Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Agent-based Hough Transform: A Way to the Improvement of the Execution Time in the Detection of the Dominant Straight Line in an Image

This paper focuses on the minimization of the time of the dominant straight line detection in an image using Hough Transform algorithm. The idea is a mixture between two domains, namely image processing and multi-agent systems. The importance of this work comes from the relying of image processing techniques on hardware accelerations. This paper demonstrates how the distribution of a purely sequential processing on a set of agents leads to an improvement from time execution point of view. The purpose is to reduce the execution time of Hough transform technique through the distribution of the algorithm on a set of reactive agents. This may allow the exploitation of a parallel or distributed environment. The main idea is based on the division of similar repeated processing with different parameters on several agents. It is a SIMD-like architecture according to Flynn classification. The obtained results are promising in the way that the execution time is at least divided by 4 comparatively to the use of the algorithm in its sequential form.
Wandering behaviour in people with dementia.

BACKGROUND Wandering has been described as one of the most challenging behaviours to manage and yet a search of the literature in the last two decades yields only a limited number of papers that specifically studied wandering. AIM This paper reviews the current literature on wandering in relation to the nature of the phenomenon, attempts to classify the behaviour, the extent of the problem, the profile of those who wander, postulations about its aetiology, and intervention strategies being employed. METHOD Eight literature databases were searched for the last 40 years up to February 2003 using 'wandering' and 'dementia' as combined keywords. A total of 133 articles was included in the review. FINDINGS The prevalence of wandering behaviour was difficult to assess and no conclusions could be reached. The typical wanderer depicted in the literature was relatively young in the older population, more cognitively impaired, more likely to be a man, might have experienced sleep problems, had a more active premorbid lifestyle, and used more psychotropic medications. While studies agreed that wanderers are more cognitively impaired, their findings did not necessarily agree on other attributes. Three major approaches, namely the biomedical, psychosocial and person-environment interaction perspectives, in conceptualizing wandering behaviour can be identified from the literature. Medications, activity programmes, behavioural modification and environmental manipulation have been used as interventions but none has so far demonstrated unequivocal effectiveness. CONCLUSION Knowledge generated through research remains insufficient to explain fully why and when wandering occurs. Variability in how the phenomenon was defined and studied, and the small size of the samples made generalizability of findings difficult. Future research should incorporate a clearer definition of wandering; a specific targeted population with representative sample size; appropriate subject identification strategies; focussed interventions, and better control conditions.
Summary and Future Perspectives

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A NEURAL SYSTEM OF PHONEMATIC TRANSFORMATION

A common task in speech processing for which neural networks are widely employed is text-to-phoneme conversion. In this paper we propose a novel solution to this problem by combining a multilayer neural network and a modular hybrid system that uses basic rules to subdivide the original problem into easier tasks which are then solved by dedicated neural networks. A hybrid solution can be more rapidly constructed than a single net solution, and is easily extendable. Input data representation is also discussed. A voting committee concept is used to enhance generalization abilities of the system. Efficiency of the proposed systems is compared.
Recoding of Sensory Information across the Retinothalamic Synapse

The neural code that represents the world is transformed at each stage of a sensory pathway. These transformations enable downstream neurons to recode information they receive from earlier stages. Using the retinothalamic synapse as a model system, we developed a theoretical framework to identify stimulus features that are inherited, gained, or lost across stages. Specifically, we observed that thalamic spikes encode novel, emergent, temporal features not conveyed by single retinal spikes. Furthermore, we found that thalamic spikes are not only more informative than retinal ones, as expected, but also more independent. Next, we asked how thalamic spikes gain sensitivity to the emergent features. Explicitly, we found that the emergent features are encoded by retinal spike pairs and then recoded into independent thalamic spikes. Finally, we built a model of synaptic transmission that reproduced our observations. Thus, our results established a link between synaptic mechanisms and the recoding of sensory information.
Comparison of mechanomyographic sensors during incremental cycle ergometry for the quadriceps femoris

