Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatio-Temporal Markov Random Field-Based Packet Video Error Concealment

In this paper, a spatio-temporal Markov random field method is proposed for block-based packet video error concealment. We suggest the combined usage of two estimators, one for lost pixels, and one for lost motion vectors. The estimator for the lost pixel field takes surrounding pixels in the same frame where the loss occurred and motion-compensated pixels from a previous frame based on a motion field estimate into account, while the optimal estimator of the motion field takes surrounding pixels in the same frame where the loss occurred, pixels from a previous frame, and the estimator function for the pixel field into account. Our method increases performance in peak signal-to-noise ratio as well as subjective visual performance compared to several other previous error concealment algorithms.
Turning Zimbabwe’s indigenous knowledge social systems for economic growth: A case of Honde Valley in Manicaland Province

Indigenous knowledge systems encompass all the natural resources, knowledge, culture and sills that the community values. The study focused on how the rich indigenous knowledge systems in Honde Valley can be used as a vehicle to foster and to establish methods of promoting sustainable economic growth for the community. The community has valuable indigenous knowledge systems and skills to successfully utilise to effect sustainable change, yet its economic status is wilting each day. This floppy situation can be addressed through turning the indigenous knowledge systems into effective use for the community’s economic change. Marangos (2006) argues that effective approach to indigenous knowledge systems leads to some solutions towards perpetual life-cycle of poverty. According to Atkins and Fray (2014) the richness of the community lies in the minds of that particular community. Hence, collective efforts in the use of indigenous resources by the community itself make it possible to change its own life-style. From a population of 12 000, only 50 participants were purposively selected because qualitative studies deal with small sample sizes that look into insights. The purposive sampling technique was used because the researchers wanted to work with appropriate informants. A qualitative case approach was adopted because it included interviewing participants, analysing responses, observing them and listening to their social interaction (Patton 2002; Punch 2009). Questionnaire, interviews and focus group discussions were employed as data generating techniques. Ethical and legal considerations were observed. The study revealed that the community lacked correct approaches to resuscitate the indigenous knowledge systems which were suffocated by the foreigners. The community had deficiency in social change and value added concepts. The study recommended that the community needs education and empowerment towards diversity, creativity and innovative to enable them to be more culturally conscious to the uniqueness of their indigenous knowledge systems.
Fast construction of irreducible polynomials over finite fields

The main result of this paper a new algorithm for constructing an irreducible polynomial of specified degree n over a finite field Fq . The algorithm is probabilistic, and is asymptotically faster than previously known algorithms for this problem. It uses an expected number of O-(n2 + n log q) operations in Fq, where the "soft-O" O- indicates an implicit factor of (log n )O(1). In addition, two new polynomial irreducibility tests are described.
Impact of a High Loading Dose of Atorvastatin on Contrast-Induced Acute Kidney Injury

Background— The role of statins in the prevention of contrast-induced acute kidney injury (CIAKI) is controversial. Methods and Results— First, we investigated the in vivo effects of atorvastatin on CIAKI. Patients with chronic kidney disease enrolled in the Novel Approaches for Preventing or Limiting Events (NAPLES) II trial were randomly assigned to (1) the atorvastatin group (80 mg within 24 hours before contrast media [CM] exposure; n=202) or (2) the control group (n=208). All patients received a high dose of N-acetylcysteine and sodium bicarbonate solution. Second, we investigated the in vitro effects of atorvastatin pretreatment on CM-mediated modifications of intracellular pathways leading to apoptosis or survival in renal tubular cells. CIAKI (ie, an increase >10% of serum cystatin C concentration within 24 hours after CM exposure) occurred in 9 of 202 patients in the atorvastatin group (4.5%) and in 37 of 208 patients in the control group (17.8%) (P=0.005; odds ratio=0.22; 95% confidence interval, 0.07–0.69). CIAKI rate was lower in the atorvastatin group in both diabetics and nondiabetics and in patients with moderate chronic kidney disease (estimated glomerular filtration rate, 31–60 mL/min per 1.73 m2). In the in vitro model, pretreatment with atorvastatin (1) prevented CM-induced renal cell apoptosis by reducing stress kinases activation and (2) restored the survival signals (mediated by Akt and ERK pathways). Conclusions— A single high loading dose of atorvastatin administered within 24 hours before CM exposure is effective in reducing the rate of CIAKI. This beneficial effect is observed only in patients at low to medium risk.
Avoiding the Testing Trap: Using Alternative Assessment Instruments to Evaluate Programs for the Gifted

