Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A new DER coordination in LV network based on the concept of distributed control

Given the paradigm of smart grid as the promising backbone for future network, this paper uses this paradigm to propose a new coordination approach for LV network based on distributed control algorithm. This approach divides the LV network into hierarchical communities where each community is controlled by a control agent. Different level of communication has been proposed for this structure to control the network in different operation modes.
An improved Human Action Recognition system using RSD Code generation

This paper presents a novel method for recognizing human actions from a series of video frames. The paper uses the idea of an RSD (Region Speed Direction) code generation, which is capable of recognizing most of the common activities in spite of the spatiotemporal variability between subjects. Majority of the researches focus on upper body part or make use of hand and leg trajectories. The trajectory-based approach gives less accurate results due to variability of action pattern between subjects. In RSD Code, we give importance to three factors Region, Speed and Direction to detect the action. These three factors together gives better result for recognizing actions. The proposed method is free from occlusion, positional errors and missing information. The results from our algorithm are comparable to the results of the existing human action detection algorithms.
A Study of Genetic Algorithm Evolution on the Lipophilicity of Polychlorinated Biphenyls

The search for multivariate linear regression (MLR) in quantitative structure–property relationships (QSPR) is a hard problem, due to the dimension of the entire search space. A genetic algorithm (GA) was developed and assessed, to select proper descriptors for predicting the octan‐1‐ol/H2O partition coefficient of polychlorinated biphenyls. The GA was implemented as a Windows based FreePascal application with MySQL connectivity for fetching the data. An outcome study based on 30 runs was done keeping all parameters constant: sample size, 8; number of variables in the MLR, 2; adaptation‐imposed requirements; maximum number of generations, 1000; selection strategy, proportional; probability of mutation, 0.05; number of genes implied in mutation, 2; optimization parameter, r2; optimization score, minimum in sample; and optimization objective, maximum. The results revealed that the number of evolutions followed the Poisson distribution with the sample size as parameter. The average of the determination coefficient is higher than 98% of the determination coefficient obtained through complete search, and follows the Gaussian distribution. The correlation coefficients obtained by the best performing GA‐MLR models proved not to be statistically different from the correlation coefficient of the QSPR model obtained by complete search.
Hyperdatabases for peer-to-peer data stream processing

New sensor technologies, powerful mobile devices, and wireless communication standards strongly proliferate ubiquitous and pervasive computing. This is particularly true for healthcare applications. Modern non-invasive unobtrusive sensors enable sophisticated monitoring of the human body. As a result of this monitoring a growing amount of elderly people suffering from chronic diseases will benefit from an enhanced quality of life and improved treatment. Healthcare applications process a vast amount of continuously generated data, this has become a serious challenge. Data stream management addresses this problem in general. However, healthcare applications have additional requirements, e.g., flexibility and reliability. As a consequence, we propose the combination of a sophisticated information infrastructure, called hyperdatabase, and data stream management. Hyperdatabases already allow for reliable process management in a peer-to-peer fashion. In this paper, we elaborate the close relation between distributed process management and data stream management. Further, we show that data stream processing can significantly benefit from an infrastructure for reliable process management. We present the architecture of our prototype infrastructure that supports processing of continuous data streams with a high degree of flexibility and reliability.
Escaping the Identity Trap

Organizations, like people, have essential natures ? defined by their formative experiences, their beliefs, their knowledge bases and their core competences ? which may remain tacit and unquestioned until some event, such as a new strategy or a radical shift in the environment, makes an old identity obsolete. A disruption in a strongly anchored identity can be fatal, unless managers can align their company's identity better with current business conditions. Hamid Bouchikhi, of France's ESSEC Business School and John R. Kimberly of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School note that while the "identity trap" threatens every organization, escaping a restrictive identity is possible. They identify two ways enterprises do this successfully ? through evolution (a gradual change in their strategic and organizational layers) and revolution (a change that bursts up through companies' outer layers). Through field-based and clinical research in a variety of industries and companies, including Moulinex, Polaroid, Groupe Danone and Aventis, the authors have developed an "identity audit" to help managers learn to recognize the conflicts and initiate identity change to make their companies more adaptive. By regularly assessing how well their identity fits with current business conditions, companies can rethink their identity before it becomes obsolete.
Staff perceptions of change resulting from participation in a European cancer accreditation programme: a snapshot from eight cancer centres

