Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A combinatorial description of the spectrum for the Tsetlin library and its generalization to hyperplane arrangements

1. Introduction. Imagine a collection of books labeled 1 through n arranged in a row in some order. We reorganize the row of books by successively choosing a book at random: choosing book i with probability w i and moving it to the front of the row. This " move-to-front rule " determines an interesting Markov chain on the set of arrangements of the books. If σ and τ denote any two orderings of the books, then the probability of transition from σ to τ is w i if and only if τ is obtained from σ by moving book i to the front. This Markov chain is commonly called the Tsetlin library or move-to-front scheme. Due to its use in computer science as a standard scheme for dynamic file maintenance as well as cache maintenance (cf. [Do], [FHo], and [P]), the move-to-front rule is a very well-studied Markov chain. A primary resource for this problem is Fill's comprehensive paper [F], which derives the transition probabilities for any number of steps of the chain and the eigenvalues with corresponding idempotents and discusses the rate of convergence to stationarity. Its thorough bibliography contains a wealth of pointers to the relevant literature. Of particular interest is the spectrum of this Markov chain. In general, knowledge of the eigenvalues for the transition matrix of a Markov chain can give some indication of the rate at which the chain converges to its equilibrium distribution. In the case of the Tsetlin library, the eigenvalues have an elegant formula, discovered (independently) Theorem 1.1. The distinct eigenvalues for the move-to-front rule are indexed by subsets A ⊆ {1,. , n} and given by λ A = i∈A w i. The multiplicity of λ A is the number of derangements (permutations with no fixed points) of the set {1,. , n − |A|} In this paper we study a sequence of generalizations of the Tsetlin library, culminating in a generalization of the setting of central hyperplane arrangements. In each case we develop a formula analogous to Theorem 1.1 for the distinct eigenvalues and multiplicities for this more general class of Markov chains. Our first generalization comes from viewing move-to-front as the operation of moving the books in the subset {i} to the front and then moving the subset [n] − {i} behind {i} while retaining their relative order; this is all done with probability w i …
Effects of Orifice-Weir Outlet on Hydrology and Water Quality of a Drained Forested Watershed

Orifice-weir structures at ditch outlets are proposed to reduce peak drainage rates during high flows and to store water during the growing season in poorly drained managed pine plantations. Two coastal watersheds, one conventionally drained (D1) and another with an orifice-weir outlet (D3), were monitored to examine the effects of this orifice treatment on drainage outflows and nutrient exports from drained pine plantations in eastern North Carolina. Five years (1995–1999) of measured hydrologic data showed that the daily water table elevation on D3 was 7 cm higher on average, but was 13.5 cm higher during wet periods compared to conventional drainage. The peak drainage rates from D3 were substantially dampened by the orifice-weir. Accordingly, average annual outflow was reduced by 18%. The reduction in outflow was as much as 34% in 1995. Taking the characteristic differences observed in concentrations between these two watersheds during the pretreatment phase into consideration, the measured average annual TKN concentration in the watershed with the orifice appeared to be higher, and total P and sediment lower than expected for conventional drainage. Despite the reduction of flow in all 5 yr, the measured exports of NO3-N, TKN, and total N increased in the first 3 yr (except for TKN in 1995) and decreased in 1998 and 1999 with no significant effects because of the orifice-weir treatment. However, on an average annual basis, total sediment and total P export from D3 were reduced by 54% and 30%, respectively. These results showed that an orifice-weir at the drainage outlet can be used to reduce peak rates, annual drainage outflows, total P and sediment export. The orifice-weir outlet did not have an effect on the export of nitrogen components as happens when controlled drainage with a raised weir is used. South. J. Appl. For. 27(2):130–142.
An Introduction to Ensemble Methods for Data Analysis

This article provides an introduction to ensemble statistical procedures as a special case of algorithmic methods. The discussion begins with classification and regression trees (CART) as a didactic device to introduce many of the key issues. Following the material on CART is a consideration of cross-validation, bagging, random forests, and boosting. Major points are illustrated with analyses of real data.
Hybrid Leakage and Voltage Reduction under EDF Scheduling

