Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Direct manipulation of parallel coordinates

This paper introduces two novel techniques to manipulate parallel coordinates. Both techniques are dynamic in nature as they encourage one to experiment and discover new information through interacting with a data set. The first technique, polyline averaging, makes it possible to dynamically summarise a set of polylines and can hence replace computationally much more demanding methods, such as hierarchical clustering. The other new technique interactively visualises correlation coefficients between polyline subsets, helping the user to discover new information in the data set. Both techniques are implemented in a Java-based parallel coordinate browser. In conclusion, examples of the use of these techniques in visual data mining are also explored.
Reducing Adolescents’ Approval of Political Violence: The Social Influence of Universalistic and Immigrant-Friendly Peers

This study examines the role of peers in adolescents’ development of universalistic values and positive sentiments toward immigrants, and the extent to which a network of more universalistic or immigrant-friendly peers can reduce approval of violent political means among adolescents. Using longitudinal data on 997 adolescents, the study employed a social network approach to examine these aspects. Results showed no peer influence and peer selection effects for how adolescents develop universalistic values but that peers transfer positive immigrant sentiments to other adolescents over time and also that adolescents tend to select peers with similar sentiments toward immigrants. In addition, whereas peers’ positive sentiments toward immigrants were found not to reduce adolescents’ approval of violent political means over time, such a reducing effect was found for universalistic values. However, further studies are needed to better understand the role of peers with regard to mechanisms underlying adolescents’ development of political orientations.
Design Issues for Persistent Java: A Type-Safe, Object-Oriented, Orthogonally Persistent System

The object-oriented programming language Java is receiving much attention and is likely to become a popular commercial programming language because of its regular structure, safety features and modern constructs. It presents a novel opportunity, because of this safety and potential popularity, to make orthogonal persistence defined by reachability widely available. We report on a design for a system that provides such persistence with no changes to the Java language. The design includes ambitious goals for transactional flexibility but also includes simple transactional behaviour sufficient for many applications. We report on several issues that were encountered during the design which as yet have no obvious solution. An outline of the proposed implementation is also given.
The Angle-Measuring Algorithm for the Stepped-frequecy Radar Based on Dual-line Digital Phase Interferometer

The phase interferometer is very important in the direction-finding and position of target. In this paper, the phase interferometer is employed to angle measurement of the stepped frequency radar target. By the way of dual-line digital phase interferometer, the contradiction between direction range and direction accuracy is solved. The effect of SNR and AOA on the accuracy of angle measurement is also analyzed. In order to remove the errors of amplitude and phase which is introduced by the antenna element, cable and receiver, an error correction method is presented. The algorithm of angle measurement and the method of removing errors of amplitude and phase are verified by the experiment.
Crosstalk-aware Energy Reduction in NoC Communication Fabrics

Interconnect fabrics of multi-core systems - on-chip are confronted with increased crosstalk effects and energy dissipation. Crosstalk avoidance coding (CAC) is a promising way to reduce the coupling capacitance of the interconnect wires. We propose a method to address both crosstalk and energy dissipation in networks-on-chip (NoC) by modifying the structure of the data packets and reducing the number of coding-decoding operations. Our results show that by incorporating crosstalk avoidance coding (CAC) schemes in the NoC data stream it is possible to save a significant amount of energy while communicating between multiple IP cores.
An algorithm for tuberculosis screening and diagnosis in people with HIV.

BACKGROUND Tuberculosis screening is recommended for people with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection to facilitate early diagnosis and safe initiation of antiretroviral therapy and isoniazid preventive therapy. No internationally accepted, evidence-based guideline addresses the optimal means of conducting such screening, although screening for chronic cough is common. METHODS We consecutively enrolled people with HIV infection from eight outpatient clinics in Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam. For each patient, three samples of sputum and one each of urine, stool, blood, and lymph-node aspirate (for patients with lymphadenopathy) were obtained for mycobacterial culture. We compared the characteristics of patients who received a diagnosis of tuberculosis (on the basis of having one or more specimens that were culture-positive) with those of patients who did not have tuberculosis to derive an algorithm for screening and diagnosis. RESULTS Tuberculosis was diagnosed in 267 (15%) of 1748 patients (median CD4+ T-lymphocyte count, 242 per cubic millimeter; interquartile range, 82 to 396). The presence of a cough for 2 or 3 weeks or more during the preceding 4 weeks had a sensitivity of 22 to 33% for detecting tuberculosis. The presence of cough of any duration, fever of any duration, or night sweats lasting 3 or more weeks in the preceding 4 weeks was 93% sensitive and 36% specific for tuberculosis. In the 1199 patients with any of these symptoms, a combination of two negative sputum smears, a normal chest radiograph, and a CD4+ cell count of 350 or more per cubic millimeter helped to rule out a diagnosis of tuberculosis, whereas a positive diagnosis could be made only for the 113 patients (9%) with one or more positive sputum smears; mycobacterial culture was required for most other patients. CONCLUSIONS In persons with HIV infection, screening for tuberculosis should include asking questions about a combination of symptoms rather than only about chronic cough. It is likely that antiretroviral therapy and isoniazid preventive therapy can be started safely in people whose screening for all three symptoms is negative, whereas diagnosis in most others will require mycobacterial culture.
A Component Model Family for Vehicular Embedded Systems

