Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Three-State Received Signal Strength Model for Device-Free Localization

The indoor radio propagation channel is typically modeled as a two-state time-variant process, where one of the states represents the channel when the environment is static, whereas the other state characterizes the medium when it is altered by people. In this paper, the aforementioned process is augmented with an additional state. It is shown that the changes in received signal strength are dictated by: 1) electronic noise, when a person is not present in the monitored area; 2) reflection, when a person is moving in the close vicinity of line-of-sight; and 3) shadowing, when a person is obstructing the line-of-sight component of the transmitter–receiver pair. Statistical and spatial models for the three states are derived, and the models are empirically validated. Based on the models, a link line monitoring system is designed, which aims to, first, estimate the temporal state of the channel using a hidden Markov model, and, second, track a person using a particle filter. The results suggest that the presented system outperforms other state-of-the-art systems in terms of localization accuracy while increasing size of the link's sensing region.
Positioning Glass: Investigating Display Positions of Monocular Optical See-Through Head-Mounted Display

The physical position of the display on a monocular OST-HMD in relative to our eye is an important factor of the performance and usability in dual-task scenarios. We investigated 9 different display positions in a modern dual-task scenario with 27 participants. The experiment-involved participants responding to 3 different types of notifications displayed on the HMD while performing a visually intensive primary task. We found that although the notifications at the middle and bottom center positions were noticed quicker, the top and the peripheral positions were more comfortable, unobtrusive, and preferred. In particular, middle-right strikes the best balance between performance and usability in the dual-task scenario we studied. Our findings and discussions demonstrated the need for further work and a more rigorous investigation in dual-task scenarios with characteristics dissimilar to ours.
Optimal Synthesis of Gated Clocks for Low-Power Finite-State Machines

The automatic synthesis of low power FSMs with gated clocks relies on e cient algorithms for the synthesis and optimization of dedicated clock-stopping circuitry. In a previous paper [3] we have described a framework for the transformation of FSMs and the extraction of input and state conditions where the clock can be safely stopped without modifying the external behavior. In this paper we concentrate on the optimal synthesis of the logic block that controls the local clock of the FSM. We formulate and solve a new logic optimization problem, namely, the synthesis of a sub-function of a Boolean function that is minimal in size under a constraint on its probability to be one. We describe the relevance of this problem for the optimal synthesis of gated clocks. A prototype tool has been implemented and its performance, although in uenced by the initial structure of the nite state machine, shows that sizable power reductions can be obtained with our technique.
THE BLACK ATLANTIC AS A COUNTERCULTURE OF MODERNITY

This is the first chapter of the as yet not translated book by the English philosopher Paul Gilroy. The proposed conception of the Black Atlantic proved to be one of the most effective and influential theories of recent years, dealing with post-colonialism and the black societies of the region. Gilroy deliberated on a wide gamut of issues spanning from the history and theory of ideas, social and political questions, and values to problems associated with art. According to one of his theses, developed in the book, characteristic features of Black Atlantic cultures included the ability to propose a synthesis of cultural phenomena.
Inversion-based gait generation for humanoid robots

In this paper, we address the problem of gait generation for bipedal robots. We cast the determination of a Center of Mass (CoM) reference trajectory for a given Zero Moment Point (ZMP) desired behaviour as a stable inversion problem for non-minimum phase systems and obtain an analytical solution for any given ZMP trajectory. Our method exploits results from our previous research, in which we derived a family of bounded CoM trajectories associated to a given desired ZMP trajectory.
Stroke break analysis: a practical method to study timeout value for handwriting recognition input

Handwriting recognition (HWR) input method has been considered to be one of the most usable text entry methods for handheld devices, especially for languages with large and complicated character sets such as Chinese. The paper studies stroke break times within handwritten characters and presents a new method for setting HWR timeout by examining the break time distributions. For multi-stroke character HWR input, a timeout is widely used as a segmentation technique to initiate the recognition process. In this paper, we examine the largest stroke break time in each character and explore the relationship between break time distribution and optimal HWR timeout. The study used Chinese as test material and the test independent variables were writing condition (input box, full screen) and user's posture while they were writing (hold device in hand, keep device on table). The main findings are: (1) the stroke break times are similar in full screen and input box conditions, though the users tend to write larger characters in full screen condition. (2) The stroke break times fit into a tight distribution. It is feasible to estimate optimal HWR timeout by studying stoke break time distribution. A nonparametric histogram method was used to model the stroke break distributions and it showed that typical Chinese HWR default timeouts are around 99% percentile in the distribution. (3) Differences in HWR stroke break distributions are very significant between individual users. The stroke break time analysis can also be applied to design HWR timeout customization scale.
Generic replication of software transactional memory

