Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Finding the number of hidden neurons for an MLP neural network using coarse to fine search technique

Skin detection is an important preliminary process for subsequent feature extraction in image processing techniques. There are several techniques that are used for skin detection. In this work, the multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network is used. One of the important aspects of MLP is how to determine the network topology. The number of neurons in the inputs and output layers are determined by the number of available inputs and required outputs respectively. Thus, the only thing remaining is how to determine the number of neurons in the hidden layer. Therefore, we employed the coarse to fine search method to find the number of neurons. First, the number of hidden neurons is initially set using the binary search mode, HN=1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128, where HN indicates the number of hidden neurons. The 30 networks with these HN values are trained and their Mean Squared Error (MSE) is calculated. Then a sequential search, fine search, will be used in the neighbourhood of the HN that gave the lowest MSE. The selected number of neurons in the hidden layer is the lowest HN that gave the lowest MSE. The YCbCr colour space is used in this work due to its capability to separate the luminance and chrominance components explicitly. Several chrominance components are investigated.
Group coordination and negotiation through spatial proximity regions around mobile devices on augmented tabletops

Negotiation and coordination of activities involving a number of people can be a difficult and time-consuming process, even when all participants are collocated. We propose the use of spatial proximity regions around mobile devices on a table to significantly reduce the effort of proposing and exploring content within a group of collocated people. In order to determine the location of devices on ordinary tables, we developed a tracking mechanism for a camera-projector system that uses dynamic visual markers displayed on the screen of a device. We evaluated our spatial proximity region based approach using a photo-sharing application for people sat around a table. The tabletop provides a frame of reference in which the spatial arrangement of devices signals the coordination state to the users. The results from the study indicate that the proposed approach facilitates coordination in several ways, for example, by allowing for simultaneous user activity and by reducing the effort required to achieve a common goal. Our approach reduced the task completion time by 43% and was rated as superior in comparison to other established techniques.
Acts of kindness : The effect of prosocial kindness versus self-focused kindness on mental well-being and the role of positive emotions and positive relations

2 Introduction . 3 Prosocialvs. self-focused kindness . 4 Current study . 5 Methods . 6 Design . 6 Participants and procedure . 6 Intervention . 9 Materials . 9 Data analysis . 11 Results . 13 Descriptive statistics . 13 Efficacy on mental well-being, positive emotions and positive relations . 15 Mediation analyses . 15 Discussion . 17 Strengths, limitations and directions for future research . 19 Conclusion . 20 Literature . 22 Tables . 24 Final version Dieter Voigt Student 1360906
Theory of mind and social competence among school-age Latino children

ABSTRACT The present study examined relations between Theory of Mind (ToM) understanding and social competence among school-age Latino children. Participants included 62 children ages 6–12 years. Picture vocabulary was assessed via a standardized language survey, and ToM assessed via Happé’s [(1994). An advanced test of theory of mind: Understanding of story characters’ thoughts and feelings by able autistic, mentally handicapped and normal children and adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 24, 129–154. doi:10.1007/BF021720931994] advanced ToM tasks. Parents and teachers evaluated the child’s social skills using a 23 item social competence inventory consisting of one positive and two forms of negative behaviours: relational aggression and overt hostility. Results indicated that girls scored significantly higher on positive social behaviour compared to boys. Overall, positive associations were found between children’s ToM ability and positive (but not negative) social behaviour. Results and implications about the socioemotional processes underlying ToM development are discussed.
Availability analysis of span-restorable mesh networks

The most common aim in designing a survivable network is to achieve restorability against all single span failures, with a minimal investment in spare capacity. This leaves dual-failure situations as the main factor to consider in quantifying how the availability of services benefit from the investment in restorability. We approach the question in part with a theoretical framework and in part with a series of computational routing trials. The computational part of the analysis includes all details of graph topology, capacity distribution, and the details of the restoration process, effects that were generally subject to significant approximations in prior work. The main finding is that a span-restorable mesh network can be extremely robust under dual-failure events against which they are not specifically designed. In a modular-capacity environment, an adaptive restoration process was found to restore as much as 95% of failed capacity on average over all dual-failure scenarios, even though the network was designed with minimal spare capacity to assure only single-failure restorability. The results also imply that for a priority service class, mesh networks could provide even higher availability than dedicated 1+1 APS. This is because there are almost no dual-failure scenarios for which some partial restoration level is not possible, whereas with 1+1 APS (or rings) there are an assured number of dual-failure scenarios for which the path restorability is zero. Results suggest conservatively that 20% or more of the paths in a mesh network could enjoy this ultra-high availability service by assigning fractional recovery capacity preferentially to those paths upon a dual failure scenario.
Évaluer et entraîner la connaissance du corps dans l’autisme via Kinect et Pictogram Room