Background Healthcare accreditation is considered to be an essential quality improvement tool. However, its effectiveness has been critiqued. Methods Twenty-four interviews were conducted with clinicians (five), nurses (six), managers (eight), and basic/translational researchers (five) from eight European cancer centres on changes observed from participating in a European cancer accreditation programme. Data were thematically analysed and verified with participants and checked against auditor’s feedback. Results Four change categories emerged: (i) the growing importance of the nursing and supportive care field (role change). Nurses gained more autonomy/clarity on their daily duties. Importance was given to the hiring and training of supportive care personnel (ii) critical thinking on data integration (strategic change). Managers gained insight on how to integrate institutional level data (iii) improved processes within multidisciplinary team (MDT) meetings (procedural change). Clinical staff experienced improved communication between MDTs (iv) building trust (organisational change). Accreditation improved the centre’s credibility with its own staff and externally with funders and patients. No motivational changes were perceived. Researchers perceived no changes. The auditor’s feedback included changes in 13 areas: translational research, biobanks, clinical trials, patient privacy and satisfaction, cancer registries, clinical practice guidelines, patient education, screening, primary prevention, role of nurses, MDT, supportive care, and data integration. However, our study revealed that staff perceived changes only in the last four areas. Conclusion Staff perceived changes in data integration, nursing and supportive care, and in certain clinical aspects. Accreditation programmes must pay attention to the needs of different stakeholder groups, track changes, and observe how/why change happens.
On the Coverage and Cost of HPHT Versus LPLT Networks for Rooftop, Portable, and Mobile Broadcast Services Delivery

The discussion around different network architectures, namely high power/high tower (HPHT) versus low power/low tower (LTLP) is currently a hot topic in different international fora. This paper presents the results of a study to compare coverage, number of sites, and network deployment/maintenance costs associated to three different network configurations (HPHT only, LTLP only, and mixed HPHT + LTLP) for rooftop, mobile, and portable indoor/outdoor digital terrestrial television service delivery. The analysis has been based on a practical network planning scenario. The results have been obtained with coverage simulations in the Basque Country, a region in northern Spain currently served with 64 transmitters of a traditional broadcast network. The results conclude that a LPLT network would require 3.3 more centers for providing the same coverage as the current HPHT network at a cost three times higher. Also, it has been observed that the current HPHT network fails to give portable and mobile coverage numbers close to real-service targets in urban areas. In those cases, the approach with lower number of sites and cost is a mixed HPHT + LTLP network, where a set of LPLT transmitters complement the coverage provided by the HPHT network.
Horton Tables: Fast Hash Tables for In-Memory Data-Intensive Computing

Hash tables are important data structures that lie at the heart of important applications such as key-value stores and relational databases. Typically bucketized cuckoo hash tables (BCHTs) are used because they provide high-throughput lookups and load factors that exceed 95%. Unfortunately, this performance comes at the cost of reduced memory access efficiency. Positive lookups (key is in the table) and negative lookups (where it is not) on average access 1.5 and 2.0 buckets, respectively, which results in 50 to 100% more table-containing cache lines to be accessed than should be minimally necessary. To reduce these surplus accesses, this paper presents the Horton table, a revamped BCHT that reduces the expected cost of positive and negative lookups to fewer than 1.18 and 1.06 buckets, respectively, while still achieving load factors of 95%. The key innovation is remap entries, small in-bucket records that allow (1) more elements to be hashed using a single, primary hash function, (2) items that overflow buckets to be tracked and rehashed with one of many alternate functions while maintaining a worst-case lookup cost of 2 buckets, and (3) shortening the vast majority of negative searches to 1 bucket access. With these advancements, Horton tables outperform BCHTs by 17% to 89%.
Assessment of anticyclonic supercell environments using close proximity soundings from the RUC model

Anticyclonic,left-moving supercells are a concern for forecasters primarily because of their tendency to yield large and damaging hail and/or unusually large amounts of hail (i.e., Edwards and Hodanish 2004). Such storms may be quite persistent and destructive, lasting several hours with hail approaching 5 inches (13 cm) in diameter (Mathews and Turnage 2000). Further, they may rarely become tornadic, predominantly in environments of moderate to strong buoyancy. Two left-moving supercells that had access to surface-based convective available potential energy (SBCAPE) of near 2000 ms are known to have produced documented tornadoes -one in California (Monteverdi et al. 2001) and the other in the Texas Panhandle (Dostalek et al. 2004). Also, a tornadic supercell near Houston, TX on 3 Jun 2003 (NCDC 2003), in an environment of roughly 5000 J kg SBCAPE, was a left-mover, and is included in our data set.
Ricker‐compliant deconvolution

Ricker‐compliant deconvolution spikes at the center lobe of the Ricker wavelet. It enables deconvolution to preserve and enhance seismogram polarities. Expressing the phase spectrum as a function of lag, it works by suppressing the phase at small lags. A by‐product of this decon is a pseudo‐unitary (very clean) debubble filter where bubbles are lifted off the data while onset waveforms (usually Ricker) are untouched.
Image Set-Based Face Recognition: A Local Multi-keypoint Descriptor-Based Approach

