Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
High Data-Rate Video Broadcasting Over 3G Wireless Systems

In cellular environments, video broadcasting is a challenging problem in which the number of users receiving the service and the average successfully decoded video data-rate have to be intelligently optimized. When video is broadcasted using the 3G packet data standard, 1xEV-DO, the code space may be divided among the multiple layers if scalable video coding is employed. In this paper, we propose a novel, multi-objective optimized video broadcasting scheme for 1xEV-DO and investigate the feasibility of using multiple layers for transmission. The multi-objective optimization aims to find the best compromise between maximizing the average decodable video data-rate and minimizing the basic quality video outage probability. Simulations conducted for the ITU Pedestrian A and Vehicular B channels show that high data-rates with low outages are possible when 1xEV-DO is used for video broadcasting, however, it may not be desirable to use scalable video coding for this purpose
On the number of transmissions vs. redundancy tradeoff for flooded fountain codes

We consider a multihop ad hoc network where a source node must reliably deliver a set of data packets to a given destination node. To do so, the source applies a fountain code and floods the encoded packets through the network, until they reach their destination or are lost in the process. We model the probability that the destination can recover the original transmissions from the received coded packets as a function of the network topology and of the number of redundant packets generated by the source, and show that our analytical results predict the outcome of simulations very well. These results are finally employed to discuss how the number of cooperating relays and the redundancy of the code should be set in order to achieve a good working point on the tradeoff between the reliability of end-to-end communications and the number of packet transmissions that take place in the network.
Im2Text and Text2Im: Associating Images and Texts for Cross-Modal Retrieval

Building bilateral semantic associations between images and texts is among the fundamental problems in computer vision. In this paper, we study two complementary cross-modal prediction tasks: (i) predicting text(s) given an image (“Im2Text”), and (ii) predicting image(s) given a piece of text (“Text2Im”). We make no assumption on the specific form of text; i.e., it could be either a set of labels, phrases, or even captions. We pose both these tasks in a retrieval framework. For Im2Text, given a query image, our goal is to retrieve a ranked list of semantically relevant texts from an independent textcorpus (i.e., texts with no corresponding images). Similarly, for Text2Im, given a query text, we aim to retrieve a ranked list of semantically relevant images from a collection of unannotated images (i.e., images without any associated textual meta-data). We propose a novel Structural SVM based unified formulation for these two tasks. For both visual and textual data, two types of representations are investigated. These are based on: (1) unimodal probability distributions over topics learned using latent Dirichlet allocation, and (2) explicitly learned multi-modal correlations using canonical correlation analysis. Extensive experiments on three popular datasets (two medium and one web-scale) demonstrate that our framework gives promising results compared to existing models under various settings, thus confirming its efficacy for both the tasks.
Use of Continuous Wavelet-like Transform in automated music transcription

This paper describes an approach to the problem of automated music transcription. The Continuous Wavelet-like Transform is used as a basic time-frequency analysis of a musical signal due to its flexibility in time-frequency resolutions. The signal is then sequentially modeled by a number of tone harmonic structures; on each iteration a dominant harmonic structure is considered to be a pitch candidate. The transcription performance is measured on test data generated by MIDI wavetable synthesis both from MIDI files and played on a keyboard. Three cases: monophonic, polyphonic and complicated polyphonic are examined.
Preoperative Anxiety in Candidates for Heart Surgery

Objective: The goal of this study was to evaluate preoperative anxiety and its predisposing factors in a group of adult patients who were candidate for any kind of heart surgery. Methods: We evaluated preoperative anxiety in 300 patients undergoing heart surgery whose ages ranged between 18-65 years. Relationship of probable demographic factors like gender, educational level, marital status, number of children, family support, opium addiction, occupational status, and left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) with anxiety level of the patients were evaluated. To determine anxiety, the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) was completed by the subjects. Results: Descriptive anxiety levels showed that mean of state and trait anxiety of our studied patients were in moderate scaling. Correlation between state and trait anxiety was more prominent in females (r = 0.80) than in males (r = 0.70) (p < 0.001). Distribution of males and females was significantly different (p = 0.048). All the patients had significantly different underlying diseases (p = 0.018), opioid addiction (yes/no) was significantly different in all of the patients (p < 0.001), while family support (yes/no) was not significantly different in all of the patients (p = 0.453). There were significant differences between mean of preoperative anxiety at different LVEF values of any EF level (p < 0.001, F = 6.47); those who had LVEF of more than 50% had significantly lower mean anxiety scores. Conclusion: Preoperative psychiatric consultation should be focused more on women and patients with higher EF. Moreover, physical activity strength may be effective on reducing preoperative anxiety.
Vacuous jaw movements and feeding deficits in rats with ventrolateral striatal dopamine depletion: possible relation to parkinsonian symptoms

