Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Composite Valuation of Immaterial Damage in Flooding: Value of Statistical Life, Value of Statistical Evacuation and Value of Statistical Injury

This paper enriches existing valuation literature in a number of ways by presenting context-specific estimates of immaterial damage. First, it offers an estimation of value of statistical life (VOSL) in the context of a natural hazard (flooding). Next, as one of the contributions, alongside with less biased estimate of VOSL (euro 6.8 mln) it also provides estimates of the value of statistical injury (VOSI, euro 92,000), and of the value of statistical evacuation (VOSE, euro 2,400). Our estimated indicators are plausible and stay robust throughout various estimations. For flood protection policy in the Netherlands, a higher value of VOSL forthcoming from this research would imply 'underprotection' under current conditions. Another important finding concerns the composition of the total value of immaterial damages, where value of fatalities or value of evacuation may dominate depending on the prevailing floor risk circumstances. This implies that, first, VOSL is not an adequate proxy for immaterial damages since it understates prospective benefits of designated protective measures. Second, spatially differentiated composition of immaterial damages should be explicitly considered to guide policy decisions.
Computer Aided Verification of Lamport's Fast Mutual Exclusion Algorithm Using Colored Petri Nets and Occurrence Graphs with Symmetries

In this paper, we present a computer tool for verification of distributed systems. As an example, we establish the correctness of Lamport's Fast Mutual Exclusion Algorithm. The tool implements the method of occurrence graphs with symmetries (OS-graphs) for Colored Petri Nets (CP-nets). The basic idea in the approach is to exploit the symmetries inherent in many distributed systems to construct a condensed state space. We demonstrate a significant increase in the number of states which can be analyzed. The paper is to a large extent self-contained and does not assume any prior knowledge of CP-nets (or any other kinds of Petri Nets) or OS-graphs. CP-nets and OS-graphs are not our invention. Our contribution is the development of the tool and verification of the example, demonstrating how the method of occurrence graphs with symmetries can be put into practice.
Embedded Extended Visual Cryptography Schemes

A visual cryptography scheme (VCS) is a kind of secret sharing scheme which allows the encoding of a secret image into n shares distributed to n participants. The beauty of such a scheme is that a set of qualified participants is able to recover the secret image without any cryptographic knowledge and computation devices. An extended visual cryptography scheme (EVCS) is a kind of VCS which consists of meaningful shares (compared to the random shares of traditional VCS). In this paper, we propose a construction of EVCS which is realized by embedding random shares into meaningful covering shares, and we call it the embedded EVCS. Experimental results compare some of the well-known EVCSs proposed in recent years systematically, and show that the proposed embedded EVCS has competitive visual quality compared with many of the well-known EVCSs in the literature. In addition, it has many specific advantages against these well-known EVCSs, respectively.
Composite surface for blocking bacterial adsorption on protein biochips.

The design and fabrication of protein biochips requires characterization of blocking agents that minimize nonspecific binding of proteins or organisms. Nonspecific adsorption of Escherichia coli, Listeria innocua, and Listeria monocytogenes is prevented by bovine serum albumin (BSA) or biotinylated BSA adsorbed on SiO(2) surfaces of a biochip that had been modified with a C(18) coating. Biotinylated BSA forms a protein-based surface that in turn binds streptavidin. Because streptavidin has multiple binding sites for biotin, it in turn anchors other biotinylated proteins, including antibodies. Hence, biotinylated BSA simultaneously serves as a blocking agent and a foundation for binding an interfacing protein, avidin or streptavidin, which in turns anchors biotinylated antibody. In our case, the antibody is C11E9, an IgG-type antibody that binds Listeria spp. Nonspecific adsorption of another bacterium, Escherichia coli, is also minimized due to the blocking action of the BSA. The blocking characteristics of BSA adsorbed on C(18)-derivatized SiO(2) surfaces for construction of a protein biochip for electronic detection of pathogenic organisms is investigated.
Gesture-based Continuous Authentication for Wearable Devices: the Google Glass Case

We study the feasibility of touch gesture behavioural biometrics for implicit authentication of users on a smartglass (Google Glass) by proposing a continuous authentication system using two classifiers: SVM with RBF kernel, and a new classifier based on Chebyshev's concentration inequality. Based on data collected from 30 volunteers, we show that such authentication is feasible both in terms of classification accuracy and computational load on smartglasses. We achieve a classification accuracy of up to 99% with only 75 training samples using behavioural biometric data from four different types of touch gestures. To show that our system can be generalized, we test its performance on touch data from smartphones and found the accuracy to be similar to smartglasses. Finally, our experiments on the permanence of gestures show that the negative impact of changing user behaviour with time on classification accuracy can be best alleviated by periodically replacing older training samples with new randomly chosen samples.
Detection of facial characteristics based on edge information

