Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An ontology-mapping service for agent-based automated negotiation

The automation of B2B processes requires a high level of interoperability between potentially disparate systems. We model such systems using software agents (as enterprise’s representative agents), which interact using ACL protocols. This paper presents, in the context of an Electronic Institution, an ontology-mapping service that enables the automation of negotiation protocols where the involved agents may use different ontologies to represent their domain knowledge. The ontology-mapping service employs two approaches used for lexical and semantic similarity, namely N-Grams and WordNet, and poses few requirements on the ontologies’ representation format. Examples are provided that illustrate the integration of ontology-mapping with automated negotiation.
An output-capacitor-free buck converter with nano-second-DVS and sub-switching-cycle load transient response

An output-capacitor-free switching buck converter is proposed in this paper. By removing the off-chip capacitor, both the PCB footprint and system volume can be reduced. Due to the smaller output capacitance and added pull-up/down power transistors, the dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) tracking speed can be improved to nano-seconds/volt level. The load transient response of the proposed switching converter is also improved within one switching cycle. The proposed buck converter is designed with TSMC 0.35-μm CMOS process, regulating a 1.2~1.8V output voltage from a 3-V input power supply at 2-MHz switching frequency. A 63-ns/V DVS tracking speed is achieved with 100-pF filtering capacitor. The output voltage is recovered within one switching cycle when a 270mW load change occurs.
A new implementation of the infrared flux method using the 2MASS catalogue

Context. The effective temperature scale of FGK stars, especially at the lowest metallicities remains a major problem in the chemical abundance analysis of metal-poor stars. Aims. We present a new implementation of the infrared flux method (I RFM) using the 2MASS catalogue. Methods. We computed the theoretical quantities in the 2MASS JHKs filters by integrating theoretical fluxes computed from ATLA S models, and compare them directly with the observed 2MASS JHKs magnitudes. This is the main difference between our imple- mentation of the IRFM and that of Ram´ irez & Melendez (2005, ApJ, 626, 446; hereafter RM05), since to introduce new stars at the lowest metallicities they transform the 2MASS JHKs magnitudes into the TCS photometric system. We merge in our sample the stars from Alonso et al. (1996, AA hereafter AAM96; 1999, AA hereafter AAM99), and other studies to appropriately cover a wide range of metallicities, endin g up with 555 dwarf and subgiant field stars and 264 giant field s tars. We derived a new bolometric flux calibration using the availabl e Johnson-Cousins U BV(RI)C and the 2MASS JHKs photometry. We also computed new Teff versus colour empirical calibrations using our extended sample of stars. Results. We derived effectives temperatures for almost all the stars in the AAM96 and AAM99 samples and find that our scales of temperature are hotter by ∼ 64 K (σT = 104 K, N = 332 dwarfs) and∼ 54 K with aσT = 131 K (N = 202 giants). The same comparison with the sample of RM05 for stars with (Fe/H)<−2.5 provides a difference of∼ −87 K (σT = 194 K, N = 12 dwarf stars) and∼ 61 K (σT = 62 K, N = 18 giant stars). Conclusions. Our temperature scale is slightly hotter than that of AAM96 and RM05 for metal-rich dwarf stars but cooler than that of RM05 for metal-poor dwarfs. We have performed an fully self-consistent IRFM in the 2MASS photometric system. For those who wish to use 2MASS photometry and colour-temperature calibrations to derive effective temperatures, especially for metal-poor stars, we recommend our calibrations over others available in the literature. In our implementation we avoid the transf ormation of the 2MASS JHKs magnitudes to a different photometric system and thus fully exploit the excellent internal consistency of the 2MASS photometric system.
Profile Guided Load Marking for Memory Renaming

Memory operations remain a significant bottleneck in dynami c lly scheduled pipelined processors, due in part to the inability to statically determine th e existence of memory address dependencies. Hardware memory renaming techniques have been pro posed which predict which stores a load might be dependent upon. These prediction techniques c an be used to speculatively forward a value from a predicted store dependency to a load through a va lue prediction table; however, these techniques require large and time-consuming hardware tabl es. In this paper we propose a software-guided approach for iden tifyi g dependencies between store and load instructions and the Load Marking(LM) architecture to communicate these dependencies to the hardware. Compiler analysis and profiles are used to find i mportant store/load relationships, and these relationships are identified during execution via hin ts or an n-bit tag. For those loads that are not marked for renaming, we then use additional profiling inf ormation to further classify the loads into those that have accurate value prediction and those tha t are largely independent of neighboring stores. These classifications allow the processor to apply t he most appropriate aggressive form of execution for each load individually, minimizing the need f or expensive recovery action.
EFFECTS OF PROFICIENCY SUBSKILLS ON PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT IN L2 CHINESE STUDY ABROAD

