Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Formulation and Empirical Validation of a GQM Based Measurement Framework

Today, software projects are often characterized by poor quality, schedule overruns and high costs. One of the reasons for this failure is the lack of holistic information available for making suitable corrective actions. So an effective measurement framework which is empirically validated by the project stakeholders is needed to control the project and give directions to accomplish the project goals of the stakeholders. In this backdrop, this paper explains how a stakeholder driven generic Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) measurement framework was derived, and empirically validated with Norman Schneidewind's six empirical validation criteria with (i) A survey from seasoned software professionals and (ii) A case study of a SAP Enterprise Portal project.
OBJECT RECOGNITION USING EIGENVIEWS

We introduce a novel method to characterize the shape of objects under viewpoint variation for use in an object recognition task. Images of a collection of 3D objects captured under different viewpoint locations are used to obtain representative views (eigenviews) that encode the information in these images. Three techniques are used to extract eigenviews from a given collection of images, Principal Component Analysis, Independent Component Analysis and Nonnegative Matrix Factorization. The idea is illustrated with a collection of four synthetic objects. A Nearest Neighbor classifier is used to perform the classification of an arbitrary view of an object. The proposed system is shown to be robust to noise and partial occlusions. The effect of the number of eigenviews used is also presented. The classification results demonstrate that this system holds promise for use in object detection under variation in viewpoint location.
Modeling Firewalls Using Hierarchical Colored Petri Nets

This paper concentrates on one technological aspect of providing communications security, firewall technology. It introduces a formalism called Hierarchical Colored Petri Nets (HCPN)in tutorial style. The main contribution of the paper is a description of how to model firewall systems using Hierarchical Colored Petri Nets. A byproduct of this approach is a novel way of modeling audit streams in distributed systems. HCPNs are well suited for modeling concurrent, distributed systems in which regulated flows of information are significant, such as firewall systems which enforce access control policies on network packets. The paper introduces the basics of this modeling technique. It demonstrates with several examples how firewalls can be modeled. It outlines how simulations of such models can facilitate testing, performance analysis, and interactive design exploration. Finally, the approach can serve as the basis for formal analysis techniques available through Applied Petri Net Theory.
Management Systems: A Viable Systems Approach

Part 1: Management Systems: Foundations 1.The Nature of Management Systems 2.Introduction to the Theory of World Views 3.The Paradigm of Complexity 4.The Dynamic of System Paradigms 5.Purposefulness, Methods, and Purposeful Intervention Part 2: Viable Systems and Inquiry 6.Systems as Actors in Networks 7.Viability and Change in Systems 8.The Theory of Viable Systems 9.The Nature of Methodological Inquiry 10.Viable Inquiry Systems Part 3: Approaches to Inquiry 11.Systems Intervention Strategy. Case: Budget Deficit in Liverpool City Council 12.Organisational Diagnosis. Case: Budget Deficit in Liverpool City Council 13.Soft Systems Methodology. Case: Change in the National Health Service 14.Viable Systems Model Methodology. Case: Viability in a School of Transport 15.Conflict Modelling Cycle. Case 1: The Liverpool Dock Strike of 1995 Case 2: The Fall of the Soviet Empire. 16.Exploring the Practice of Mixing Methods
Capital Markets and Corporate Control: Empirical Evidence from Hedge Fund Activism in Germany

Since the beginning of this century the German financial system has changed from an extreme universal banking system to a more financial market oriented system in various aspects. Most importantly and most visibly, the corporate governance and corporate control structure underwent substantial changes. In fact, hedge funds and other activist investors are increasingly taking advantage of a control vacuum within the ownership structure of many German firms which resulted from the reallocation of corporate control from universal banks to capital markets. In particular, many German banks have sold off their equity stakes in industrial companies and have stopped voting proxies on behalf of their clients. In addition, they reduced their involvement in supervisory boards. One interesting question is whether this capital market orientation led to an increase in shareholder value. Based on a sample of 324 events in Germany between January 2000 and June 2006, we find empirical evidence that the engagement of activist shareholders such as hedge funds increased shareholder value in the short and in the long run. Moreover, our findings suggest that this effect is more pronounced for small illiquid stocks due to higher information asymmetries. Furthermore, there is also some weak evidence that the initial valuation effects around the announcement date depend on the track record and reputation of the activist investor.
An Efficient Bandit Algorithm for sqrt(T) Regret in Online Multiclass Prediction?