In this paper we propose to use components for managing the increasing complexity in modern vehicular systems. Compared to other approaches, the distinguishing feature of our work is using and benefiting from components throughout the development process from early design to development and deployment, and an explicit separation of concerns at different levels of granularity. Based on the elaboration of the specifics of vehicular systems (resource constraints, real-time requirements, hard demands on reliability), the paper identifies concerns that need to be addressed by a component model for this domain, and describes a realization of such a component model.
Predicting Build Co-changes with Source Code Change and Commit Categories

When software is maintained and evolved the build configuration also needs to be updated. Knowing when to update the build configuration is typically done manually with the risk of missing an update and breaking the build. To mitigate this risk, previous work has investigated prediction models to help developers to identify commits that will likely involve an update of the build configuration. In this paper, we investigate whether we can improve these existing prediction models by taking into account detailed information on source code changes and commit categories. Our main hypothesis is that such detailed information on changes will significantly improve the prediction of build co-changes. To that extent, we extract information on changes from 10 Java open source projects and use a random forest classifier to train models that predict build co-changes within and across projects. Our results show significant improvements over existing prediction models: the AUC for intra-and cross-project prediction improves by 11.54% and 9.46% respectively. In addition, we investigate advanced resampling techniques to explore the effect of unbalanced data on our models. The results show that SMOTE can particularly improve prediction models with low performance that were trained on unbalanced data. Our models improve the prediction and enable a better understanding of build co-changes.
Privacy-preserving Collaborative Filtering based on Randomized Perturbation Techniques and Secure Multiparty Computation

With the evolution of the Internet, collaborative filtering techniques are becoming increasingly popular in E-commerce recommender systems. Such techniques recommend items to users employing similar users' preference data. People use recommender systems to cope with information overload. Although collaborative filtering systems are widely used by E-commerce sites, they fail to protect users' privacy. Since many users might decide to give false information because of privacy concerns, collecting high quality data from users is not an easy task. Collaborative filtering systems using these data might produce inaccurate recommendations. To reserve privacy in collaborative filtering recommender systems, this paper presented a collaborative filtering algorithm based on randomized perturbation techniques and secure multiparty computation. The randomized perturbation techniques are used in the course of user data collection and can generate recommendations with decent accuracy. Employing secure multiparty computation to protect the privacy of collaborative filtering by distributing the user profiles between multiple repositories and exchange only a subset of the profile data, which is useful for the recommendation. Theoretical analysis shows that the algorithm based on randomized perturbation techniques and secure multiparty computation not only protect the users’ privacy, but also can keep the accuracy.
Multistage SFM: A Coarse-to-Fine Approach for 3D Reconstruction

Several methods have been proposed for large-scale 3D reconstruction from large, unorganized image collections. A large reconstruction problem is typically divided into multiple components which are reconstructed independently using structure from motion (SFM) and later merged together. Incremental SFM methods are most popular for the basic structure recovery of a single component. They are robust and effective but are strictly sequential in nature. We present a multistage approach for SFM reconstruction of a single component that breaks the sequential nature of the incremental SFM methods. Our approach begins with quickly building a coarse 3D model using only a fraction of features from given images. The coarse model is then enriched by localizing remaining images and matching and triangulating remaining features in subsequent stages. These stages are made efficient and highly parallel by leveraging the geometry of the coarse model. Our method produces similar quality models as compared to incremental SFM methods while being notably fast and parallel.
Saunders and Wallace on Everett and Lewis

Simon Saunders and David Wallace attempt to use a modified form of David Lewis's analysis of personal fission to ground the claim that prior to undergoing Everett branching an informed subject can be uncertain about which outcome s/he will observe. I argue that a central assumption of this seductive idea is questionable despite appearing innocuous and that at the very least further argument is needed in support of it.
Improving Fingerprint Verification Using Minutiae Triplets