The role of an external evaluator or internal coordinator, administrator or teacher involved in the evaluation of a gifted program should be monitoring program quality, growth and improvement. Simply stated, the process of program evaluation enables us to assess whether or not the objectives of the gifted program are being met, and whether or not administrators, classroom teachers, parents and students believe that the services being provided are meeting their collective and individual needs. If an evaluation is being conducted to improve the quality of services rendered, it should be geared to the individual objectives of the gifted program that is being evaluated. Over the last five years, research has been conducted on the effectiveness of a combination of the previously developed Enrichment Triad Model (Renzulli, 1977) and the newly developed Revolving Door Identification Model (RDIM) (Renzulli, Reis, and Smith, 1981 1. During this time period, lengthy and in-depth evaluations have been conducted in each of the initial twelve field test districts that implemented Triad/RDIM in Connecticut. This article will detail this process and the instrumentation and methodology used in the evaluations of these programs.
A Case Series Evaluation of a Pilot Group Cognitive Behavioural Treatment for Children With Asthma and Anxiety

Anxiety disorders occur at an increased rate in children with asthma; however, there is only a small evidence base to support specific psychological treatments for these children. The current study evaluated the efficacy of a pilot cognitive behavioural treatment (CBT) group intervention for children with asthma and a comorbid anxiety disorder in a case series design. Five children (aged 8–11 years old) with asthma and a comorbid anxiety disorder and their mothers took part in eight 1-hour group treatment sessions. Primary outcomes measures were anxiety diagnosis and asthma-related quality of life. Secondary outcome measures were asthma symptom control and parent quality of life associated with caring for a child with asthma. Three of the participants no longer met diagnostic criteria for an anxiety disorder following treatment and three different participants reported a reliable improvement in asthma-related quality of life. Two participants reported a reliable improvement in asthma symptom control. Three mothers reported an improvement in caregiver quality of life. The findings provide preliminary proof of concept evidence for the efficacy of a CBT intervention for children with asthma and clinical anxiety.
Impact of bucketing on performance of linearly interpolated language models

N-gram models are used to model language in various applications. For large vocabularies, even a very large corpus is insu(cid:14)cient to estimate a raw ratio-of-counts trigram model. One common way to over-come this problem is by linear interpolation of the trigram model with lower order models. The interpolation weights can be varied as a function of the current history, to re(cid:13)ect the con(cid:12)dence we have in the estimates of various orders. Since the number of histories is large we cannot hope to estimate a set of weights for each history. Thus sets of histories are tied together and the same weights are used for all histories within the set. In this paper we study the e(cid:11)ect of the algorithm used to tie together the various histories. We report word error rate (WER) results on a large-vocabulary speech recognition task.
Variational harmonic maps for space deformation

A space deformation is a mapping from a source region to a target region within Euclidean space, which best satisfies some userspecified constraints. It can be used to deform shapes embedded in the ambient space and represented in various forms -- polygon meshes, point clouds or volumetric data. For a space deformation method to be useful, it should possess some natural properties: e.g. detail preservation, smoothness and intuitive control. A harmonic map from a domain ω ⊂ Rd to Rd is a mapping whose d components are harmonic functions. Harmonic mappings are smooth and regular, and if their components are coupled in some special way, the mapping can be detail-preserving, making it a natural choice for space deformation applications. The challenge is to find a harmonic mapping of the domain, which will satisfy constraints specified by the user, yet also be detail-preserving, and intuitive to control. We generate harmonic mappings as a linear combination of a set of harmonic basis functions, which have a closed-form expression when the source region boundary is piecewise linear. This is done by defining an energy functional of the mapping, and minimizing it within the linear span of these basis functions. The resulting mapping is harmonic, and a natural "As-Rigid-As-Possible" deformation of the source region. Unlike other space deformation methods, our approach does not require an explicit discretization of the domain. It is shown to be much more efficient, yet generate comparable deformations to state-of-the-art methods. We describe an optimization algorithm to minimize the deformation energy, which is robust, provably convergent, and easy to implement.
A Study Towards Reliability- and Delay-Critical Wireless Communication for RoboCup Robotic Soccer Application

RoboCup is an international competition for a team of multiple fast-moving robots under a dynamic environment to autonomously play soccer game against another team. Due to the nature of the competition, the requirements and constraints for the wireless communication are extremely tight. The challenge is that wireless communication is involved in the control loop and therefore the reliability and propagation delay are vital factors which directly affect the team performance. Beside, various interferences with known and unknown frequency / transmission power usually exist at the competition site, which are hazardous environment to achieve reliable and low latency performance for wireless communication. This paper investigates the performance strengths and weaknesses of wireless communication means e.g. RF, IEEE 802.11a/b, IEEE 802.15. 4, DECT, Linx, etc, which are commonly used nowadays in different RoboCup teams and propose improvements towards reliable and delay-critical wireless communication.
ATP-Based Chemotherapy Response Assay in Primary or Recurrent Ovarian and Peritoneal Cancer