Recent trends in CMOS fabrication have resulted in an increasing need to conserve power of processors. While dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) is effective in reducing dynamic power, the latest dies are increasingly dominated by static power. For such processors, voltage/frequency pairs below a critical speed result in higher power consumption than entering a processor sleep mode. Yet, computational demand above this critical speed is best met by DVS techniques while still conserving power. We develop a novel combined leakage and DVS scheduling algorithm for real-time systems, DVSleak, based on earliest-deadline-first scheduling (EDF). Our method trades off DVS with leakage, where the former slows down execution while the latter intelligently defers dispatching of jobs when sleeping is beneficial. We further capitalize on feedback knowledge about actual execution times to anticipate computational demands without sacrificing deadline guarantees. This combined DVS/leakage algorithm results in an average of 45% additional power savings over a leakage-oblivious DVS algorithm in experiments. Its benefits over prior schemes are significant in that it neither requires special hardware support beyond DVS and sleep modes, nor does it assume execution times equal to their worst-case bounds.
XJU1: A Chinese Ethnic Minorities Face Database

Due to the various factors like expression, pose, illumination and accessory variation etc., human face seem different in multiple occasions. To determine the efficiency of the different face recognition algorithms, it requires benchmark face images. In this paper, we presented a comprehensive study of the available 2D face databases and also introduces the creation of a visual face database, Xinjiang University 1 (XJU1) Face Database, which is under development in the College of Information Science and Engineering. It contains high quality face images of 254 individuals of different ethnic of collected from the Xinjiang province of China. Database images are captured within a room with controlled variations in expression, pose and illumination along with variability in age, gender, accessories, and partial occlusion. Each image contains the combined primary challenges of face recognition, i.e., expression, pose, and illumination. In order to show the usability of the database, we four baseline face recognition algorithms have also been tested on the XJU1 face database, which may be used as the control algorithm performance score by other researchers.
On the performance of IEEE 802.15.6 CSMA/CA with priority for query-based traffic

This paper presents a mathematical model to characterise the performance of a IEEE 802.15. 6 Body Area Network (BAN), using a Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) protocol, when a query-based traffic is established. According to the latter, the BAN coordinator periodically triggers nodes, which will immediately start the CSMA/CA protocol, in order to send their data to the coordinator. The model evaluates the packet success probability and the mean delay of packets received from the coordinator. Each node is characterised by a User Priority (UP) value, which affects the Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol parameters. A set of experiments on a real platform has been performed to validate the model. This work can be considered the starting point for a development of a more elaborate mechanism to optimise the UP assignment in order to achieve the performance imposed by the application.
Computational plasmonics for complex dielectric materials

Materials with complex dielectric constants can introduce surprising behaviour for else well known physics. Standard surface wave descriptions rely on small complex contributions to the dielectric constants. This assumption fails even for gold at small wavelengths. We show numerical diagnostics for surface waves in complex dielectric materials and present graphene data as example. To overcome geometric limitations an approach for spatially resolved dielectric response calculations is given.
Autoantibodies targeting tumor-associated antigens in metastatic cancer

In addition to the well-established effector functions of IgGs, including direct cytotoxicity and antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity, some populations of IgGs may exert anti-inflammatory effects. Here, we describe a population of antibodies that form in the natural course of metastatic cancer and contain glycans that terminate with sialic acid. We demonstrate that both the titer of these antibodies and their level of sialylation are relatively stable throughout the progression of metastatic melanoma. The sialylation pattern of these antibodies somehow correlates with their specificity for tumor-associated antigens, as IgGs targeting several antigens associated with infectious agents are relatively poor of sialic acid. We also show that some antibodies targeting the melanoma-associated antigen NY-ESO-1 bind to the human C-type lectin CD209 (DC-SIGN). We propose that these antibodies are candidate anti-inflammatory antibodies. The presence of anti-inflammatory antibodies in cancer patients may explain, at least in part, why tumors persist and spread in the host despite strong tumor-specific humoral responses. The elucidation of the cellular and molecular pathways involved in the induction of anti-inflammatory antibodies specific for tumor-associated antigens and their function may yield important insights into how tumors evade immune detection and progress.
Delay-dependent conditions for robust absolute stability of uncertain time-delay systems

This paper is concerned with the robust absolute stability analysis problem for a class of uncertain time-delay systems with nonlinearities satisfying a given sector condition. Based on the Lyapunov stability theory and the linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach, a delay-dependent sufficient condition for the robust absolute stability is derived and is expressed as the feasibility problem of a certain LMI system. A maximum upper bound of the allowable delay is obtained by solving a convex optimization problem. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the proposed results.
Handling Contingency Selection Using Goal Values