Consider a sequence of examples (xt, yt) for t = 1, . , T where xt ∈ R and yt ∈ [K], where the goal of a Learner is to predict the class yt from the input xt. In the more common full-information setting, the Learner observes the true class yt after making her prediction ŷt. In the present open problem, however, we will consider the so-called bandit setting: after predicting ŷt, the Learner is only told “correct” or “incorrect”, her feedback being a single bit 1[ŷt 6= yt]. We assume that the Learner’s hypothesis class is the set ofK-tuples of vectorsW = 〈w1, . ,wK〉 where wi ∈ R (we can think ofW as theK × n hypothesis matrix). Given an instance xt, such a hypothesis will produce a K-tuple of “scores” 〈w1 ·xt, . ,wK ·xt〉, and the Learner’s prediction will be the class with the largest score: ŷt = arg max k∈[K] wk · xt.
An Integrated Photoluminescence Sensing Platform Using a Single-Multi-Mode Fiber Coupler-Based Probe

We demonstrate an integrated fiber optic photoluminescence sensing platform using a novel single-multi-mode fiber coupler (SMFC)-based probe with high collection efficiency for fluorescence signals. The SMFC, prepared using fused biconical taper technology, not only transmits excitation light, but also collects and transmits fluorescence. The entire system does not use complex optical components and rarely requires optical alignment. The simple structure of the SMFC considerably improves the light transmission efficiency, signal-to-noise ratio, and sensitivity of the system. Theoretical and experimental results show that the proposed probe increases the collection efficiency by more than eight-fold compared with a bifurcated fiber probe. The performance of the proposed probe was experimentally evaluated by measuring the fluorescence spectra of well-known targets and a fresh Tall Fescue leaf.
Improvement of a configuration management system

The company CAD-UL AG develops software tools for embedded systems. Single tools such as compilers, linkers and debuggers are offered as well as complete development tool chains for the software development process. In contrast to application software for personal computers, embedded systems require very specialized software of highly optimized and exhaustively tested code. Since the previously existing configuration management was not efficient in comparison to the state-of-the-art in software engineering, an improvement was implemented by the introduction of a modern configuration management (CM) system (Cederqvist, 1998). In the paper, CAD-UL intends to show the results and the experiences of the European Systems and Software Initiative Process Improvement Experiment (ESSI-PIE) ICMS with the new configuration management system.
Standardization in nursing practice: crosscontextual information sharing

Cooperation and collaboration are an inherent part of the daily work performed at a hospital in general, and among nurses in particular. However, the technologies that support these work practises are still inadequate. In this case study, we explore the standardization process in nursing practice, and how standards are used across departments in a hospital environment in order to share information and knowledge. We explore what issues are at stake when standard care plans are used across organizational boundaries. Moreover, we examine the following: a) the adjustment of nursing classification in local practice; b) the tension between different standards; and c) the use of standard plans as a bridge to share information across various context.
Regularized Parametric Regression for High-dimensional Survival Analysis

Survival analysis aims to predict the occurrence of specific events of interest at future time points. The presence of incomplete observations due to censoring brings unique challenges in this domain and differentiates survival analysis techniques from other standard regression methods. In many applications where the distribution of the survival times can be explicitly modeled, parametric survival regression is a better alternative to the commonly used Cox proportional hazards model for this problem of censored regression. However, parametric survival regression suffers from model overfitting in high-dimensional scenarios. In this paper, we propose a unified model for regularized parametric survival regression for an arbitrary survival distribution. We employ a generalized linear model to approximate the negative log-likelihood and use the elastic net as a sparsity-inducing penalty to effectively deal with highdimensional data. The proposed model is then formulated as a penalized iteratively reweighted least squares and solved using a cyclical coordinate descent-based method. We demonstrate the performance of our proposed model on various high-dimensional real-world microarray gene expression benchmark datasets. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed model produces more accurate estimates compared to the other competing state-of-the-art methods.
Author's Personal Copy Computers and Mathematics with Applications an Efficient Hybrid Bem–rbie Method for Solving Conjugate Heat Transfer Problems

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: a b s t r a c t In this paper, a hybrid boundary element method (BEM) — radial basis integral equation (RBIE) method is derived to solve conjugate heat transfer (CHT) problems. The BEM is used to solve the heat transfer in the solid region, while the fluid region is solved by using the RBIE. The capability of the RBIE to calculate the potential and the spatial gradients, while advantageous when knowledge of the spatial gradients is of primary importance, can lead to unnecessary increases in the computational cost when solving CHT problems due to the additional equations imposed per node. By using the BEM to solve the heat transfer in the solids, a significant reduction in the size of the system matrix compared to the case of using the RBIE for both the heat transfer in the solid and fluid regions can be achieved. A case study that examines the CHT inside the human eye is solved using the derived hybrid BEM–RBIE method.
Evidence for a Type III Secretion System in Aeromonas salmonicida subsp. salmonicida