Improving fingerprint matching algorithms is an active and important research area in fingerprint recognition. Algorithms based on minutia triplets, an important matcher family, present some drawbacks that impact their accuracy, such as dependency to the order of minutiae in the feature, insensitivity to the reflection of minutiae triplets, and insensitivity to the directions of the minutiae relative to the sides of the triangle. To alleviate these drawbacks, we introduce in this paper a novel fingerprint matching algorithm, named M3gl. This algorithm contains three components: a new feature representation containing clockwise-arranged minutiae without a central minutia, a new similarity measure that shifts the triplets to find the best minutiae correspondence, and a global matching procedure that selects the alignment by maximizing the amount of global matching minutiae. To make M3gl faster, it includes some optimizations to discard non-matching minutia triplets without comparing the whole representation. In comparison with six verification algorithms, M3gl achieves the highest accuracy in the lowest matching time, using FVC2002 and FVC2004 databases.
An online condition monitoring thermal prognostic indicator system for MV cable circuits

Developing a reliable online condition monitoring prognostic indicator tool for MV cables is of great importance as it can predict and prevent upcoming failures of the distribution cable circuits. This paper introduces a thermal prognostic model for MV underground cable terminations based on a support vector regression algorithm. The model is shown to predict the likely temperature along the cable thirty minutes into the future and is able to rapidly identify temperature anomalies which may indicate upcoming failures.
Guessing Subject to Distortion

We investigate the problem of guessing a random vector X within distortion level D. Our aim is to characterize the best attainable performance in the sense of minimizing, in some probabilistic sense, the number of required guesses G(X) until the error falls below D. The underlying motivation is that G(X) is the number of candidate codewords to be examined by a rate-distortion block encoder until a satisfactory codeword is found. In particular, for memoryless sources, we provide a single-letter characterization of the least achievable exponential growth rate of the /spl rho/th moment of G(X) as the dimension of the random vector X grows without bound. In this context, we propose an asymptotically optimal guessing scheme that is universal both with respect to the information source and the value of /spl rho/. We then study some properties of the exponent function E(D, /spl rho/) along with its relation to the source-coding exponents. Finally, we provide extensions of our main results to the Gaussian case, guessing with side information, and sources with memory.
Author ' s personal copy An autonomous assessment system based on combined latent semantic kernels

In this paper, we develop an autonomous assessment system based on the kernel combinations which are mixed by two kernel matrices from the WordNet and corpus. Many researchers have tried to integrate these two resources in many applications, to utilize diverse information extracted from each resource. However, since two resources have been represented in quite different ways, one resource has been secondary to another. To fully integrate two resources at the same level, we first transform the WordNet, which has a hierarchical structure, into a matrix structure. Concurrently, another matrix, which represents a co-occurrence of words in the collection of text documents, is constructed. We then build two initial latent semantic kernels from both matrices and merge them into a new single kernel matrix. When we merge two matrices, we split each initial matrix into independent columns and mix the columns with various methods. We acquire a few combined kernel matrices which show various performances in experiments. Compared to the basic vector space model, original kernel matrices, and the BLEU based method, the combined matrices improve the accuracy of assessment. 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Study on a combined scheme by using T-S fuzzy and TSMC approaches

This study investigates the hybrid design by using the Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy system modeling method and the Terminal Sliding Mode Control (TSMC) technique. The combined scheme is shown to have the merits of both approaches. The presented scheme can alleviate the on-line computational burden because T-S fuzzy model can approximate the original nonlinear system and some of the parameters can be off-line computed. Moreover, it can also preserve the advantages of TSMC, including rapid response, robustness to uncertainties and/or external disturbance, and guaranteeing the fast finite-time state convergence. The proposed method is applied to a two-link robot manipulator dynamics, and it is also compared to the combination of T-S fuzzy system and conventional Sliding Mode Control (SMC) design. Simulation results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed scheme.
A fuzzing test for dynamic vulnerability detection on Android Binder mechanism

Binder, which helps to package the functional codes of system processes into inter-process invocable interfaces for application-level processes, is the core mechanism to implement the Inter-Process Communication(IPC) in Android. This paper, for the first time, attempts to study the system-level security properties of this mechanism. The universal injection interface and the model of IPC data are proposed to implement a fuzzing test. A test case generation technique based on mutation algorithm of pre-captured IPC data is introduced in order to improve the fuzzing test efficiency. Two high-risk vulnerabilities are detected in Android 5.1. 0. Analysis of these vulnerabilities highlights a critical design issue in the system services of Binder mechanism.
Understanding players' transition from youth to senior professional football environments: A coach perspective