Cet article presente l’utilisation d’une plate-forme de jeu video pour evaluer le niveau de representation du corps propre chez de jeunes enfants non verbaux avec TSA. Les stimuli sont le reflet du corps reel projete sur le mur, la silhouette grisee ou coloree sans rapport avec les vetements de l’enfant, le petit avatar fil de fer. L’evaluation est realisee sur la base des criteres de la litterature developpementale utilisant le reflet dans le miroir et l’ombre verticale. A partir des resultats de l’evaluation, il est possible de mettre au point une therapie ludique ayant pour objectif de faire progresser les enfants vers des niveaux plus elabores de representation du corps, eventuellement jusqu’a une conception allocentree de la situation dans l’espace environnant, physique et social.
Point Mutation Analysis of PMP22 in Patients Referred for Hereditary Neuropathy with Liability to Pressure Palsies

A cohort of 404 patients referred for hereditary neuropathy with liability to pressure palsies was tested initially for the common PMP22 whole gene deletion. 94 whole gene deletions were detected, plus three partial gene deletions, and the remaining 307 patients were screened for PMP22 point mutations. Nine point mutations were identified (8.5% of all mutations), eight of which were in exon 5, suggesting a point mutation hotspot for individuals with this condition. Sequencing analysis of PMP22 exon 5 should therefore be included as a routine diagnostic test for gene deletion-negative patients.
Tree-Ring Growth Trends of Abies alba Mill: Possible Adaptations to Climate Change in Marginal Populations of Central Italy

A dendroclimatic analysis was used to assess the climate-growth relationships of Abies alba Mill. over the last century in marginal populations of Central Italy. Tree-ring cores were collected in five mixed silver fir forests at low and high-elevation sites of the Apennines range in Tuscany and Marches. Regular and moving correlations functions were applied to tree-ring width series and monthly climate gridded data. Principal component analysis displayed groups of chronologies with similar growth patterns, discriminating for altitude and geographical location. Climate-growth relationships showed the positive influence of late-spring and summer precipitations and the negative effect of summer temperatures. Stands growing within the optimal altitude range for the species showed a positive and a decreasing negative influence of spring and summer temperatures, respectively. At the highest site (1375 m asl) the positive effect of previous year spring-summer precipitation and summer temperature of both previous and current year became scarce or null. Results suggest that the shifting influence of summer precipitation on tree-rings growth from July to August of the previous year is a possible response of silver fir to the significant reduction of spring precipitation and general temperature increase throughout the 20th century.
Effects of Public’s Media Dependency, Risk Severity, and Subjective Knowledge on Preventive Behavior Intention of Cyber Crime

This study examined the effect of public's media dependency, risk severity, subjective knowledge on preventive behavior intention of cyber crime. The results showed that publics' media dependency related with cyber crime issue and information influenced positively on risk severity. Second, publics' media dependency related with cyber crime issue and information influenced positively on subjective knowledge. Third, risk severity related with cyber crime influenced positively on subjective knowledge. Fourth, risk severity related with cyber crime influenced positively on preventive behavior intention. Fifth, subjective knowledge related with cyber crime influenced positively on preventive behavior intention.
Te xture On Demand

Te xture On Demand (TOD) is a technique for organizing large amounts of stored texture data in disk files and accessing it efficiently. Simply reading entire texture images into memory is not a good solution for real memory systems or for virtual memory systems. Te xture data should be read from disk files onlyon demand . In the TOD technique, each texture image is stored as a sequence of fixed-size rectangular regions called til s, rather than in the conventional raster scanline order. Tiles are an appropriate unit of texture data to read into memory on demand. As fixed-size units with good locality of reference in a variety of rendering schemes, tiles can be cached in main memory using the paging algorithms common in virtual memory systems. Good results have been obtained using an LRU tile replacement algorithm to select a tile to be deleted when main memory space is required. Prefiltered textures are an important means of limiting bandwidth. TOD uses a set of prefiltered texture images called an r-set, a generalization of the texture pyramid (‘‘mip map’’). Texture filtering methods are reconsidered in terms of their performance in the TOD environment. Efficient filtering methods using the r-set are described. The paper describes various implementations of TOD, including a virtual memory implementation and a distributed implementation on a 16-processor multicomputer. CR Categories and Subject Headings: I.3. 3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation; I.3. 7 [Computer Graphics]: Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism − color, shading,
Dust in the Photospheric Environment. III. A Fundamental Element in the Characterization of Ultracool Dwarfs