Software Transactional Memory (STM) is a powerful tool for managing access to shared data. A major impairment to the adoption of this technology in mainstream applications is the lack of efficient replication schemes capable of ensuring adequate scalability and fault-tolerance levels. A key issue is that no existing replication approach succeeds in delivering optimal performance across the entire spectrum of possible transactional workloads. In this work we describe an architecture for generic replication of STMs. Our approach strongly simplifies the development and evaluation of alternative STM replication policies, by defining neat, generic interfaces that encapsulate the three key components at the core of a replicated STM: the local STM, the replica coordination manager and the underlying group communication system. Our generic architecture for STM replication aims at integrating the results from the growing community of researchers working in this area, paving the way towards the development of self-optimizing STM replication mechanisms.
Design of PIAA coronagraphs over square apertures

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of a theoretical study pertaining to the feasibility of PIAA units using Deformable Mirrors. We begin by reviewing the general derivation of the design equations driving PIAA. We then show how to solve these equations for square apertures and show the performance of pure PIAA systems in the ray optics regime. We tie these design equations into the study of edge diffraction effects, and provide a general expression for the field after a full propagation through a PIAA coronagraph. Third, we illustrate how a combination of pre and post apodisers yields to a contrast of 10 even in the presence of diffractive effects, for configuration with neither wavefront errors or wavefront control. Finally we present novel PIAA configurations over square apertures which circumvent the constraints on the manufacturing of PIAA optics by inducing the apodisation with two square Deformable Mirrors (DM). Such solutions rely on pupil size smaller than currently envisioned static PIAA solutions and thus require aggressive pre and post-apodizing screens in order to mitigate for diffractive effect between the two mirrors. As a result they are associated to significant loss in performance, throughput in particular. Subject headings: instrumentation: high angular resolution
XRCE's Participation to CLEF 2008 Ad-Hoc Track

Our participation to CLEF2008 (Ad-Hoc Track, TEL Subtask) was an opportunity to develop and assess methods that tackle multilinguilality in a principled ‐ while rather simple ‐ way. It was also an opportunity to demonstrate the eectiveness of the dictionary adaptation method we designed last year in the case of the domainspecific track. Unfortunately, it turned out that several mistakes we accumulated in our implementation impacted significantly and negatively the performance of our submitted runs. We nevertheless decided to experiment extra runs, that we designed to (partially) compensate for the errors made in the ocial runs and whose performance are reported in this working note. These results are quite satisfying, as they reach (or exceed) the level of the other best participants for the bilingual tasks.
Variable Length Markov Chains for Web Usage Mining

Web usage mining is usually defined as the discipline that concentrates on developing techniques that model and study users’ Web navigation behavior by means of analyzing data obtained from user interactions with Web resources; see (Mobasher, 2006; Liu, 2007) for recent reviews on web usage mining. When users access Web resources they leave a trace behind that is stored in log files, such traces are called clickstream records. Clickstream records can be preprocessed into time-ordered sessions of sequential clicks (Spiliopoulou et al., 2003), where a user session represents a trail the user followed through the Web space. The process of session reconstruction is called sessionizing. Understanding user Web navigation behavior is a fundamental step in providing guidelines on how to improve users’ Web experience. In this context, a model able to represent usage data can be used to induce frequent navigation patterns, to predict future user navigation intentions, and to provide a platform for adapting Web pages according to user specific information needs (Anand et al., 2005; Eirinaki et al., 2007). Techniques using association rules (Herlocker et al., 2004) or clustering methods (Mobasher et al., 2002) have been used in this context. Given a set of transactions clustering techniques can be used, for example, to find user segments, and association rule techniques can be used, for example, to find important relationships among pages based on the users navigational patterns. These methods have the limitation that the ordering of page views is not taken into consideration in the modeling of user sessions (Liu, 2007). Two methods that take into account the page view ordering are: tree based methods (Chen et al., 2003) used for prefetching Web resources, and Markov models (Borges et al., 2000; Deshpande et al., 2004) used for link prediction. Moreover, recent studies have been conducted on the use of visualization techniques for discovering navigational trends from usage data (Chen et al., 2007a; Chen et al., 2007b).
Unpacking the Value of Writing: Exploring College Students' Perceptions of Writing.

