and experiment with both traditional and new record linkage techniques, as well as for practitioners to conduct linkages with data sets containing up to several hundred thousand records.
GRBs and the 511 keV emission of the Galactic bulge

We consider the phenomenology of the 511 keV emission in the Galactic bulge, as recently observed by INTEGRAL, and propose a model in which the positrons are produced by gamma-ray bursts (GRB) associated with mini-starbursts in the central molecular zone (CMZ). We show that the positrons can easily diffuse across the bulge on timescales of ∼ 10 7 yr, and that their injection rate by GRBs is compatible with the observed fluxes if the mean time between two GRBs in the bulge is ∼ $8\times 10^4$ yr $\times (E_{{\rm GRB}}/10^{51}\,{\rm erg})$. We also explain the low disk-to-bulge emission ratio by noting that positrons from GRBs in the Galactic disk should be annihilated on timescales of $\la$ 10 4 yr in the dense shell of the underlying supernova remnant, after the radiative transition, while the remnants of GRBs occurring in the hot, low-density medium produced by recurrent starbursts in the CMZ become subsonic before they can form a radiative shell, allowing the positrons to escape and fill the whole Galactic bulge. If the mean time between GRBs is smaller than ~$ 10^4\,{E}_{51}$ yr, INTEGRAL should be able to detect the (localized) 511 keV emission associated with one or a few GRB explosions in the disk.
Gene × Environment Interactions in Reading Disability and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder

This article examines Gene × Environment (G × E) interactions in two comorbid developmental disorders—reading disability (RD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)—as a window on broader issues on G × E interactions in developmental psychology. The authors first briefly review types of G × E interactions, methods for detecting them, and challenges researchers confront in interpreting such interactions. They then review previous evidence for G × E interactions in RD and ADHD, the directions of which are opposite to each other: bioecological for RD and diathesis stress for ADHD. Given these results, the authors formulate and test predictions about G × E interactions that would be expected at the favorable end of each symptom dimension (e.g., aboveaverage reading or attention). Consistent with their prediction, the authors found initial evidence for a resilience interaction for above-average reading: higher heritability in the presence of lower parental education. However, they did not find a G × E interaction at the favorable end of the ADHD symptom dimension. The authors conclude with implications for future research. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Bruce F. Pennington, Department of Psychology, University of Denver, 2155 South Race Street, Denver, CO 80208-0001. bpenning@du.edu. NIH Public Access Author Manuscript Dev Psychol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 January 1. Published in final edited form as: Dev Psychol. 2009 January ; 45(1): 77–89. doi:10.1037/a0014549. N IH PA Athor M anscript N IH PA Athor M anscript N IH PA Athor M anscript
Estimating security price derivatives using simulation

Simulation has proved to be a valuable tool for estimating security prices for which simple closed form solutions do not exist. In this paper we present two direct methods, a pathwise method and a likelihood ratio method, for estimating derivatives of security prices using simulation. With the direct methods, the information from a single simulation can be used to estimate multiple derivatives along with a security's price. The main advantage of the direct methods over resimulation is increased computational speed. Another advantage is that the direct methods give unbiased estimates of derivatives, whereas the estimates obtained by resimulation are biased. Computational results are given for both direct methods, and comparisons are made to the standard method of resimulation to estimate derivatives. The methods are illustrated for a path independent model (European options), a path dependent model (Asian options), and a model with multiple state variables (options with stochastic volatility).
On the Confidence Interval for the parameter of Poisson Distribution

The possibility of construction of continuous analogue of Poisson distribution with the search of bounds of confidence intervals for parameter of Poisson distribution is discussed. Also, in the article is shown that the true value of a parameter of Poisson distribution for the observed value $\hat x$ has Gamma distribution with the scale parameter, which is equal to one, and the shape parameter, which is equal to $\hat x$. The results of numerical construction of confidence intervals are presented.
Case-Based Trust Evaluation from Provenance Information

Trust is a crucial aspect for open distributed systems. Especially as users may rely on the shared services to make important decisions, it is essential to let them know services' trustworthiness. Provenance describes the origins and processes that are related to the generation of services. It can greatly enhance transparency and accountability of shared services. In this paper, we focus on how to derive trust information from huge amount of provenance data, and proposed a case-based approach which can estimate services' trustworthiness from provenance. This approach can greatly utilise the value of provenance, and provide more objective and reasonable trust estimation to users.
Advanced Joint Transceiver Design for Block-Diagonal Geometric-Mean-Decomposition-Based Multiuser MIMO Systems

In this paper, we propose an advanced joint transceiver design for block-diagonal geometric-mean-decomposition (BD-GMD) based multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. First, we use the lattice reduction (LR) method to design the BD-GMD-based advanced detection and precoding for an uplink and a downlink, respectively. Then, we exploit the vector perturbation (VP) technique to further improve the system performance of the multiuser downlink. To directly reduce the high complexity of VP by a sphere encoder, we provide an LR-based sphere encoder and LR-based approximations for perturbation symbols. Performance and complexity analyses are given to show the advantages of the proposed schemes. Particularly, the diversity-gain analysis shows some insights of the existing and proposed schemes. Simulation results verify the performance improvement as well as the theoretical analysis.