Recent photometry of L and T dwarfs revealed that the infrared colors show a large variation at a given effective temperature, and within the framework of our unified cloudy model (UCM), this result can be interpreted as due to a sporadic variation of the critical temperature (Tcr), which is essentially a measure of the thickness of the dust cloud. In our previous applications of the UCMs, we assumed that Tcr is constant at about 1800 K in all the L and T dwarfs, but in view of the new observing result, we now allow Tcr to vary between the surface temperature (T0) and the condensation temperature (Tcond) at given Teff and log g. Then, the two-color diagram and the color-magnitude diagram can be well explained by the effects of Teff, log g, and Tcr, but not by the effects of Teff and log g alone. This result implies that Tcr is one of the important parameters needed for characterization of dusty dwarfs. The effects of Teff and Tcr on individual spectra, however, are difficult to discriminate, since Teff at fixed Tcr on one hand and Tcr at fixed Teff on the other essentially have the same effect on the spectra. We show that the degeneracy of Teff and Tcr can be removed to some extent by the analysis of the spectral energy distribution on an absolute scale. The reanalysis of a selected sample of spectra revealed that the L-T spectral sequence may not necessarily be a sequence of Teff, but may reflect a change in the thickness of the dust cloud, represented by Tcr in our UCM. Although this unexpected result is based on a limited sample, an odd "brightening" of the absolute J magnitudes plotted against the L-T spectral types may also be an indication that the L-T spectral sequence is not necessarily a temperature sequence. This is because Mbol based on the same photometry data also shows a similar brightening. Thus, the "J-brightening" might not be due to any atmospheric effect and hence should not be a problem to be solved by model atmospheres, including the UCMs. Thus, almost all the available observed data are reasonably well interpreted by the UCMs, whose full capability emerges once Tcr is introduced as the fifth parameter in addition to the usual four parameters (i.e., chemical composition, Teff, log g, and microturbulent velocity) needed to characterize stellar spectra in general.
A Hardware-friendly Support Vector Machine for Embedded Automotive Applications

We present here a hardware-friendly version of the support vector machine (SVM), which is useful to implement its feed-forward phase on limited-resources devices such as field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) or microcontrollers, where a floating-point unit is seldom available. Our proposal is tested on a machine-vision benchmark dataset for automotive applications.
Effect of a Sensory Integration Intervention on Aggressive Behavior in Alternative School Elementary Students

The purpose of this quasi-experimental time series designed study was to determine the effect of a sensory integration intervention on aggressive behavior of students enrolled in an alternative elementary school for students with disabilities. Twenty (20) students participated in the study. Data was collected through behavioral observations over the course of 16 consecutive school days with the individual student’s frequency of aggressive behaviors in four domains being recorded on 8 days with a weighted vest on and 8 days without a weighted vest on. The four observed and recorded domains were verbal aggression, aggression toward property, aggression toward self, and physical aggression toward others. A series of paired samples t-tests were used to analyze the data. Results of this study are reported at its conclusion.
Shear modulus estimation using parallelized partial volumetric reconstruction

Magnetic resonance elastography can be limited by the computationally intensive nonlinear inversion schemes that are sometimes employed to estimate shear modulus from externally induced internal tissue displacements. Consequently, we have developed a parallelized partial volume reconstruction approach to overcome this limitation. In this paper, we report results from experiments conducted on breast phantoms and human volunteers to validate the proposed technique. More specifically, we demonstrate that computational cost is linearly related to the number of subzones used during image recovery and that both subzone parallelization and partial volume domain reduction decrease execution time accordingly. Importantly, elastograms computed based on the parallelized partial volume technique are not degraded in terms of either image quality or accuracy relative to their full volume counterparts provided that the estimation domain is sufficiently large to negate the effects of boundary conditions. The clinical results presented in this paper are clearly preliminary; however, the parallelized partial volume reconstruction approach performs sufficiently well to warrant more in-depth clinical evaluation.
Multiple Reduced Phoneme Sets for Second Language Speech Recognition

This paper describes a novel method to improve the performance of second language speech recognition when the mother tongue of users is known. Considering that second language speech usually includes less fluent pronunciation and more frequent pronunciation mistakes, I propose using a reduced phoneme set generated by a phonetic decision tree (PDT)-based top-down sequential splitting method instead of the canonical one of the second language. However, the proficiency of second language speakers varies widely, the optimal phoneme set is dependent on the proficiency of the second language speaker. In this work, I verify the efficacy of reduced phoneme set in the first step, and examine the relation between the proficiency of speakers and a reduced phoneme set customized for them in the second step. On the basis of the results of the investigation, I propose a novel speech recognition method using multiple reduced phoneme sets to further improve the recognition performance considering the various proficiency levels of second language speakers. Experimental results demonstrate the high validity of the proposed method.
DES algorithm security fortification using Elliptic Curve Cryptography