Abstract This study is the first to examine contributions of proficiency subskills to pragmatic development. We used the latent growth curve modeling to reveal the causal relationships between proficiency subskills and pragmatic competence in 109 American learners of Chinese across two data points over three months abroad in China. Proficiency was measured by a standardized Chinese proficiency test with separate scores for listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Pragmatic competence was measured by a computerized oral discourse completion task assessing speech acts. Findings showed that pragmatic competence accrued along with increased proficiency. Changes of proficiency explained 54.1% of the variance in changes of pragmatic competence. Listening and speaking contributed more to pragmatic development than reading and writing did, indicating that when pragmatic competence is measured by an online spoken task, speaking and listening have stronger impacts.
Document clustering around weighted-medoids

In this paper, we propose a new similarity-based k-partitions clustering approach, called CAWP. Given the similarities of pairs of objects in the dataset, CAWP groups these objects into K non-overlaped clusters. Each cluster is represented by multiple objects with different weights, called prototype weight. The more representative an object is with respect to a cluster, the larger prototype weight is assigned to that object in the corresponding cluster. Compared with the traditional k-medoids approach, where each cluster is represented by a single medoid or representative object, the way of using prototype weights to allow multiple objects together to describe a cluster is more appropriate in our view. Experimental study using large document datasets show that CAWP is more favorable than other existing similarity-based clustering approaches as it achieves both good effectiveness and efficiency.
Automatic Analysis of UT Inspections in Aircraft Structures (MIDAS-AUTODET Software)

NDT data analysis is a crucial activity in quality control and maintenance of industrial parts, in particular, of aircraft structures. This paper presents MIDASAUTODET, an advanced Software for automatic UT data evaluation under customisable criteria that can be easily defined and programmed by the expert to comply with different customer’s quality procedures. Ultrasonic records (mainly Cscan images) can be combined to perform defect extraction, defect grouping applying different clustering techniques, as well as defect sizing and characterisation. MIDAS-AUTODET is an optional module integrated into MIDAS Data Analysis Software, developed entirely by Tecnatom in a 3D environment. 3D UT data representation is available (as well as information on trajectories and component geometry). This Software can deal with conventional UT records generated by MIDAS Multichannel UT Data Acquisition systems (also developed by Tecnatom1) as well as with MIDAS-Multi 2000 phased-array systems when phased-array inspection is required. Recent experiences show that the combined analysis of such inspections using the Software described in this paper is feasible. Taking into account that several areas (and therefore, associated defect assessment criteria) can be distinguished in each component, additional tools have been developed to obtain a description of the part under inspection using experimental data. So, areas with different thickness, different class, structural elements such as stiffeners, exclusion areas, etc. are identified and this information combined later on with the UT records. The Software will allow an important reduction of evaluation time, improving quality and therefore reliability, simplifying an activity that takes several hours to skilled workers and that, now, could be carried out by personnel with a lower qualification and then, confirmed and approved by an expert afterwards.
Sleep Staging Based on Signals Acquired Through Bed Sensor

We describe a system for the evaluation of the sleep macrostructure on the basis of Emfit sensor foils placed into bed mattress and of advanced signal processing. The signals on which the analysis is based are heart-beat interval (HBI) and movement activity obtained from the bed sensor, the relevant features and parameters obtained through a time-variant autoregressive model (TVAM) used as feature extractor, and the classification obtained through a hidden Markov model (HMM). Parameters coming from the joint probability of the HBI features were used as input to a HMM, while movement features are used for wake period detection. A total of 18 recordings from healthy subjects, including also reference polysomnography, were used for the validation of the system. When compared to wake-nonrapid-eye-movement (NREM)-REM classification provided by experts, the described system achieved a total accuracy of 79±9% and a kappa index of 0.43±0.17 with only two HBI features and one movement parameter, and a total accuracy of 79±10% and a kappa index of 0.44±0.19 with three HBI features and one movement parameter. These results suggest that the combination of HBI and movement features could be a suitable alternative for sleep staging with the advantage of low cost and simplicity.
Physical activity motivating games: virtual rewards for real activity