The aim of this study was to explore: (a) sociocultural features of a first team environment perceived to influence a player's progression, (b) the ways in which young players should manage these features and (c) how coaches operate to assist young players during specific phases in the youth-to-senior transition. Semi-structured interviews with eight elite development coaches in English Premier League football clubs generated two higher order categories: fitting in with standards of first team environment (e.g. handling social dynamics in the first team group) and facilitating shared perception of transition across key stakeholders (e.g. communicating with first team staff). Together, these findings indicate the need for young players to navigate between conforming, adapting to and breaking with specific features of the first team environment to successfully progress in the youth-to-senior transition to professional football.
Tax reporting for non-profit organizations (NPOs) in Malaysia

This study attempted to examine the relationship between financial characteristics and tax payment of non-profit organizations (NPOs) in Malaysia. So far, there have been no studies conducted on this issue and little is known about the extent of the problem. Therefore, this exploratory study was carried out to examine the tax reporting of NPOs registered with Registrar of Societies (ROS) in Malaysia. The objectives of the study were to examine the financial characteristics of taxable and non-taxable NPOs, and to investigate how donations and other income received such as, members' expenses, professional fees and members' accumulated fund could be associated with the taxation paid by them. Therefore, considering the importance of NPOs and their contribution of income tax revenue to the country, the current study had provided significant results on the relationship between financial characteristics of the NPOs and their tax payment. Hence, this study had contributed to the body of knowledge and should be of assistance to policymakers with regards to the financial behavior of the taxable NPOs, so as to further review the tax system, especially, the deductibility of donations made under section 44 of the Income tax Act 1967.
Novel Promising Estrogenic Receptor Modulators: Cytotoxic and Estrogenic Activity of Benzanilides and Dithiobenzanilides

The cytotoxicity of 27 benzanilides and dithiobenzanilides built on a stilbene scaffold and possessing various functional groups in aromatic rings previously described for their spasmolytic properties was assayed on three human cancer cell lines (A549 –lung adenocarcinoma, MCF-7 estrogen dependent breast adenocarcinoma and MDA-MB-231 estrogen independent breast adenocarcinoma) and 2 non-tumorigenic cell lines (CCD39Lu–lung fibroblasts, MCF-12A - breast epithelial). Three compounds (6, 15 and 18) showed selective antiproliferative activity against estrogen dependent MCF-7 cancer cells and their estrogenic activity was further confirmed in MCF-7 transfected with an estrogen receptor reporter plasmid and in HEK239 cells over-expressing the estrogen receptor alpha (ERα). Compound 18 is especially interesting as a potential candidate for therapy since it is highly toxic and selective towards estrogen dependent MCF7 cell lines (IC50 = 5.07 μM versus more than 100 μM for MDA-MB-231) and almost innocuous for normal breast cells (IC50 = 91.46 μM for MCF-12A). Docking studies have shown that compound 18 interacts with the receptor in the same cavity as estradiol although the extra aromatic ring is involved in additional binding interactions with residue W383. The role of W383 and the extended binding mode were confirmed by site-directed mutagenesis.
Normality and Faults in Logic-Based Diagnosis

Is there one logical definition of diagnosis? In this paper I argue that the answer to this question is "no". This paper is about the pragmatics of using logic for diagnosis; we show how two popular proposals for using logic for diagnosis, (namely abductive and consistency-based approaches) can be used to solve diagnostic tasks. The cases with only knowledge about how normal components work (any deviation being an error) and where there are fault models (we try to find a covering of the observations) are considered as well as the continuum between. The result is that there are two fundamentally different, but equally powerful diagnostic paradigms. They require different knowledge about the world, and different ways to think about a domain. This result indicates that there may not be an axiomatisation of a domain that is independent of how the knowledge is to be used.
High performance controller for DFIG of grid connected wind turbines

This paper presents a high performance stationary frame non-linear controller for DFIG which improves the behavior of the grid connected wind turbines especially during asymmetric disturbances at the PCC. A controller design procedure that guarantees the DFIG stability under uncertainties and disturbances at grid side is presented in details. Furthermore, it is demonstrated in the paper that with the proposed controller different goals such as control of grid side active and reactive power, minimization of toque pulsation under unbalance operation and improvement of the low voltage ride through capability can be easily achieved. Simulations and experimental results are given to illustrate the good performance of a grid connected DFIG with the proposed controller.