This study explored college students’ beliefs about the value of writing, their past experiences with writing, and the relationship between students’ prior experiences with writing and writing value beliefs. One hundred fourteen undergraduates from a public Southeastern university participated in the study. Using expectancy-value theory as a framework, structural (Saldaña, 2013) and hypothesis (Bernard, 2011) coding was used to analyze student responses. Findings suggested that attainment, utility, and interest value aligned well with student writing value responses. Students noted both positive and negative experiences with writing. Whereas most students discussed the role of good instruction, positive role models, and constructive criticism in their positive past writing experiences, unengaging and daunting tasks were salient memories for students describing negative prior experiences with writing. Although writing is essential for college and occupational success, students often struggle to produce quality writing. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress report (NAEP, 2011) showed that one-third of students in 12th grade (20%) scored below proficiency in the areas of expository, persuasive, analytical, and argumentative writing. Moreover, only two percent of students submitted writing that was considered advanced. In a similar report surveying the literacy skills of college graduates of two- and four-year programs, the American Institutes of Research (Baer, Baldi, & Cook, 2006) found that over half of responding students lacked basic writing skills. Considering the importance of writing skills both inside and outside of the classroom, these trends deserve attention.
Towards Extracting Customer Needs from Incident Tickets in IT Services

In many service relationships, customer encounters are not systematically exploited in order to gain valuable insights. However, text mining and analytics methods would provide effective means to systematically screen customer responses and automatically extract relevant business information. In this work, we develop a machine learning method as an artifact for screening incident information in IT Services to detect customer needs. We implement and evaluate the method in a real-world context with an IT provider covering several thousands of incident tickets per year. We show that it is feasible to map incoming tickets to a domain-specific selection of needs-and, hence, enable the providers' customer contacts to address unfilled needs with tailored service offerings. Thus, we contribute a methodology to service marketing and innovation managers to automatically and scalably monitor their customer base for additional sales opportunities.
Generation and characterization of the PKCγ‐Cre mouse line

PKCgγ is a protein kinase C (PKC) isoform that is expressed in the central nervous system (CNS). We generated a PKCgγ‐Cre mouse line and characterized the expression and activity of the Cre protein. Our studies show that Cre expression largely recapitulates the endogenous expression of PKCgγ. Several major sites of Cre expression are the cerebral cortex, hippocampus, thalamus, amygdala, and spinal cord. Examination of PKCgγ‐Cre/ROSA26 mice reveals a similar X‐gal staining pattern in the CNS, indicating that Cre recombinase is capable of removing LoxP sites in vivo. These data indicate that the PKCgγ‐Cre mouse line could be a useful reagent for generating Cre‐mediated tissue‐specific knockouts in the CNS. genesis 43:28–33, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Conformational variability in structures of the nitrogenase iron proteins from Azotobacter vinelandii and Clostridium pasteurianum.