Image-set-based face recognition has recently attracted much attention due to widespread of surveillance and video retrieval applications. Extraction of partial and misaligned face images from a video is relatively common in unconstrained scenarios and in the presence of detection/localization error, respectively. However, existing face recognition techniques that consider holistic image-set representation would not perform well under such conditions. In this paper, we introduce a local image-set-based face recognition approach to address this issue, where each image set is represented by a cluster set of keypoint descriptors and similarity between image sets is measured by the distance between the corresponding sets of clusters. Our representation is robust to misalignment because the extraction of descriptors is carried out without respect to the absolute face position. Additionally, our approach is robust to partial face occlusion due to that (1) descriptors corresponding to non-occluded keypoints are not affected by the occluded keypoints, (2) matching decision is contributed only by distances between the matched cluster pairs corresponding to the non-occluded facial parts. Extensive experiment evaluation shows that our approach is able to achieve very promising recognition rates.
Towards equal rights for higher-kinded types

Generics are a very popular feature of contemporary OO languages, such as Java, C# or Scala. Their support for genericity is lacking, however. The problem is that they only support abstracting over proper types, and not over generic types. This limitation makes it impossible to, e.g., define a precise interface for Iterable, a core abstraction in Scala’s collection API. We implemented “type constructor polymorphism” in Scala 2.5, which solves this problem at the root, thus greatly reducing the duplication of type signatures and code.
A Bsp Matrix Multiplication Implementation

The BSP algorithm for matrix multiplication presented below was presented in the seminal work of [1]. It works for p ≤ n 2. Each processor is assigned the task of computing an n/ √ p × n/ √ p submatrix of the product A × B. The input matrices A and B are divided into p block-submatrices, each one of dimension m × m, where m = n/ √ p. We call this distribution of the input among the processors block distribution. This way, element A(i, j), 0 ≤ i < n, 0 ≤ j < n, belongs to the (j/m) * √ p + (i/m)-th block that is subsequently assigned to the memory of the same-numbered processor. Let A i (respectively, B i) denote the i-th block of A (respectively, B) stored in processor i. With these conventions the algorithm in [1] can is described in Figure 1. The following Proposition describes the performance of the aforementioned algorithm. 1. Let m = n/ √ p ; Each processor is also assigned a unique processor number q; 2. Let p i = q mod √ p ; p j = q/ √ p ; C q = 0; 3. a l ← A pi+l * √ p , 0 ≤ l < √ p; 4. b l ← B pj * √ p+l , 0 ≤ l < √ p; 5. for 0 ≤ l < √ p do C q = C q + a l × b l ; end Mult A Figure 1: Procedure Mult A. Proposition 1 Algorithm Mult A for multiplying two n × n matrices A and B stored according to the block distribution requires, for any p ≤ n 2 , computation time C mul (n) that is given by C mul (n) = max {L, (2n − 1)n 2 p }, and communication time M mul (n) that is given by the expression M mul (n) = max {L, g 2n 2 √ p }. One immediately realizes that algorithm Mult A is not memory efficient since it requires more local memory per processor – by a factor of √ p – than the required one. Algorithm Mult B shown in Figure 2 is the memory efficient variant of Mult A. It is not synchronization efficient though since its number of supersteps is not constant any more; it has been increased by …
Tauroursodeoxycholic Acid (TUDCA) Protects Photoreceptors from Cell Death after Experimental Retinal Detachment

Background Detachment of photoreceptors from the underlying retinal pigment epithelium is seen in various retinal disorders such as retinal detachment and age-related macular degeneration and leads to loss of photoreceptors and vision. Pharmacologic inhibition of photoreceptor cell death may prevent this outcome. This study tests whether systemic administration of tauroursodeoxycholic acid (TUDCA) can protect photoreceptors from cell death after experimental retinal detachment in rodents. Methodology/Principal Findings Retinal detachment was created in rats by subretinal injection of hyaluronic acid. The animals were treated daily with vehicle or TUDCA (500 mg/kg). TUNEL staining was used to evaluate cell death. Photoreceptor loss was evaluated by measuring the relative thickness of the outer nuclear layer (ONL). Macrophage recruitment, oxidative stress, cytokine levels, and caspase levels were also quantified. Three days after detachment, TUDCA decreased the number of TUNEL-positive cells compared to vehicle (651±68/mm2 vs. 1314±68/mm2, P = 0.001) and prevented the reduction of ONL thickness ratio (0.84±0.03 vs. 0.65±0.03, P = 0.002). Similar results were obtained after 5 days of retinal detachment. Macrophage recruitment and expression levels of TNF-a and MCP-1 after retinal detachment were not affected by TUDCA treatment, whereas increases in activity of caspases 3 and 9 as well as carbonyl-protein adducts were almost completely inhibited by TUDCA treatment. Conclusions/Significance Systemic administration of TUDCA preserved photoreceptors after retinal detachment, and was associated with decreased oxidative stress and caspase activity. TUDCA may be used as a novel therapeutic agent for preventing vision loss in diseases that are characterized by photoreceptor detachment.
On operationalizing syntactic complexity