A key question in conditional planning is: how many, and which of the possible execution failures should be planned for? One cannot, in general, plan for all the failures that can be anticipated: there axe simply too many. But neither can one ignore all the possible failures, or one will fail to produce sufficiently flexible plans. We describe a planning system that attempts to identify the contingencies that contribute the most to a plan’s overall value. Plan generation proceeds by extending the plan to include actions that will be taken in case the identified contingencies fail, iterating until either a given expected value threshold is reached or planning time is exhausted.
Being there: a brief visit to a neighbourhood induces the social attitudes of that neighbourhood

There are differences between human groups in social behaviours and the attitudes that underlie them, such as trust. However, the psychological mechanisms that produce and reproduce this variation are not well understood. In particular, it is not clear whether assimilation to the social culture of a group requires lengthy socialization within that group, or can be more rapidly and reversibly evoked by exposure to the group’s environment and the behaviour of its members. Here, we report the results of a two-part study in two neighbourhoods of a British city, one economically deprived with relatively high crime, and the other affluent and lower in crime. In the first part of the study, we surveyed residents and found that the residents of the deprived neighbourhood had lower levels of social trust and higher levels of paranoia than the residents of the affluent neighbourhood. In the second part, we experimentally transported student volunteers who resided in neither neighbourhood to one or the other, and had them walk around delivering questionnaires to houses. We surveyed their trust and paranoia, and found significant differences according to which neighbourhood they had been sent to. The differences in the visitors mirrored the differences seen in the residents, with visitors to the deprived neighbourhood reporting lower social trust and higher paranoia than visitors to the affluent one. The magnitudes of the neighbourhood differences in the visitors, who only spent up to 45 min in the locations, were nearly as great as the magnitudes of those amongst the residents. We discuss the relevance of our findings to differential psychology, neighbourhood effects on social outcomes, and models of cultural evolution.
Augmented speech production based on real-time statistical voice conversion

In human-to-human speech communication, various barriers are caused by some constraints, such as physical constraints causing vocal disorders and environmental constraints making it hard to produce intelligible speech. These barriers would be overcome if our speech production was augmented so that we could produce speech sounds as we want beyond these constraints. Voice conversion (VC) is a technique for modifying speech acoustics, converting non-/para-linguistic information to any form we want while preserving the linguistic content. One of the most popular approaches to VC is based on statistical processing, which is capable of extracting a complex conversion function in a data-driven manner. Although this technique was originally studied in the context of speaker conversion, which converts the voice of a certain speaker to sound like that of another specific speaker, it has great potential to achieve various applications beyond speaker conversion. This paper briefly reviews a trajectory-based conversion method that is capable of effectively reproducing natural speech parameter trajectories utterance by utterance and highlights several techniques that extend this trajectory-based conversion method to achieve real-time conversion processing. Finally this paper shows some examples of real-time VC applications to enhance human-to-human speech communication, such as speaking-aid, silent speech communication, and voice changer/vocal effector.
A novel multi-feature fusion method for tracking based on discriminative power of feature

Visual object tracking essentially deals with nonstationary data, both the target and background that change over time, and no single feature can remain reliable in various situations. Most existing multiple feature fusion trackers simply used fixed weights to combine the features. In this paper, we propose a novel multiple features fusion approach which can adaptively evaluate and adjust the effect of each feature online. The framework is embedded in particle filter, different feature extraction mechanisms are applied to train and update different Incremental Fisher Linear Discriminant Analysis (IFLD) classifiers online independently. The IFLD classifiers label the particles, target or background, and determine the weights to generate likelihood maps. The fusion of the likelihood maps is accomplished with a linear fusion method and the confidence score is adaptively determined by measuring the separability of foreground and background, as we believe that the feature which best distinguishes between object and background is the best feature for tracking. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of our algorithm in handling appearance changes, low contrast image and cluttered background. Compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms, our method is more accurate.
The CPS After the Redesign: Refocusing the Economic Lens