Contemporary lifestyle has become increasingly sedentary: little physical (sports, exercises) and much sedentary (TV, computers) activity. The nature of sedentary activity is self-reinforcing, such that increasing physical and decreasing sedentary activity is difficult. We present a novel approach aimed at combating this problem in the context of computer games. Rather than explicitly changing the amount of physical and sedentary activity a person sets out to perform, we propose a new game design that leverages user engagement to generate out of game motivation to perform physical activity while playing. In our design, players gain virtual game rewards in return for real physical activity performed. Here we present and evaluate an application of our design to the game Neverball. We adapted Neverball by reducing the time allocated to accomplish the game tasks and motivated players to perform physical activity by offering time based rewards. An empirical evaluation involving 180 participants shows that the participants performed more physical activity, decreased the amount of sedentary playing time, and did not report a decrease in perceived enjoyment of playing the activity motivating version of Neverball.
Brainwave Technology Gives Internet Access to the Physically Disabled

It is impossible for severely disabled people to browse or learn through the Internet due to the mere lack of independent control of the mouse. This paper proposes a brain computer interface (BCI) to aid severely disabled individuals, such as people disabled by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), in browsing or learning on the Internet. By analyzing specific components of event-related potentials (ERPs), cursor control can be achieved. The cursor can be controlled by brain waves in a user-friendly manner to move or click on the web page. The major contributions of this research include: (1) designing a BCI for disabled people, (2) embedding the BCI's cursor controller into a web page, (3) conducting clinical experiments, (4) analysing the experimental results, system accuracy, and effectiveness, and (5) evaluating the system's practicability and giving suggestions for future work. There are two innovative technologies proposed in this research: (1) a specific component of ERPs located at O1, the N2P3 (the difference between the peak and trough of N200 and P300), was used to differentiate targeted from non-targeted (non-selected) signals, (2) instead of a fixed position style BCI, a movable watermark style BCI which follows the cursor was designed. The novel technique supported by a user-friendly interface helps the disabled have contact with the outside world resulting in positive emotions.
Speeding up irregular applications in shared-memory multiprocessors: memory binding and group prefetching

While many parallel applications exhibit good spatial locality, other important codes in areas like graph problem-solving or CAD do not. Often, these irregular codes contain small records accessed via pointers. Consequently, while the former applications benefit from long cache lines, the latter prefer short lines. One good solution is to combine short lines with prefetching. In this way, each application can exploit the amount of spatial locality that it has. However, prefetching, if provided, should also work for the irregular codes. This paper presents a new prefetching scheme that, while usable by regular applications, is specifically targeted to irregular ones: memory binding and group prefetching. The idea is to hardware-bind and prefetch together groups of data that the programmer suggests are strongly related to each other. Examples are the different fields in a record or two records linked by a permanent pointer. This prefetching scheme, combined with short cache lines, results in a memory hierarchy design that can be exploited by both regular and irregular applications. Overall, it is better to use a system with short lines (16-32 bytes) and our prefetching than a system with long lines (128 bytes) with or without our prefetching. The former system runs 6 out of 7 splash-class applications faster. In particular, some of the most irregular applications run 25-40% faster.
Searching for structure in data with fuzzy clusters of variable dimensionality of feature subspaces

Structural relationships in data are revealed by methods of clustering and fuzzy clustering. In essence, clustering leads to the reduction of data. Dimensionality reduction comes as a complementary process in which we eliminate some features (attributes). This study introduces a concept of structure reduction which is guided by a criterion of structure retention. In particular, it is shown that each cluster could be described by a different subset of features so that finally the reduction leads to the local feature subspaces. By analyzing the resulting subspaces, one could gain a better insight into a nature of the contributing features and in this way identify subsets of the most meaningful ones. The reduction problem is formulated and formalized as a certain combinatorial optimization task whose solution is provided by means of particle swarm optimization.
Spatially-decaying aggregation over a network: model and algorithms

Data items are often associated with a location in which they are present or collected, and their relevance or influence decays with their distance. Aggregate values over such data thus depend on the observing location, where the weight given to each item depends on its distance from that location. We term such aggregation spatially-decaying.Spatially-decaying aggregation has numerous applications: Individual sensor nodes collect readings of an environmental parameter such as contamination level or parking spot availability; the nodes then communicate to integrate their readings so that each location obtains contamination level or parking availability in its neighborhood. Nodes in a p2p network could use a summary of content and properties of nodes in their neighborhood in order to guide search. In graphical databases such as Web hyperlink structure, properties such as subject of pages that can reach or be reached from a page using link traversals provide information on the page.We formalize the notion of spatially-decaying aggregation and develop efficient algorithms for fundamental aggregation functions, including sums and averages, random sampling, heavy hitters, quantiles, and Lp norms.
A Rough Set and SVM Based Approach to Chinese Textual Affect Sensing