In the recent functional linguistic literature, the notion of syntactic complexity and similar concepts have received considerable attention. Yet, when trying to operationalize syntactic complexity as an independent variable in statistical research designs, it soon emerges that the notion is somewhat underdefined. I will report the results from an experiment comparing three measures of syntactic complexity — node counts, word counts, and a so-called ‘Index of Syntactic Complexity’ — with regard to their accuracy and applicability. While presupposing that node counts are cognitively the most ‘real’ measure, it turns out that the other two measures are near-perfect proxies of the former. I conclude that since node counts are in most cases unreasonably resource demanding to conduct, researchers can feel safe in using the measure that is most economically to conduct, word counts.
Detecting and recognizing moving pedestrians in video

Detecting and recognizing pedestrians in video footages are two essential and significant tasks in many automatic video understanding systems. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach to moving pedestrian detection and recognition in video. The testing process of this approach involves two main steps: moving edge detection and hypotheses generation. Moving edges are firstly extracted by comparing the edges identified in adjacent frames. Shape context descriptors are then produced for the edge points sampled from the moving edges and matched against the instances of a codebook that is learned from a set of training samples to generate initial hypotheses. Final hypotheses are formed by pruning initial hypotheses with large overlaps. Experiments with a publicly available dataset show that the proposed approach can reliably detect and recognize moving pedestrians in real scenes that contain either different viewing angles or different degrees of occlusions.
Geographic and technologicaI R&D spillovers and firms productivity performance

Knowledge originating in a particular country or region increasingly transcends its national boundaries and contributes to the productivity growth of other geographic areas. This paper aims at assessing the magnitude of R&D spillover effects on large international R&D companies’ productivity growth. In particular, I investigate the extent to which R&D spillover effects are intensified by both geographic and technological proximities between spillover generating and receiving firms. I also control for the firm’s ability to identify, assimilate and absorb the external knowledge stock. The empirical findings indicate a positive and significant impact of both types of R&D spillovers and of absorptive capacity on productivity performance. Based on these findings, policy implications are proposed. University of Naples Parthenope, Department of Economic Studies "Salvatore Vinci". Email: aldieri@uniparthenope.it Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, DULBEACERT. Email : mcincera@ulb.ac. be
Soft-decision successive interference cancellation CDMA receiver with amplitude averaging and robust to timing errors

Successive interference cancellation (SIC) is a low-complexity multiuser detection method for DS/CDMA systems. If the channel is AWGN or slowly varying, averaging the channel amplitude estimates over multiple bits can greatly improve performance. However, the error propagation associated with a hard-limiter decision rule prevents SIC from achieving the performance improvement from averaging. We propose a new soft-decision rule to be used with amplitude averaging, which combines linear and hard decision rules. A performance within 0.4 dB of the single-user bound is obtained. We also made the above soft-decision SIC robust to time delay errors.
Neural-based underwater spherical object localization through electrolocation

Navigation of cluttered underwater environments remains to this day a challenging task in mobile robotics. Applying an electric field to a mobile robot's direct environment and measuring perturbations of this field, one is able to detect the presence of foreign objects in close proximity of the system. In addition, one is also able to infer a range of information relative to the detected objects, such as their position or electrical characteristics. Extracting such information from available measures typically requires a model (analytical, numerical or heuristic) descriptive of the relationship from geometry of the scene to measures performed (typically referred to as forward model), or of the inverse relationship (inverse model). In the following, we directly extract one such model from experimental data, and capture a forward model using a neural formalism. Then, using an iterative procedure, we are able to estimate the position of a detected object and assess the degree of confidence one can place on this estimate. Merit of the approach is illustrated using experimental data for a spherical object.
Biomechanics in bone tissue engineering

Biomechanics may be considered as central in the development of bone tissue engineering. The initial mechanical aspects are essential to the outcome of a functional tissue engineering approach; so are aspects of interface micromotion, bone ingrowths inside the scaffold and finally, the mechanical integrity of the scaffold during its degradation. A proposed view is presented herein on how biomechanical aspects can be synthesised and where future developments are needed. In particular, a distinction is made between the mechanical and the mechanotransductional aspects of bone tissue engineering: the former could be related to osteoconduction, while the latter may be correlated to the osteoinductive properties of the scaffold. This distinction allows biomechanicians to follow a strategy in the development of a scaffold having not only mechanical targets but also incorporating some mechanotransduction principles.