The views in this paper are those of the authors, and do not represent official BLS policy 2 The CPS After the Redesign: Refocusing the Economic Lens The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a major source of information about the American labor market. In addition to providing monthly estimates of unemployment and employment, economists, sociologists and policy analysts use data from the CPS to examine broad societal and cyclical changes in economic activity over time. For example, data from the CPS have been used to investigate the declining rate of employment among men, especially older men (e. In January 1994, the CPS underwent a major redesign both in the wording of the questionnaire and the methodology used to collect the data. The objective of the redesign was to improve the quality and expand the quantity of available data. However, the redesign also caused changes in the measurement of many of the estimates derived from the CPS. The major purpose of this paper is to estimate adjustment factors for various aggregate measures derived from the CPS in order to permit comparisons of estimates before and after the redesign. In addition, these adjustment factors will be analyzed to assess the impact of the redesign on some of the key conclusions drawn from the CPS. 1 The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. The first section briefly summarizes the reasons for the CPS redesign. The second section contains a description of the data and a discussion of the motivation for the methodology used in the empirical analysis. The third section presents the empirical model. The estimated adjustment factors, along with a discussion of possible causes and implications of the estimated changes, are presented in the fourth section. The paper concludes with a brief summary of the results and implications of the redesign. 1 The estimates presented in this paper are being provided only to aid individuals who use the CPS historically. The Bureau of Labor Statistics will not revise previously published official estimates. The redesigned CPS was the culmination of a massive 8 year collaborative effort between the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Bureau of the Census (BC). The impetus for changing the CPS was fourfold. First, there were indications that some of the concepts and wording in the CPS were becoming dated. The last major revision to the wording of the CPS occurred in 1967. Since that time …
A QoS multicast routing algorithm based on ant colony algorithm

Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is a new meta-heuristic for hard combinational optimization problem. In order to resolve QoS multicast routing effectively and efficiently, this paper firstly describe QoS multicast routing model and ACO algorithm, then a new version of ACO algorithm based on pheromone local and global updating rule is proposed. Simulation results show that this algorithm can find optimal solution quickly and has a good scalability.
Frequent Pattern Discovery from a Single Graph with Quantitative Itemsets

In this paper, we focus on a single graph whose vertices contain a set of quantitative attributes. Several networks can be naturally represented in this complex graph. An example is a social network whose vertex corresponds to a person with some quantitative items such as age, salary and so on. Although it can be expected that this kind of data will increase rapidly, most of current graph mining algorithms do not handle these complex graphs directly. Motivated by the above background, by effectively combining techniques of graph mining and quantitative itemset mining, we developed an algorithm named FAG-gSpan for finding frequent patterns from a graph with quantitative itemsets.
Cryptographic Properties of Addition Modulo 2n

The operation of modular addition modulo a power of two is one of the most applied operations in symmetric cryptography. For example, modular addition is used in RC6, MARS and Twofish block ciphers and RC4, Bluetooth and Rabbit stream ciphers. In this paper, we study statistical and algebraic properties of modular addition modulo a power of two. We obtain the probability distribution of modular addition carry bits along with conditional probability distribution of these carry bits. Using these probability distributions and Markovity of modular addition carry bits, we compute the joint probability distribution of arbitrary number of modular addition carry bits. Then, we examine algebraic properties of modular addition with a constant and obtain the number of terms as well as the algebraic degrees of the component Boolean functions of the output of modular addition with a constant. Finally, we present another formula for the ANF of component Boolean functions of modular addition modulo a power of two. This formula contains more information than representations which are presented in cryptographic literature, up to now.
Channel allocation and transmission power management scheme in software defined network-based WLAN environments

Wireless local area network (WLAN) uses carrier sens multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) to share wireless medium. However, in dense WLAN environment, it occurs interference between WLAN nodes such as access points (APs) and stations (STAs). For resolving this problem, we propose management of WLAN APs by using open network operating system (ONOS) controller which is one of software defined network (SDN) controller. Based on this, we propose a channel and transmission power control of WLAN AP in order to optimize the channel. Experimental results shows that our proposed scheme can improve performance of WLAN in terms of data rate.
Topological Orders Based Planning for Solving POMDPs

Although partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) have received significant attention in past years, to date, solving problems of realistic order of magnitude remains a serious challenge. In this context, techniques that accelerate fundamental algorithms have been a main focus of research. Among them prioritized solvers suggest solutions to the problem of ordering backup operations. Prioritization techniques for ordering the sequence of backup operations considerably reduce the number of backups needed, but involve significant overhead. This paper introduces a novel prioritized method, namely topological order-based planning (TOP), that exploits causal relations between states to deal with two key issues. First,TOP detects the structure of POMDPs as a means of overcoming both the dimensionality and the history curses. Second, it circumvents the problem of unnecessary backups and builds approximate solutions based on a topological order induced by the underlying structure. Empirical experiments prove that TOP is competitive with the best techniques on general domains, and can perform significantly better on layered ones.