The purpose of this study was to examine the mechanomyographic (MMG) amplitude and mean power frequency (MPF) versus power output relationships for the vastus lateralis and rectus femoris muscles during incremental cycle ergometry between the piezoelectric contact sensor (HP) and the accelerometer (ACC) sensor. Nine men performed an incremental cycle ergometry test to voluntary exhaustion. Polynomial regression analyses on a subject‐by‐subject basis indicated that the relationship between the normalized MMG amplitude versus normalized power output was best fit with either a linear, quadratic, or cubic model. These patterns were consistent between sensors for each muscle for each subject. No consistent relationship was found for MMG MPF within subjects and between muscle groups. In addition, there were no significant sensor × power output interactions for normalized MMG amplitude or MPF. These results suggest that, for cycle ergometry, the HP and ACC sensors provide similar information for the interpretation of motor control strategies during continuous exercise. Muscle Nerve, 2010
The Influence of Individual Attributes On Inter-Ethnic Tolerance among Early Youth In Selangor

The development, survival, and continuity of Malaysia lie on the shoulders of young Malaysians. As such, youth should demonstrate a higher level of understanding and greater tolerance in order to maintain peace and harmony. In line with that, the objective of this study is to determine the influence of individual attributes on inter-ethnic tolerance among early youth in Selangor. And, it focused on the influence of cognitive readiness, personality traits and religious personality on attitude, which would in turn, influence how an individual behaved in a multi-cultural situation. The Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) framework (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1991) was used to model the relationships among the three selected independent variables that contributed toward inter-ethnic tolerance behavior. As many as 563 secondary school students in Selangor, representing early youth, participated in this study. This study adopted the exploratory design and survey data collection method. Instruments used were the Malay translated NEO PI-R Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R), a self- designed questionnaire on the Inter-ethnic Tolerant Behavior (IETB) and Universal Religious Personality Inventory (URPI). The study found that more than half of the youth possessed high level of cognitive readiness. For Malay and Indian youth, the majority have high level of cognitive readiness, while more female youth tend to have high cognitive readiness compared to male. In terms of attitude, majority of the respondents were found to have high level of positive attitude regarding inter-ethnic relations. Gender, religion and the level of religious practice significantly contribute to youth attitude towards Inter-ethnic Tolerant Behavior (IETB). In terms of the level of IETB, the majority of the Malay and Chinese early youth displayed a moderate level; however, the majority of the Indian youth have a high level of IETB. The findings indicated that cognitive readiness, all personality traits, except for the domain of Neuroticism, and all three types of religious personality (pro-social, ritual and anti-social) significantly influenced the youth’s willingness to accept issues regarding inter-ethnic relations. Specifically, pro-social and ritual behavior influenced youth attitude positively, while the influence of anti-social behavior on attitude was negative. The study improved the proposed model which was based on Theory of Planned behavior (TBP) and confirmed the impact of cognitive readiness, personality traits and religious personality on youth attitude, and the impact of the youth attitude on their behavior on inter-ethnic issues. The study also found that cognitive readiness is the most influential factor to IETB, and that both cognitive readiness and religious personality influenced inter-ethnic tolerant behavior directly and indirectly as well through attitude. Inter-ethnic tolerant behavior (IETB) among students may be improved through enhancing cognitive readiness, pro-social behavior, attitude and openness of the individuals.
Use of plethysmographic variability index derived from the Massimo® pulse oximeter to predict fluid or preload responsiveness: a systematic review and meta‐analysis

This systematic review and meta‐analysis assessed the accuracy of plethysmographic variability index derived from the Massimo® pulse oximeter to predict preload responsiveness in peri‐operative and critically ill patients. A total of 10 studies were retrieved from the literature, involving 328 patients who met the selection criteria. Overall, the diagnostic odds ratio (16.0; 95% CI 5–48) and area under the summary receiver operating characteristic curve (0.87; 95% CI 0.78–0.95) for plethysmographic variability index to predict fluid or preload responsiveness was very good, but significant heterogeneity existed. This could be explained by a lower accuracy of plethysmographic variability index in spontaneously breathing or paediatric patients and those studies that used pre‐load challenges other than colloid fluid. The results indicate specific directions for future studies.
Critical globalization studies

If academics and intellectuals are to play a meaningful part in addressing the urgent issues that humanity faces in the twenty-first century—those of war and peace, social justice, democracy, cultural diversity, and ecological sustainability—it is incumbent upon us to gain an analytical understanding of globalization as the underlying structural dynamic that drives social, political, economic, and cultural processes around the world. My colleague Richard Appelbaum and I recently put out a call for a critical globalization studies (henceforth, CGS):
DOORS: towards high-performance fault tolerant CORBA