Purpose To investigate chemosensitivity with an adenosine triphosphate-based chemotherapy response assay in patients with epithelial ovarian or peritoneal cancer according to tumor histology, grade, and disease status. Materials and Methods One hundred specimens were collected during primary or secondary debulking from 67 patients with primary ovarian cancer, 24 patients with recurrent ovarian cancer, 5 patients with primary peritoneal cancer, and 4 patients with recurrent peritoneal cancer; samples were collected between August 2006 and June 2009. Tumor cells were isolated and cultured for 48 hours in media containing chemotherapy. The chemosensitivity index (CI) was calculated as 300 minus the sum of the cell death rate at 0.2×, 1×, and 5× drug concentrations, and the CI values were compared. Results CI values were obtained from 93 of 100 patients. The most active agents against primary disease were ifosfamide and paclitaxel. For primary serous adenocarcinoma, paclitaxel and irinotecan were the most active, followed by ifosfamide. For clear cell carcinoma, ifosfamide was the most active, followed by paclitaxel and irinotecan. Although not statistically significant, the CIs of cisplatin, carboplatin, paclitaxel, and docetaxel decreased as tumor grade increased. In 14 cases of recurrent disease, paclitaxel was the most active, followed by ifosfamide and cisplatin. Conclusion Ifosfamide and paclitaxel were the most active drugs for primary and recurrent disease. Therefore, we recommend further clinical studies to confirm the efficacy of paclitaxel, ifosfamide, and cisplatin combination chemotherapy for recurrent and primary ovarian cancer.
Sequence-kernel based sparse representation for amateur video summarization

Automatic video summarization is critical for facilitating fast browsing and efficient management of multimedia data. Compared to well-edited videos with predefined structures (e.g., movies) or constrained contents (e.g., news or sports videos), upon which existing methods focus, the main challenges of summarizing unconstrained amateur or consumer videos include dealing with extremely diverse contents without any pre-imposed structure and typically mediocre video quality. To address these challenges, we explore a signal-reconstruction-based approach relying only on visual content. In particular, we propose a sequence-kernel-based sparse representation approach for directly summarizing consumer videos. A dictionary of subsequences is first constructed from clustered frames with importance ranking scores of extracted high-level semantics. Video summarization is formulated to seek an optimal combination of the dictionary elements that robustly represents the original video. Weighted-sequence distance is exploited to compute the approximation error, and the kernel-based feature-sign algorithm is used to estimate the sparse coefficients. A linear combination over the dictionary with the obtained optimal sparse coefficients is output as the final summary video. Extensive experiments are performed on 18 videos with subjective ratings from 7 evaluators. Results obtained by the proposed approach compare favorably with two existing methods both visually and quantitatively, validating its effectiveness.
A comparison of two buffer insertion ring architectures with fairness algorithms

Buffer insertion rings (BIR) are known to provide higher throughputs than other competing ring technologies. With the introduction of spatial reuse, MAN's and LAN's are at a greater advantage of maximizing bandwidth efficiency. Spatial reuse introduces the concept of congestion and fairness algorithms are needed to police the fair access of the low priority traffic on the ring. Two architectures are studied in this paper, mono transit buffer (MTB) and the dual transit buffer (DTB). Different from earlier BIR architectures, the congestion control mechanisms studied in this paper are rate based and traffic streams are regulated using leaky buckets. It has been shown through simulations that both architectures exhibit oscillatory behavior under certain congestion conditions. MTB oscillates due to the buffer threshold settings. We show that by correctly setting parameters, oscillations can be dampened to achieve fair throughputs for all nodes contributing to the congestion.
Evaluation of the rate constants of sugar transport through maltoporin (LamB) of Escherichia coli from the sugar-induced current noise

LamB (maltoporin) of Escherichia coli outer membrane was reconstituted into artificial lipid bilayer membranes. The channel contains a binding site for sugars and is blocked for ions when the site is occupied by a sugar. The on and off reactions of sugar binding cause an increase of the noise of the current through the channel. The sugar-induced current noise of maltoporin was used for the evaluation of the sugar-binding kinetics for different sugars of the maltooligosaccharide series and for sucrose. The on rate constant for sugar binding was between 10(6) and 10(7) M-1.s-1 for the maltooligosaccharides and corresponds to the movement of the sugars from the aqueous phase to the central binding site. The off rate (corresponding to the release of the sugars from the channel) decreased with increasing number of glucose residues in the maltooligosaccharides from approximately 2,000 s-1 for maltotriose to 180 s-1 for maltoheptaose. The kinetics for sucrose movement was considerably slower. The activation energies of the stability constant and of the rate constants for sugar binding were evaluated from noise experiments at different temperatures. The role of LamB in the transport of maltooligosaccharides across the outer membrane is discussed.
Supporting Mobile Collaborative Activities through Scaffolded Flexible Grouping