A series of experiments examined the effects of regional dopamine depletions produced by intrastriatal injections of 6-hydroxydopamine on voluntary and involuntary movements in rats. Depletion of dopamine in the ventrolateral striatum produced a substantial decrease in food intake, from which the animals recovered. Rats with dopamine depletions in anteroventromedial or dorsolateral striatum did not have significant feeding deficits. Rats with ventrolateral dopamine depletions showed no deficits in locomotor activity or rearing behavior; however, depletions of dopamine in dorsolateral striatum significantly reduced rearing. Vacuous jaw movements that resemble chewing were produced by dopamine depletion in the ventrolateral striatum, but not the anteroventromedial or dorsolateral striatum. Systemic administration of haloperidol (0.4 mg/kg) increased vacuous chewing responses in dopamine-depleted and control rats. Thus, vacuous chewing responses can result from reduced functional activity of striatal dopamine, and these responses share some characteristics with human parkinsonian symptoms. In addition, these data support the notion that the neostriatum is functionally heterogeneous and that the ventrolateral region is particularly important for oral motor control.
Combining end-effector and legs observation for kinematic calibration of parallel mechanisms

In this paper, an original approach is proposed for the kinematic calibration of parallel mechanisms. The originality lies in the use of vision to get information on all parts of the mechanism, i.e. its end-effector as well as its legs. Metrological redundancy is therefore maximized to improve the calibration efficiency. The approach is implemented for the calibration of the I4 parallel mechanism, with the use of the Jacobian matrix. No accurate camera location is needed so that the experimental procedure is easy to achieve. The calibration algorithm is detailed and experimentally demonstrated more efficient than other calibration methods based on legs observation or end-effector observation.
The reusable holdout: Preserving validity in adaptive data analysis

Testing hypotheses privately Large data sets offer a vast scope for testing already-formulated ideas and exploring new ones. Unfortunately, researchers who attempt to do both on the same data set run the risk of making false discoveries, even when testing and exploration are carried out on distinct subsets of data. Based on ideas drawn from differential privacy, Dwork et al. now provide a theoretical solution. Ideas are tested against aggregate information, whereas individual data set components remain confidential. Preserving that privacy also preserves statistical inference validity. Science, this issue p. 636 A statistical approach allows large data sets to be reanalyzed to test new hypotheses. Misapplication of statistical data analysis is a common cause of spurious discoveries in scientific research. Existing approaches to ensuring the validity of inferences drawn from data assume a fixed procedure to be performed, selected before the data are examined. In common practice, however, data analysis is an intrinsically adaptive process, with new analyses generated on the basis of data exploration, as well as the results of previous analyses on the same data. We demonstrate a new approach for addressing the challenges of adaptivity based on insights from privacy-preserving data analysis. As an application, we show how to safely reuse a holdout data set many times to validate the results of adaptively chosen analyses.
Cytotoxicity of CD56bright NK Cells towards Autologous Activated CD4+ T Cells Is Mediated through NKG2D, LFA-1 and TRAIL and Dampened via CD94/NKG2A

In mouse models of chronic inflammatory diseases, Natural Killer (NK) cells can play an immunoregulatory role by eliminating chronically activated leukocytes. Indirect evidence suggests that NK cells may also be immunoregulatory in humans. Two subsets of human NK cells can be phenotypically distinguished as CD16+CD56dim and CD16dim/−CD56bright. An expansion in the CD56bright NK cell subset has been associated with clinical responses to therapy in various autoimmune diseases, suggesting an immunoregulatory role for this subset in vivo. Here we compared the regulation of activated human CD4+ T cells by CD56dim and CD56bright autologous NK cells in vitro. Both subsets efficiently killed activated, but not resting, CD4+ T cells. The activating receptor NKG2D, as well as the integrin LFA-1 and the TRAIL pathway, played important roles in this process. Degranulation by NK cells towards activated CD4+ T cells was enhanced by IL-2, IL-15, IL-12+IL-18 and IFN-α. Interestingly, IL-7 and IL-21 stimulated degranulation by CD56bright NK cells but not by CD56dim NK cells. NK cell killing of activated CD4+ T cells was suppressed by HLA-E on CD4+ T cells, as blocking the interaction between HLA-E and the inhibitory CD94/NKG2A NK cell receptor enhanced NK cell degranulation. This study provides new insight into CD56dim and CD56bright NK cell-mediated elimination of activated autologous CD4+ T cells, which potentially may provide an opportunity for therapeutic treatment of chronic inflammation.
Towards a Cache-Aware Development of High Integrity Real-Time Systems