ABSTRACT Aeromonas salmonicida subsp. salmonicida, the etiological agent of furunculosis, is an important fish pathogen. We have screened this bacterium with a broad-host-range probe directed against yscV, the gene that encodes the archetype of a highly conserved family of inner membrane proteins found in every known type III secretion system. This has led to the identification of seven open reading frames that encode homologues to proteins functioning within the type III secretion systems of Yersinia species. Six of these proteins are encoded by genes comprising a virA operon. The A. salmonicida subsp. salmonicida yscV homologue, ascV, was inactivated by marker replacement mutagenesis and used to generate an isogenic ascV mutant. Comparison of the extracellular protein profiles from the ascV mutant and the wild-type strain indicates that A. salmonicida subsp. salmonicida secretes proteins via a type III secretion system. The recently identified ADP-ribosylating toxin AexT was identified as one such protein. Finally, we have compared the toxicities of the wild-type A. salmonicida subsp. salmonicida strain and the ascV mutant against RTG-2 rainbow trout gonad cells. While infection with the wild-type strain results in significant morphological changes, including cell rounding, infection with the ascV mutant has no toxic effect, indicating that the type III secretion system we have identified plays an important role in the virulence of this pathogen.
Angelah: a framework for assisting elders at home

The ever growing percentage of elderly people within modern societies poses welfare systems under relevant stress. In fact, partial and progressive loss of motor, sensorial, and/or cognitive skills renders elders unable to live autonomously, eventually leading to their hospitalization. This results in both relevant emotional and economic costs. Ubiquitous computing technologies can offer interesting opportunities for in-house safety and autonomy. However, existing systems partially address in-house safety requirements and typically focus on only elder monitoring and emergency detection. The paper presents ANGELAH, a middleware-level solution integrating both "elder monitoring and emergency detection" solutions and networking solutions. ANGELAH has two main features: i) it enables efficient integration between a variety of sensors and actuators deployed at home for emergency detection and ii) provides a solid framework for creating and managing rescue teams composed of individuals willing to promptly assist elders in case of emergency situations. A prototype of ANGELAH, designed for a case study for helping elders with vision impairments, is developed and interesting results are obtained from both computer simulations and a real-network testbed.
Improvement of VerbNet-like resources by frame typing

Verbenet is a French lexicon developed by “translation” of its English counterpart — VerbNet (Kipper-Schuler, 2005)—and treatment of the specificities of French syntax (Pradet et al., 2014; Danlos et al., 2016). One difficulty encountered in its development springs from the fact that the list of (potentially numerous) frames has no internal organization. This paper proposes a type system for frames that shows whether two frames are variants of a given alternation. Frame typing facilitates coherence checking of the resource in a “virtuous circle”. We present the principles underlying a program we developed and used to automatically type frames in VerbeNet. We also show that our system is portable to other languages.
Evaluation of a Statistical Analysis Model for Detection of Associations in the Lesion-De cit Domain

2 Abstract We evaluate the analytical capabilities of a BRAin Image Database (BRAID), which is used for the elucidation of structure{function relationships in the human brain through the study of lesioned structures and associated neurological deecits. For this purpose, we develop a lesion-deecit simulator (LDS), which generates artiicial subjects, each of which consists of a set of functional deecits and a brain image with lesions; the deecits and lesions conform to predeened distributions. We use probability distributions to model the number, size, and spatial distribution of lesions as well as the strength and complexity of structure{function associations, and the registration error. By controlling these parameters we use the LDS to evaluate, as a case study, the Fisher exact test of independence, one of the statistical methods currently available in BRAID for detection of associations. Measures of the ability in detecting associations are obtained as a function of the number of subjects used, the strength and number of hypothesized associations, the number of structures associated with a particular function, and the prior probabilities of structure abnormality. The number of samples needed has an inverse proportional relationship to the strength of associations and the smallest prior probability of structure abnormality. The number of structures associated with a particular function was found to have much greater eeect on the performance of the analysis method than the number of associations to discover. The reduction of the ability to detect associations due to registration error was also quantiied. The imperfect registration method that was used, reduces, on the average, the number of associations discovered by 13%. These computational models provide a means for evaluating many aspects of diierent lesion{deecit analysis methods.
The Contribution of DNS Lookup Costs to Web Object Retrieval