In this paper, a novel method for eye and mouth detection and eye center and mouth corner localization, based on geometrical information is presented. First, a face detector is applied to detect the facial region, and the edge map of this region is extracted. A vector pointing to the closest edge pixel is then assigned to every pixel. x and y components of these vectors are used to detect the eyes and mouth. For eye center localization, intensity information is used, after removing unwanted effects, such as light reflections. For the detection of the mouth corners, the hue channel of the lip area is used. The proposed method can work efficiently on low-resolution images and has been tested on the XM2VTS database with very good results.
Shadow removal using background reconstruction

Shadow removal plays an important role in moving object detection and tracking. In this paper, a new shadow removal method is introduced for the accurate identification of moving objects. This method firstly uses background subtraction to detect moving objects that have casted shadows. Secondly, a background reconstruction scheme is developed to create a dynamically updated background reference image. Thirdly, shadows are removed by comparing and analysing the reference image with the original video frame. This method is capable of detecting and removing shadows in different environments under different lighting conditions. Five benchmark videos typically used to test the effectiveness of shadow removal techniques and two user recorded videos have been examined using the proposed method. Experimental results have shown that the method can produce satisfactory results with regard to robustness and consistency.
Efficient, Failure Resilient Transactions for Parallel and Distributed Computing

Scientific simulations are moving away from using centralized persistent storage for intermediate data between workflow steps towards an all online model. This shift is motivated by the relatively slow IO bandwidth growth compared with compute speed increases. The challenges presented by this shift to Integrated Application Workflows are motivated by the loss of persistent storage semantics for node-to-node communication. One step towards addressing this semantics gap is using transactions to logically delineate a data set from 100,000s of processes to 1000s of servers as an atomic unit. Our previously demonstrated Doubly Distributed Transactions (D2T) protocol showed a high-performance solution, but had not explored how to detect and recover from faults. Instead, the focus was on demonstrating high-performance typical case performance. The research presented here addresses fault detection and recovery based on the enhanced protocol design. The total overhead for a full transaction with multiple operations at 65,536 processes is on average 0.055 seconds. Fault detection and recovery mechanisms demonstrate similar performance to the success case with only the addition of appropriate timeouts for the system. This paper explores the challenges in designing a recoverable protocol for doubly distributed transactions, particularly for parallel computing environments.
GMM foreground segmentation processor based on address free pixel streams

A compact implementation of a foreground segmentation processor in a multi-resolution transform domain has been proposed for HDTV signals. The proposed architecture is designed to simplify system controls by the hardware streaming and to reduce required memory capacities. It enables flowing pixels through all functional units in order, including multi-resolution spatial transform and temporal segmentation. The resultant architecture does not use memories except I/O buffers. Therefore, memory modules as well as complex address manipulation over the multiple global transforms and spatial/temporal interface is not required. The FPGA prototype chip dissipates 150 mW of power. This approach can be used for tablets and smart-phone by an ASIC implementation which will reduce the operation power to about 1/6.
The family context of language brokering among Latino/a young adults

Immigrant youth in the U.S. are often enlisted to translate and interpret for their parents who may lack English proficiency. This activity is called language brokering, and it is commonly observed in immigrant families including those who are Latino. Evidence remains mixed as to whether language brokering is harmful or beneficial to family dynamics. However, examination of the factors which moderate the association between language brokering and family conflict may provide insight into these processes. This study investigated the moderating effects of three parent–child relationship variables (i.e., communication, psychological control, and behavioral control) on the relationship between language brokering frequency and family intergenerational conflict in a sample of 228 Latino/a young adults. Participants reported language brokering frequency for mothers and fathers as well as their perceptions of communication, psychological control, and behavioral control displayed by their mothers and fathers and the frequency of family intergenerational conflicts experienced. Results showed that more frequent language brokering for the mother predicted a higher likelihood of family intergenerational conflict, and all three familial contextual variables moderated this association. The findings suggest that interpersonal factors embedded within the family context must be considered in order to better understand language brokering processes.
2016 Third International Conference on Information Retrieval and Knowledge Management Query Refinement for Ontology Information Extraction

—Ontology information extraction has gain popularity due to the increasing amount of ontologies developed over the years. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has introduced SPARQL query language to extract information. However SPARQL query language follow a specific pattern in order to find the triple through subgraph matching. The keywords used in the SPARQL query have to be exactly same as the existing keywords in the RDF data in-order to extract the required information. The paper introduced a method to ease the job of the user by generating SPARQL query from the query entered by the user. The method uses the object property list generated from the ontology and word's synonym to aid in SPARQL query generation. The result has shown that the proposed method clearly eases the need of the user to learn SPARQL syntax.
Dynamics of Dark-Fly Genome Under Environmental Selections