The job description of caches is to speed up memory accesses in the average case. Their intrinsic unpredictability however can seriously hamper the practicality and trustworthiness of system analysis and validation. In effect, this conflict asks system designers to take side between best average-case performance and maximum assurance, since both can’t be had. In this paper we study the I-cache predictability problem from a system-level perspective. We identify some sources of cache-related variability that can be addressed whilst considering the architectural specification of the system and thus at an early stage of development. We discuss an example of what we call a "cache-aware" software architecture and experimentally evaluate its effectiveness on a representative application.
Memory power management via dynamic voltage/frequency scaling

Energy efficiency and energy-proportional computing have become a central focus in enterprise server architecture. As thermal and electrical constraints limit system power, and datacenter operators become more conscious of energy costs, energy efficiency becomes important across the whole system. There are many proposals to scale energy at the datacenter and server level. However, one significant component of server power, the memory system, remains largely unaddressed. We propose memory dynamic volt age/frequency scaling (DVFS) to address this problem, and evaluate a simple algorithm in a real system. As we show, in a typical server platform, memory consumes 19% of system power on average while running SPEC CPU2006 workloads. While increasing core counts demand more bandwidth and drive the memory frequency upward, many workloads require much less than peak bandwidth. These workloads suffer minimal performance impact when memory frequency is reduced. When frequency reduces, voltage can be reduced as well. We demonstrate a large opportunity for memory power reduction with a simple control algorithm that adjusts memory voltage and frequency based on memory bandwidth utilization. We evaluate memory DVFS in a real system, emulating reduced memory frequency by altering timing registers and using an analytical model to compute power reduction. With an average of 0.17% slowdown, we show 10.4% average (20.5% max) memory power reduction, yielding 2.4% average (5.2% max) whole-system energy improvement.
Noise reduction in the time domain using joint diagonalization

A new filter design based on joint diagonalization of the clean speech and noise covariance matrices is proposed. First, an estimate of the noise is found by filtering the observed signal. The filter for this is generated by a weighted sum of the eigenvectors from the joint diagonalization. Second, an estimate of the desired signal is found by subtraction of the noise estimate from the observed signal. The filter can be designed to obtain a desired trade-off between noise reduction and signal distortion, depending on the number of eigenvectors included in the filter design. This is explored through simulations using a speech signal corrupted by car noise, and the results confirm that the output signal-to-noise ratio and speech distortion index both increase when more eigenvectors are included in the filter design.
Cascaded Lexicalised Classifiers for Second-Person Reference Resolution

This paper examines the resolution of the second person English pronoun you in multi-party dialogue. Following previous work, we attempt to classify instances as generic or referential, and in the latter case identify the singular or plural addressee. We show that accuracy and robustness can be improved by use of simple lexical features, capturing the intuition that different uses and addressees are associated with different vocabularies; and we show that there is an advantage to treating referentiality and addressee identification as separate (but connected) problems.
A Mobile Intelligent Interruption Management System

Mobile phones have become the most hated device that people cannot live without. For its primary usage as a communication device, it has surpassed any other medium. But it comes with a high price, interruption, anywhere anytime. These unwanted interruptions cause loss of productivity and also mostly not beneficial to the immediate task at hand, and moving them few minutes into the future can increase productivity. Considering receiver's unavailability, it is possible to manage cell phone disruptions using advanced features like sensing capability, ubiquitous computing and context aware systems. This paper proposes the architecture of a system named Mobile Intelligent Interruptions Management (MIIM), created for the automated administration of personal unavailability with regard to cell phones. We provide the problem description of interruption and its impact. Next, we state the desirable characteristics and architecture of the MIIM system. We also provide a case study implementation of MIIM system on the Android platform. Simulation and evaluation results show that its computational volumes are low enough for a mobile device. The analysis of the system also successfully satisfies all the characteristics requirements.
FTV and all-around 3DTV

FTV (Free-viewpoint TV) is the ultimate 3DTV that delivers the replica of a 3D scene and enables us to view the scene by freely changing our viewpoints. We realized FTV by developing various types of ray capture, processing and display technologies. We have also realized an all-around ray-reproducing 3DTV. The international standardization of FTV has been conducted in MPEG. The first phase of FTV was MVC (Multi-view Video Coding) and the second phase is 3DV (3D Video).
Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion mapping with Gaussian mixture model

This paper describes the acoustic-to-articulatory inversion mapping using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). Correspondence of an acoustic parameter and an articulatory parameter is modeled by the GMM trained using the parallel acousticarticulatory data. We measure the performance of the GMMbased mapping and investigate the effectiveness of using multiple acoustic frames as an input feature and using multiple mixtures. As a result, it is shown that although increasing the number of mixtures is useful for reducing the estimation error, it causes many discontinuities in the estimated articulatory trajectories. In order to address this problem, we apply maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) considering articulatory dynamic features to the GMM-based mapping. Experimental results demonstrate that the MLE using dynamic features can estimate more appropriate articulatory movements compared with the GMM-based mapping applied smoothing by lowpass filter.
Acknowledging the Language of African American Students: Instructional Strategies