Within the field of Mobile Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (mCSCL), we are interested in exploring the space of collaborative activities that enable students to practice communication, negotiation and decision-making skills. Collaboration is via learning activities that circumvent the constraints of fixed seating or locations of students. This paper presents one such collaborative learning activity that involves young students forming groups to achieve a specific goal (get the fractions on their handhelds to sum to one). Collaborative scaffolding is provided by the designed mobile collaborative application as well as by the students’ social relationships and the teacher’s facilitation. We report on our initial trials which show that the socio-technical design of the activity helps students in identifying their own strategies and stimulates collaboration. Beyond this specific application, we propose a generic model for mobile computer supported collaborative activities that can support a range of other tasks in learning languages, science or other disciplines.
CSCL chats' analysis using time series

The paper presents a research towards the combination of text mining and time series analysis in order to develop tools for the analysis of sequences of time-related documents, like chat logs. It is described an experiment of using such techniques applied on chats, for determining correlations among most frequently used words, considering their time occurrences and computing the correlations between the rhythmicities of interventions with high frequency appearance, using the time series model.
The effects of intradermal botulinum toxin type a injections on pain symptoms of patients with diabetic neuropathy

Background: Considering the dramatic increasing rate of diabetes and consequently its related complications, most importantly diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN), challenges regarding proper treatment of DPN and its effect on the quality-of-life and care of diabetic patients, the aim of this current study is to evaluate the effect of intradermal botulinum toxin type A (BTX-A) injections on pain symptoms of patients with diabetic neuropathic pain. Materials and Methods: In this randomized double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial study, diabetic patients aged <70 years with neuropathic pain in both feet were enrolled. Diabetic neuropathy (DN) in selected patients was diagnosed using DN4 questionnaire and nerve conduction velocity examinations. They randomized in two intervention (BTX-A injection/100 unit, N = 20) and placebo groups (normal saline injection, N = 20). The outcome of injection on diabetic neuropathic pain was assessed using neuropathy pain scale (NPS) and visual analog scale (VAS) score and compared in two studied groups. Results: There was no significant difference in DN4, NPS and VAS scales of studied population after intervention in the placebo group. Intradermal injection of BTX-A reduced NPS scores for all items except cold sensation (P = 0.05). It reduced DN4 scores for electric shocks, burning, pins and needles and brushing (P < 0.05). According to VAS scale 30% and 0% of patients in intervention and placebo groups have no pain after intervention (P = 0.01). Conclusion: Intradermal injection of BTX-A is a well-tolerated agent that has a significant effect on DPN pain.
Group Laws and Free Subgroups in Topological Groups

A proof is given that a permutation group in which different finite sets have different stabilizers cannot satisfy any group law. For locally compact topological groups with this property, almost all finite subsets of the group are shown to generate free subgroups. Consequences of these theorems are derived for: Thompson's group F, weakly branch groups, automorphism groups of regular trees, and profinite groups with alternating composition factors of unbounded degree. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification 20B07, 20E10, 20E18, 20P05.
Modelling and Analysis of a New Piezoelectric Dynamic Balance Regulator

In this paper, a new piezoelectric dynamic balance regulator, which can be used in motorised spindle systems, is presented. The dynamic balancing adjustment mechanism is driven by an in-plane bending vibration from an annular piezoelectric stator excited by a high-frequency sinusoidal input voltage. This device has different construction, characteristics and operating principles than a conventional balance regulator. In this work, a dynamic model of the regulator is first developed using a detailed analytical method. Thereafter, MATLAB is employed to numerically simulate the relations between the dominant parameters and the characteristics of the regulator based on thedynamic model. Finally, experimental measurements are used to certify the validity of the dynamic model. Consequently, the mathematical model presented and analysed in this paper can be used as a tool for optimising the design of a piezoelectric dynamic balance regulator during steady state operation.
Adaptive robot learning in a non-stationary environment

Adaptive control is challenging in real-world applications such as robotics. Learning has to be rapid enough to be performed in real time and to avoid damage to the robot. Models using linear function approximation are interesting in such tasks because they offer rapid learning and have small memory and processing requirements. This makes them suitable as adaptive controllers in non- stationary environments, especially when the controller needs to be an embedded system. Experiments with a light-seeking robot illustrate how the robot adapts to the environment by Reinforcement Learning where the robot collects training samples by exploring the environment.
POPMUSIC for the Point Feature Label Placement

Label placement is a problem of fundamental importance in cartography, where text labels must be placed on maps while avoiding overlaps with cartographic symbols and other labels. It requires positioning labels of area (such as countries and oceans), line (such as rivers and roads) and point (such as cities and mountain peaks) features [1]. Independent of the features being labeled these problems are NP-hard.