Environmental adaptation is one of the most fundamental features of organisms. Modern genome science has identified some genes associated with adaptive traits of organisms, and has provided insights into environmental adaptation and evolution. However, how genes contribute to adaptive traits and how traits are selected under an environment in the course of evolution remain mostly unclear. To approach these issues, we utilize “Dark-fly”, a Drosophila melanogaster line maintained in constant dark conditions for more than 60 years. Our previous analysis identified 220,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the Dark-fly genome, but did not clarify which SNPs of Dark-fly are truly adaptive for living in the dark. We found here that Dark-fly dominated over the wild-type fly in a mixed population under dark conditions, and based on this domination we designed an experiment for genome reselection to identify adaptive genes of Dark-fly. For this experiment, large mixed populations of Dark-fly and the wild-type fly were maintained in light conditions or in dark conditions, and the frequencies of Dark-fly SNPs were compared between these populations across the whole genome. We thereby detected condition-dependent selections toward approximately 6% of the genome. In addition, we observed the time-course trajectory of SNP frequency in the mixed populations through generations 0, 22, and 49, which resulted in notable categorization of the selected SNPs into three types with different combinations of positive and negative selections. Our data provided a list of about 100 strong candidate genes associated with the adaptive traits of Dark-fly.
Tuning of 2-DOF fuzzy PI(D) controllers. Laboratory applications

The paper presents aspects concerning the tuning of two-degree-of-freedom (2-DOF) fuzzy controllers focused on 2-DOF PI-fuzzy controllers and on 2-DOF PID-fuzzy controllers. 2-DOF Mamdani and Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy control system structures are offered. The tuning is based on mapping the parameters of the linear PI and PID controllers to the parameters of the fuzzy controllers in terms of the modal equivalence principle. The linear controllers are tuned by Preitl's and Precup's Extended Symmetrical Optimum method. Some experimental results dealing with the speed control of a servo system are given.
Chapter Solving General Ring Network Design Problems by MetaHeuristics

Ring network design problems have many important applications, especially in the field of telecommunications and vehicle routing. Those problems generally consist of constructing a ring network by selecting a node subset and corresponding direct links. Different requirements and objectives lead to various specific types of NP-hard ring network design problems reported in the literature, each with its own algorithms. We exploit the similarities in problems to produce a more general problem formulation and associated solution methods that apply to a broad range of problems. Computational results are reported for an implementation using a meta-heuristics framework with generic components for heuristic search.
Using social network analysis technique for supporting software product line process

Software Product Line (SPL) becomes a potential approach for software system engineering. Software artifacts based on different models and approaches are collected and deposited into repository in order to be reused for a new software product in the future. Otherwise, identifying of reusable software artifacts is still difficult and time-consuming. In particular, requirements management for SPL becomes more complex process that should take into account requirements value for customers, cost of implementation, available resources, requirements interdependencies, system architecture and dependencies to the code base. In this paper we propose a social network representing the software product line artifacts and relationships between those artifacts. We believe the social network can be analyzed in order to acquire the information representing the dependencies between software artifacts and stakeholders. This information can be applied in order to improve software requirements management for SPL.
Average Size of Unstretched Remote-Spanners

Motivated by the optimization of link state routing in ad hoc networks, and the concept of multipoint relays, we introduce the notion of remote-spanner. Given an unweighted graph G, a remote spanner is a set of links H such that for any pair of nodes (u, v) there exists a shortest path in G for which all links in the path that are not adjacent to u belong to H. The remote spanner is a kind of minimal topology information beyond its neighborhood that any node would need in order to compute its shortest paths in a distributed way. This can be extended to k-connected graphs by considering minimum length sum over k disjoint paths as distance. In this paper, we give distributed algorithms for computing remote-spanners in order to obtain sparse remote-spanners with various properties. We provide a polynomial distributed algorithm that computes a k-connecting unstretched remote-spanner whose number of edges is at a factor 2(1 + log Δ) from optimal where Δ is the maximum degree of a node. Interestingly, its expected compression ratio in number of edges is O(k/n log n) in Erdos-Renyi graph model and O((k/n)2/3) in the unit disk graph model with a uniform Poisson distribution of nodes.
Linux variability anomalies: What causes them and how do they get fixed?