There are a number of factors that contribute to the performance between clients and servers in the World Wide Web. In this work we have concentrated on the contribution of DNS lookup to the overall Web object retrieval time. We found that the DNS mechanism performed better for popular Web servers than for random Web servers. Performance was better both in terms of local cache hit rates, which would be expected, but also for authoritative and non-local, non-authoritative response times. We also found that the DNS lookup time contributed more than one second to approximately 20% of retrievals for the Web objects on the home page of a larger list of popular servers. While these numbers are signi cant, they do not re ect the expected access patterns for URLs. Results from real user request log show that only about 20% of DNS requests are not cached locally. If 20-30% of these non-cached lookups take more than one second then only 4-6% of all DNS lookups should take more than one second. These numbers appear to be less of a problem for overall Web retrieval, particularly if one considers that many DNS lookups resulting from small DNS TTL values do not yield di erent IP addresses for successive requests.
Evolutionary-Optimized Central Pattern Generator for Stable Modifiable Bipedal Walking

In this paper, an evolutionary-optimized central pattern generator (CPG) considering equality constraints is proposed for stable modifiable bipedal walking. The proposed CPG generates the position trajectories of the swing foot and the center of pelvis in the Cartesian coordinate system at single and double support phases. The significance of the proposed CPG is that it can change the sagittal and lateral step lengths just before the beginning of each single support phase while maintaining the desired values of single and double support times, which are set in the beginning of bipedal walking. To deal with environmental perturbations, the sensory feedbacks in the CPG are designed using the force sensing resistors such that the bipedal robot can maintain its balance. For the optimized parameters of the CPG, a two-phase evolutionary programming is employed. The effectiveness of the method is demonstrated by computer simulation with the Webots model of a small-sized humanoid robot, HSR-IX, and the experiment with HSR-IX developed in the RIT Laboratory, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea.
Answering Yes-No Questions by Penalty Scoring in History Subjects of University Entrance Examinations

Answering yes–no questions is more difficult than simply retrieving ranked search results. To answer yes–no questions, especially when the correct answer is no, one must find an objectionable keyword that makes the question’s answer no. Existing systems, such as factoid-based ones, cannot answer yes–no questions very well because of insufficient handling of such objectionable keywords. We suggest an algorithm that answers yes–no questions by assigning an importance to objectionable keywords. Concretely speaking, we suggest a penalized scoring method that finds and makes lower score for parts of documents that include such objectionable keywords. We check a keyword distribution for each part of a document such as a paragraph, calculating the keyword density as a basic score. Then we use an objectionable keyword penalty when a keyword does not appear in a target part but appears in other parts of the document. Our algorithm is robust for open domain problems because it requires no training. We achieved 4.45 point better results in F1 scores than the best score of the NTCIR-10 RITE2 shared task, also obtained the best score in 2014 mock university examination challenge of the Todai Robot project.
A Semantics for Concurrent Logic Programming Languages Based on Multiple- Valued Logic

In order to obtain an understanding of parallel logic thought it is necessary to establish a fully abstract model of the denotational semantics of logic programming languages. In this paper, a fixed point semantics for the committed choice, non- deterministic family of parallel programming languages, i.e. the concurrent logic programming languages is developed. The approach is from an order theoretic viewpoint. We rigorously define a semantics for a Guarded Horn Clauses-type of language because of the minimal restrictions of the language. The extension to other concurrent logic programming languages would be direct and analogous, based on their specific rules of suspension. Today's world is replete with multitasking and parallelism in general. The content of this paper reflects a paradigm of an application of multi-valued logic which is reflective of this.
Three essays on stock market liquidity and earnings seasons

In these essays, I identify the effects of earnings seasons (i.e., the clustering of earnings releases), on stock market liquidity and asset pricing. In the first essay, I document strong seasonal regularities associated with aggregate earnings announcements. Applying the large body of literature linking earnings announcements to liquidity effects, I argue that these earnings seasons create market-wide liquidity shocks and I show that both liquidity betas and liquidity risk change during earnings seasons In the second essay, I test the impact of earnings seasons on commonality in liquidity as measured by both spreads and depths. I find that commonality significantly decreases during the four weeks of each calendar quarter when most companies release their earnings. These findings contribute to the literature by identifying and examining the clustering effect of firm-specific information on commonality in liquidity. In the third essay, I extend the study of the liquidity effects of earnings seasons to a sample of 20 countries. I find that the international data corroborate both hypotheses. I also find that the aggregate quality of accounting information, and the duration and frequency of interim reporting periods are important determinants of the liquidity effects (both liquidity betas and commonality in liquidity) during earnings seasons.