Describes the Linguistic Affirmation Program (LAP), a comprehensive nonstandard language awareness program for students not proficient in Standard American English, that facilitates the acquisition of Standard American English without devaluing students’ home language and culture. Notes its six research-based critical instructional approaches. Outlines four linguistic schools of thought regarding nonstandard language forms. Notes classroom applications for success in the LAP.
The University of Birmingham ( Live System ) Sufficient conditions for unique stable sets in three agent pillage games

Pillage games (Jordan, 2006a) have two features that make them richer than cooperative games in either characteristic or partition function form: they allow power externalities between coalitions; they allow resources to contribute to coalitions’ power as well as to their utility. Extending von Neumann and Morgenstern’s analysis of three agent games in characteristic function form to anonymous pillage games, we characterise the core for any number of agents; for three agents, all anonymous pillage games with an empty core represent the same dominance relation. When a stable set exists, and the game also satisfies a continuity and a responsiveness axiom, it is unique and contains no more than 15 elements, a tight bound. By contrast, stable sets in three agent games in characteristic or partition function form may not be unique, and may contain continua. Finally, we provide an algorithm for computing the stable set, and can easily decide non-existence. Thus, in addition to offering attractive modelling possibilities, pillage games seem well behaved and analytically tractable, overcoming a difficulty that has long impeded use of cooperative game theory’s flexibility. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).
VLSI systems design of 51.84 Mb/s transceivers for ATM-LAN and broadband access

We present: (1) system design issues for the implementation of 51.84 Mb/s ATM-LAN and broadband access transceivers and (2) a pipelined fractionally spaced linear equalizer (FSLE) architecture. Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and bit-error rate (BER) along with VLSI constraints are addressed. For the LAN environment, major channel impairments include near-end crosstalk (NEXT), intersymbol interference (ISI), and impulse noise. The broadband access environment suffers from far end crosstalk (FEXT), ISI, radio-frequency interference (RFI), impulse noise, and splitter losses. Measured characteristics of the channel are compared with analytical models. These are employed in the design of the transmitter/receiver algorithms. The carrierless amplitude/phase (CAP) transmission scheme is presented as a practical bandwidth-efficient scheme for these applications. An adaptive FSLE employed in a CAP receiver eliminates ISI, suppresses NEXT (for ATM-LAN) and FEXT (for broadband access), and provides robustness to timing jitter. However, fractional tap spacing in combination with the high-data rates results in a high sample rate adaptive computation. Fortunately, throughput enhancing methods such as pipelining can be used for high-speed/low-power operation. A hardware-efficient pipelined architecture for the adaptive FSLE equalizer is presented. This has been developed using relaxed look-ahead, which maintains the algorithm functionality rather than the input-output mapping. Simulation and experimental results for high-speed digital CAP transceivers for LAN and broadband access are also presented.
Rendering with Marching Cube Algorithm

The volume rendering is one of the most useful techniques in medical visualizations, computer-aid diagnosis and other related areas. Among all the different approaches to realize it, the marching cube algorithm is the most popular one. This report is to present our approach to implement this algorithm. According to the algorithm, the whole volume data is divide into small cubes, each of them contains image data on the eight corners. The next step is to construct triangular patches on the isosurface by checking the cubes corners with the userspecified isovalue. By connecting the patches, a 3D model is represented.
A New Routing Architecture for DiffServ Domains

This paper 1 proposes a new DiffServ routing architecture (PAP) that integrates the admission control signaling and the QoS routing. It differs from traditional routing in its ability to route most Expedite Forwarding (EF) traffic along the shortest paths while making use of alternative paths to absorb transient overload. Once an EF data flow is admitted, its performance is assured. The overhead for storing alterative path information is minimal since only one routing entry at a branching point is needed for each alternative path. The route map of Cisco IOS provides a mechanism for implementing PAP.
E cient Management of Parallelism inObject-Oriented Numerical SoftwareLibrariesSatish

Parallel numerical software based on the message-passing model is enormously complicated. This paper introduces a set of techniques to manage the complexity, while maintaining high eeciency and ease of use. The PETSc 2.0 package uses object-oriented programming to conceal the details of the message passing, without concealing the parallelism, in a high-quality set of numerical software libraries. In fact, the programming model used by PETSc is also the most appropriate for NUMA shared-memory machines, since they require the same careful attention to memory hierarchies as do distributed-memory machines. Thus, the concepts discussed are appropriate for all scalable computing systems. The PETSc libraries provide many of the data structures and numerical kernels required for the scalable solution of PDEs, ooering performance portability.