An increasing number of applications are being developed using distributed object computing middleware, such as CORBA. Many of these applications require the underlying middleware, operating systems, and networks to provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS) support to enhance their efficiency, predictability, scalability, and fault tolerance. The Object Management Group (OMG), which standardizes CORBA, has addressed many of these application requirements in the Real-time CORBA and Fault-Tolerant CORBA specifications. We provide four contributions to the study of fault-tolerant CORBA middleware for performance-sensitive applications. First, we provide an overview of the Fault Tolerant CORBA specification. Second, we describe a framework called DOORS, which is implemented as a CORBA service to provide end-to-end application-level fault tolerance. Third, we outline how the DOORS' reliability and fault-tolerance model has been incorporated into the standard OMG Fault-tolerant CORBA specification. Finally, we outline the requirements for CORBA ORB core and higher-level services to support the Fault Tolerant CORBA specification efficiently.
A DNN-based acoustic modeling of tonal language and its application to Mandarin pronunciation training

In this paper we investigate a Deep Neural Network (DNN) based approach to acoustic modeling of tonal language and assess its speech recognition performance with different features and modeling techniques. Mandarin Chinese, the most widely spoken tonal language, is chosen for testing the tone related ASR performance. Furthermore, the DNN-trained, tone-sensitive model is evaluated in automatic detection of mispronunciation among L2 Mandarin learners. The best DNN-HMM acoustic model of tonal syllable (initial and tonal final), trained with embedded F0 features, has shown improved ASR performance, when compared with the baseline DNN system of 39 MFCC features. The proposed system achieves better ASR performance than the baseline system, i.e., by 32% and 35% in relative tone error rate reduction and 20% and 23% in relative tonal syllable error rate reduction, for female and male speakers, respectively. In a speech database of L2 Mandarin learners (native speakers of European languages), 2% equal error rate reduction, from 27.5% to 25.5%, has been obtained with our DNN-HMM system in detecting mispronunciations, compared with the baseline system.
Web Service Discovery Mechanisms: Looking for a Needle in a Haystack?

The introduction of software development via Web Services has been the most significant web engineering paradigm, in the last years. The widely acknowledged importance of the Web Services’ concept lies in the fact that they provide a platform independent answer to the software component development question. Equally important are the mechanisms that allow for Web Service discovery, especially as the latter has turn to an arduous task. This paper reviews the latest methods, architectures, models and concerns that have arisen in the Web Service Dis-
Ontology enrichment with texts from the WWW

Automatic thesaurus and ontology construction dates back from the last three decades [1]. Our approach is a further development of methods to construct the whole ontology automatically. In contrast to these approaches our algorithm can only be applied, if we enrich an existing ontology instead of fully constructing the ontology. The following paper focuses on requirements for the semi-automatic enrichment of medical ontologies based on the statistical information of word usage. An ontology is a structured network of concepts from an knowledge domain and interconnects the concepts by semantic relations and inheritance. [2] gives a precise technical definition of an ontology, that we will refer to throughout this paper:
High resolution Autofocused Virtual Source Imaging (AVSI)

Synthetic aperture focusing technique with arrays (SAFT) provides improved lateral resolution but, when a coupling medium is between the probe and the part, refraction complicates time-of-flight computations. This slows down the imaging process since there are not general formulae for arbitrarily shaped interface. The approach of the AVSI proposed method is to generate, by conventional delay and sum beamforming, a set of foci at different points of the interface. These act as virtual sources and SAFT processing can be carried out in the second medium only, avoiding refraction complications. Furthermore, an automated process for locating the virtual sources from ultrasound measurements and to compute the adapted focal laws in emission and reception is proposed, so knowledge of the part shape geometry is not required. Theoretical bases of the Autofocused Virtual Source Imaging method (AVSI) are presented, along with experimental data that confirms the expected performance.
Feasibility of a low-cost Tx-Rx separated reader system for RF-powered computers

Recently, research efforts to enable and improve RF-powered computers with backscattering have been conducted. In backscatter networks with monostatic readers, however, performance degradation can be occurred due to self-interference. To this end, in this paper, we suggest a reader system for RF-powered computers which separates the transmitter and the receiver, compare the system with previous proposals for readers, and characterize benefits of the separation with link budget diagrams. We also discuss several challenges for its implementation.
Strong effects of photonic band structures on the diffraction of colloidal crystals.

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Why Is There a Gender Wage Gap According to Occupational Prestige?