The Data Encryption Standard (DES) was a widespread symmetric key block cipher algorithm. It was the most popular used cryptographic scheme. DES's security was a highly contentious and controversial aspect until it became an insecure algorithm in 1999. In this paper, a modification that overcomes the security issue of the DES algorithm is introduced. The enhancement is depending on the art of the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). The ECC approach is also used to achieve the required key generation and distribution to establish a communication session. Our new ECC-based DES algorithm can be applied to any file format, in this paper it is employed to encrypt and decrypt an image file. Experimental results are carried out with detailed analyses, the results demonstrate that the proposed scheme possesses a very large key space to resist the brute-force attack and it is very immune to statistical attacks. The obtained results show that the ECC-based DES algorithm could be used as a highly secure algorithm.
EVALUATION OF THE EFFICIENCY OF ROBUST ANISOTROPIC DIFFUSION SCHEMES

The aim of the work presented in this paper is to investigate experimentally the behavior of different types of anisotropic diffusion schemes. The efficiency of the filters based on the anisotropic diffusion is determined to large extent by the properties of the conductance function in the PDE equation, which describes the diffusion process. Changing the shape of the conductivity function, we can tune the anisotropic diffusion filter to the image noise intensity and its statistical properties, in order to achieve optimal results of the image smoothing. This paper analyzes the behavior of the classical functions introduced by Perona and Malik together with the Tukey’s biweight and Huber’s minmax function introduced by Black et al. and compares the different filtering schemes with the standard approaches used for the reduction of Gaussian noise in digital images.
Multiplication Algorithms for VLSI - A Review

In today's digital world, where portable computers have become as small as the size of palm limitation on processing speed has increased. Thus there's a need for modification in the traditional approach to overcome this limitation. An implementation using parallel and pipelined approach could work at higher speed while occupying limited number of slices. Paper deals with analyzing and reviewing different multiplication algorithms viz. Vedic, Chinese, Wallace, Booth, Karatsuba and Toom-Cook by performing 11*8 bit multiplication using parallel and pipelined approach.
A statistical approach to class separability

Abstract: We propose a new statistical approach for characterizing the class separabilitydegree in . This approach is based on a nonparametric statistic called the Cut EdgeWeight. We show in this paper the principle and the experimental applications of thisstatistic. First, we build a geometrical connected graph like Toussaints Relative Neigh-bourhoodGraphonallexamplesofthelearningset. Second,wecutalledgesbetweentwoexamples of a different class. Third, we compute the relative weight of these cut edges.If the relative weight of the cut edges is in the expected range of a random distributionofthe labels on all the neighbourhood of the graphs vertices, then no neighbourhood-basedmethod provides a reliable prediction model. We will say then that the classes to predictare non-separable.Keywords: Separability, Supervised Learning, Computational Geometry. 1 Introduction Learningmethodsareveryoftenrequestedinthedataminingdomain. Thelearningmeth-ods aim to generate a prediction modelfrom a learning sample
Concentric and eccentric muscle actions and their relationship with sprint performance

The aim of the studies described in this thesis was to investigate the differences in work and metabolism between concentric and eccentric muscle actions and to examine the relationship between these muscle actions and sprint performance. The relationship between concentric and eccentric isokinetic muscle strength across three lower limb joints and sprinting performance, including the use of theoretical models was examined, in elite performers. Sprints were performed over 15 m and 35 m with times recorded over 0–15 m and 30–35 m. Using linear regression and expressing sprint performance as time, the strongest relationship found, amongst those joint actions and speeds tested, was between concentric knee extension at 240 deg.s-1 and sprint performance (0–15 m times, r=-0.518, p<0.01, and 30–35 m times, r=-0.688, p<0.01). [Continues. ]
Interpolating Earth-science Data using RBF Networks and Mixtures of Experts

We present a mixture of experts (ME) approach to interpolate sparse, spatially correlated earth-science data. Kriging is an interpolation method which uses a global covariation model estimated from the data to take account of the spatial dependence in the data. Based on the close relationship between kriging and the radial basis function (RBF) network (Wan & Bone, 1996), we use a mixture of generalized RBF networks to partition the input space into statistically correlated regions and learn the local covariation model of the data in each region. Applying the ME approach to simulated and real-world data, we show that it is able to achieve good partitioning of the input space, learn the local covariation models and improve generalization.