Text is an important modality for human-computer interaction, so studying the relationship between natural language and affective information as well as assessing the underpinned affective qualities of natural language has been the focus of research community. Several approaches have been performed to sense affect from English text, but the study on Chinese text emotion detection is still at the beginning. In this paper, we devote ourselves to sensing affective information from Chinese documents with the aim to group those into a set of emotions. A rough set and SVM based approach is adopted to categorize text into four emotional classes, including happy, sad, anger and surprise. Meanwhile, a Chinese textual emotion database is established to assist the processing.
Syllable weight encodes mostly the same information for English word segmentation as dictionary stress

Stress is a useful cue for English word segmentation. A wide range of computational models have found that stress cues enable a 2-10% improvement in segmentation accuracy, depending on the kind of model, by using input that has been annotated with stress using a pronouncing dictionary. However, stress is neither invariably produced nor unambiguously identifiable in real speech. Heavy syllables, i.e. those with long vowels or syllable codas, attract stress in English. We devise Adaptor Grammar word segmentation models that exploit either stress, or syllable weight, or both, and evaluate the utility of syllable weight as a cue to word boundaries. Our results suggest that syllable weight encodes largely the same information for word segmentation in English that annotated dictionary stress does.
A Bayesian View of Sensory Conflicts in Decision-Making March 3 , 2006 1 Introduction

Decisional conflicts abound in sensory processing and perce tual decision-making, and they arise from diverse sources . These conflicts can result directly from conflicting informa tion in the sensory inputs themselves – such as conflicts between modalities in the Stroop task, between spatially ad jacent stimuli in the Eriksen task, or between the eyes in the binocular rivalry task. Another class of conflicts is mor e indirect, as when there are multiple, conflicting interpre tations consistent with the same sensory-evoked neural inp uts. Examples of this latter type include multi-stable visu al displays, and contexts in which the semantical relationshi p among sensory objects are non-stationary over time.
The Bile Acid-Sensitive Ion Channel (BASIC) Is Activated by Alterations of Its Membrane Environment

The bile acid-sensitive ion channel (BASIC) is a member of the DEG/ENaC family of ion channels. Channels of this family are characterized by a common structure, their physiological functions and modes of activation, however, are diverse. Rat BASIC is expressed in brain, liver and intestinal tract and activated by bile acids. The physiological function of BASIC and its mechanism of bile acid activation remain a puzzle. Here we addressed the question whether amphiphilic bile acids activate BASIC by directly binding to the channel or indirectly by altering the properties of the surrounding membrane. We show that membrane-active substances other than bile acids also affect the activity of BASIC and that activation by bile acids and other membrane-active substances is non-additive, suggesting that BASIC is sensitive for changes in its membrane environment. Furthermore based on results from chimeras between BASIC and ASIC1a, we show that the extracellular and the transmembrane domains are important for membrane sensitivity.
Hydrodynamical simulations of Galactic fountains: II. Evolution of multiple fountains

The ejection of gas out of the disk in late-type galaxies is related to star formation and is mainly due to the explosion of Type II supernovae. In a previous paper, we considered the evolution of a single Galactic fountain, that is, a fountain powered by a single supernova cluster. Using 3D hydrodynamical simulations, we studied in detail the fountain flow and its dependence with several factors, such as the Galactic rotation, the distance to the Galactic center, and the presence of a hot gaseous halo. As a natural follow-up, the present paper investigates the dynamical evolution of multiple generations of fountains generated by � 100 OB associations. We have considered the observed size-frequency distribution of young stellar clusters within the Galaxy in order to appropriately fuel the multiple fountains in our simulations. Most of the results of the previous paper have been confirmed, like for example the formation of intermediate velocity clouds above the disk by the multiple fountains. Also, the present work confirms the localized nature of the fountain flows: the freshly ejected metals tend to fall back close to the same Galactocentric region where they are delivered. Therefore, the fountains do not change significantly the radial profile of the disk chemical abundance. The multiple fountains simulations also allowed to consistently calculate the feedback of the star formation on the halo gas. We found that the hot gas gains about 10 % of all the SNII energy produced in the disk. Thus, the SN feedback more than compensate for the halo radiative losses and allow for a quasi steady-state disk-halo circulation to exist. Finally, we have also considered the possibility of mass infall from the intergalactic medium and its interaction with the clouds that are formed by the fountains. Though our simulations are not suitable to reproduce the slow rotational pattern that is typically observed in the halos around the disk galaxies, they indicate that the presence of an external gas infall may help to slow down the rotation of the gas in the clouds and thus the amount of angular momentum that they transfer to the coronal gas, as previously suggested in the literature.