Studies have shown that women receive lower wage returns to attained occupational prestige than do men. In this article, I examine whether the gender difference in wage return for attained occupational prestige can be explained by men’s and women’s different family obligations, and whether gender differences in work characteristics, which are difficult to combine with family duties, account for some of the gender wage gap in returns for attained occupational prestige. If women’s family obligations were a major cause of women’s disadvantage, the negative interaction between women and occupational prestige with regard to wages would be larger for mothers and married/cohabiting women than for single women without children. Results show a gender wage gap between married/ cohabiting men and women with children that increases with occupational prestige. However, the interaction between gender and prestige is insignificant among single women and men and among married/cohabiting respondents without children. Furthermore, when controlling for time-consuming work, the gender wage gap for married/cohabiting respondents with children according to occupational prestige narrows, especially in occupations with high prestige.
A fetus with de novo 2q33.2q35 deletion including MAP2 with brain anomalies, esophageal atresia, and laryngeal stenosis

Deletions of the long arm of chromosome 2 are rare. Few cases of interstitial deletions of the 2q33q35 region have been reported. Individuals with deletions in this region have growth retardation, psychomotor retardation, micrognathia, microcephaly, and apparently low‐set ears. We describe a female fetus with a de novo deletion of 2q33.2 to q35 with delayed gyral formation with widespread neuronal heterotopia of the white matter, small cerebellum, esophageal atresia, laryngeal stenosis, micrognathia, and intrauterine growth retardation. With the use of karyotyping and high‐resolution array comparative genomic hybridization the boundaries and gene content of the deletion were identified. Our aim was to determine whether a candidate gene for the brain phenotype was present in the deletion. By this means and based on literature we pinpointed the microtubule associated gene MAP2 as a candidate for the brain anomalies. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Some Limits of Power Delivery in the Multicore Era

The ability to scale down threshold and hence supply voltages can no longer keep up with device density as technology scales. Microprocessor power density is therefore increasing. At the same time, the total number of C4s is predicted to be constant for the foreseeable future, according to ITRS 2011. As a result, more and more of the C4 pads are dedicated to power delivery, at the expense of off-chip I/O signals, impeding I/O throughput scaling–even though core counts and hence bandwidth requirements are increasing exponentially. It therefore becomes important to consider the power delivery network (PDN) as early as possible in the design process, both to ensure enough I/O pads and because a later redesign due to power delivery issues is costly. In this paper, we propose and validate a steady-state architecture-level PDN model, called VoltSpot, and explore the impact of the power delivery constraint for future technology nodes. Our results, based on a scaled multicore processor, indicate that worstcase on-chip IR drop at 16nm will be at least three times larger than that at 45nm. We propose a first-order optimization algorithm to derive the number and placement of C4 pads for by power delivery to achieve a specific IR-drop target. When optimizing to satisfy an IR-drop constraint of 5%, power delivery requires so many pads that multicore processors at 16nm will not be able to maintain constant per-core I/O bandwidth.
2013 7th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare and Workshops Mapping Kinect-based In-home Gait Speed to Tug Time: a Methodology to Facilitate Clinical Interpretation

A methodology for mapping in-home gait speed (IGS), measured unobtrusively and continuously in the homes of older adults, to Timed-Up-and-Go (TUG) time is presented. A Kinect-based gait system was used to collect in-home gait data on 15 older adults over time periods of up to 16 months. Concurrently, the participants completed a monthly clinician administered fall risk assessment protocol that included TUG and habitual gait speed (HGS) tests. A theoretical analysis of expected performance is presented, and the performance of the IGS-based TUG estimates is compared against that of estimates based on HGS measured at the same time as the TUG. Results indicate that the IGS-based estimates are as accurate as the HGS-based estimates as compared to the observed TUG times. After filtering the TUG times to reduce noise, the IGS-based estimates are more accurate. The mapping of in-home sensor data to well studied domains facilitates clinical interpretation of the in-home data.
IPv6 Tunnel Broker

The IPv6 global Internet as of today uses a lot of tunnels over the existing IPv4 infrastructure. Those tunnels are difficult to configure and maintain in a large scale environment. The 6bone has proven that large sites and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can do it, but this process is too complex for the isolated end user who already has an IPv4 connection and would like to enter the IPv6 world. The motivation for the development of the tunnel broker model is to help early IPv6 adopters to hook up to an existing IPv6 network (e.g., the 6bone) and to get stable, permanent IPv6 addresses and DNS names. The concept of the tunnel broker was first presented at Orlando's IETF in December 1998. Two implementations were demonstrated during the Grenoble IPng & NGtrans interim meeting in February 1999.