The Linux kernel is one of the largest configurable open source software systems implementing static variability. In Linux, variability is scattered over three different artifacts: source code files, Kconfig files, and Makefiles. Previous work detected inconsistencies between these artifacts that led to anomalies in the intended variability of Linux. We call these variability anomalies. However, there has been no work done to analyze how these variability anomalies are introduced in the first place, and how they get fixed. In this work, we provide an analysis of the causes and fixes of variability anomalies in Linux. We first perform an exploratory case study that uses an existing set of patches which solve variability anomalies to identify patterns for their causes. The observations we make from this dataset allow us to develop four research questions which we then answer in a confirmatory case study on the scope of the whole Linux kernel. We show that variability anomalies exist for several releases in the kernel before they get fixed, and that contrary to our initial suspicion, typos in feature names do not commonly cause these anomalies. Our results show that variability anomalies are often introduced through incomplete patches that change Kconfig definitions without properly propagating these changes to the rest of the system. Anomalies are then commonly fixed through changes to the code rather than to Kconfig files.
Brain-controlled interface for the motile control of spermatozoa : a biopolitical feminist work

Acknowledging and reflecting upon the cultural and scientific discourses that shape the notions the female body, this thesis presents a biopolitical feminist work in which a woman controls the motility of spermatozoa through the agency of her thoughts. The intellectual investigation of this project is threefold: i. to engineer a system that directs the movement of sperm via the signals of brain activity, 2. to communicate the project aesthetically and expressively through art and design, 3. to situate the project philosophically and pose critical cultural questions. Technologically, this project implements a brain-computer interface, where the electric signals generated by the brain are translated into a system engineered to control the movement of sperm through a phenomenon known as galvanotaxis. Philosophically, this project is situated within Michel Foucault's notion of biopolitics, and Donna Haraway's theorization of the body as a material-semiotic actor. While Foucault lays the foundation for exposing the body as a battleground for political power, the ideas of Haraway respond to the inherent gender prejudices of this landscape by disassembling the binary of sex through technology to spark a reimagining of new corporeal futures. Artistically, this thesis creates an act of female empowerment, responding to political regimes in which women are losing rights related to procreation within her own body. Investigating the body as a medium of culture, this project raises questions as to how we operate in our politically gendered landscape. Navigating the divergent connections between art and science, this work challenges the viewer to question what is possible. Whereas our biological understanding of sperm is usually deterministic (i.e., as an inherent homing device racing towards the chemical signatures of an egg) or colored by gendered cultural constructs (i.e., its semiotic use in pornography) this project seeks to invert all
Compression of microarray images using a binary tree decomposition

This paper proposes a lossless compression method for microarray images, based on a hierarchical organization of the intensity levels followed by finite-context modeling. A similar approach was recently applied to medical images with success. The goal of this work was to further extend, adapt and evaluate this approach to the special case of microarray images. We performed simulations on seven different data sets (total of 254 images). On average, the proposed method attained ~ 9% better results when compared to the best compression standard (JPEG-LS).
Outbreak Agent : Intelligent Wearable Technology for HazardousEnvironmentsErika Rogers

The topic of this paper is a project to design an intelligent agent which supports humans in the domain of hazardous site investigation. This software agent will be integrated into wearable technology which is embedded in the protective clothing worn by the humans. An overview of some of the design issues is presented, with a particular emphasis on the visual problem solving component.
Power Allocation for OFDM Transmission with DF Relaying

We consider OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) transmission helped by a relay. Symbols sent by the source may or may not be retransmitted by a relay during a second time slot. The relay is supposed to operate in Decode-and-Forward (DF) mode. For each carrier the destination implements maximum ratio combining. Assuming perfect CSI (channel state information) knowledge the paper investigates the power allocation problem for rate maximization of the scheme. Both cases of a sum power constraint, and of individual power constraints at the source and at the relay are tackled. The theoretical analysis is illustrated by numerical results for both types of constraints.
Who are the Indian Middle Class ? An EM Approach Based on Durables Ownership

The size and consumption habits of the Indian middle class have evoked considerable interest in the media in the past two decades. Yet the definition of the middle class has been nebulous at best. I propose the use of an Expectations Maximization (EM) algorithm to identify and estimate the size of the lower, middle and upper classes in urban India, based on their distinct durables ownership patterns. Estimates using NSS data (55th Round, 1999-00) suggest that the urban middle class in India constitutes approximately 62% of urban households (which implies about 17% of all households) with mean ownership of 3 durable goods (out of 12). I also estimate the probability that each household in the sample belongs to a particular class and based on this information, back out some class-specific socioeconomic characteristics. The estimates suggest a larger urban middle class and lower class-defining income cutoffs than found (or used) in previous studies.