The nitrogenase iron (Fe) protein performs multiple functions during biological nitrogen fixation, including mediating the mechanistically essential coupling between ATP hydrolysis and electron transfer to the nitrogenase molybdenum iron (MoFe) protein during substrate reduction, and participating in the biosynthesis and insertion of the FeMo-cofactor into the MoFe-protein. To establish a structural framework for addressing the diverse functions of Fe-protein, crystal structures of the Fe-proteins from Azotobacter vinelandii and Clostridium pasteurianum have been determined at resolutions of 2.2 A and 1.93 A, respectively. These two Fe-proteins are among the more diverse in terms of amino acid sequence and biochemical properties. As described initially for the A. vinelandii Fe-protein in a different crystal form at 2.9 A resolution, each subunit of the dimeric Fe-protein adopts a polypeptide fold related to other mononucleotide-binding proteins such as G-proteins, with the two subunits bridged by a 4Fe:4S cluster. The overall similarities in the subunit fold and dimer arrangement observed in the structures of the A. vinelandii and C. pasteurianum Fe-proteins indicate that they are representative of the conformation of free Fe-protein that is not in complex with nucleotide or the MoFe-protein. Residues in the cluster and nucleotide-binding sites are linked by a network of conserved hydrogen bonds, salt-bridges and water molecules that may conformationally couple these regions. Significant variability is observed in localized regions, especially near the 4Fe:4S cluster and the MoFe-protein binding surface, that change conformation upon formation of the ADP.AlF4- stabilized complex with the MoFe-protein. A core of 140 conserved residues is identified in an alignment of 59 Fe-protein sequences that may be useful for the identification of homologous proteins with functions comparable to that of Fe-protein in non-nitrogen fixing systems.
Prise en compte de l'imperfection des tags pour la classification sémantique d'images

L'annotation d'images consiste a decrire le contenu des images en utilisant un nombre fini de concepts fixes a priori. En pratique, nous utilisons deux modalites pour cela : l'image et les tags utilisateurs qui les accompagnent. Cependant, ces tags sont en general imparfaits et seulement une partie est pertinente vis-a-vis du contenu de l'image. Dans ce papier, nous nous interessons a la prise en compte de l'imperfection des tags en vue de leur utilisation pour l'amelioration de la performance des systemes d'annotation. Nous proposons un systeme de classification multimodale qui prend en compte l'imperfection des tags. L'amelioration de ~8% de classification obtenue sur la base d'images VCDT (Visual Concept detection Task) de la campagne d'evaluation ImageClef2011 montre l'interet de cette modelisation
A profissionalidade do educador social frente a regulamentação profissional da educação social: as disputas em torno do projeto de Lei 5346/2009

The text analyzes the professionalism of the social educator front profissonal regulation of social education imposed by the Draft Law No. 5346/2009. Conceptualizes education and educators, actors such education and professionalism. Describes critically the dispute surrounding the said Project, which the National Congress, which has been the subject of intense debate and criticism among practitioners of social education so that many wish his retirement from Congress by misconceptions perpetrated by example, allow any other professional obtains registration, without necessarily proving tacit and formal educators who are handicapping thus building a professional identity that educational field. But, there is clarity and consensus among (the) many (as) teachers (as) organized social associations, as ABRAPSocial, AEESP and AEC, on other issues, such as the minimum qualification for the exercise if average or higher , amplicon or not the areas of professional activity, inclusion of social pedagogy in the professionalism of the (a) educator (a), amongst others. This PL is already the second replacement, and clearly, showing the strength of a decision of the Associations.
Analyzing the performance of tcp flows in packet networks with las schedulers

The networking community has focused mainly on Processor Sharing (PS) policies in routers in order to establish QoS guarantees. As of today, PS scheduling has not been deployed in routers and the Internet still uses FIFO scheduling that offers only a best-effort service. Also, Internet traffic exhibits a high variability in terms of the flow sizes: Most of the flows are short, while more than half of the bytes are carried by a few largest flows. Given these observations, we recommend Least Attained Service (LAS) scheduling in routers, which favors short flows by giving the highest priority to the first packets of each flow. As a result, LAS improves the overall user perceived performance. Using simulation we show that under LAS scheduling, as compared to FIFO, the transmission time and loss rate for short TCP flows are significantly reduced, with a negligible increase in transmission time for the largest flows. We also show that the improvement seen by short TCP flows under LAS is mainly due to the way LAS interacts with TCP algorithm in the slow start (SS) phase, which result in shorter round-trip times and very low packet loss rates for short flows. We also investigate the performance of long-lived TCP and UDP flows under LAS and compare the results to FIFO scheduling.
Facebook as a tool for supporting dialogic accounting? Evidence from large philanthropic foundations in the United States

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore the utilization of the social network, Facebook, as an instrument of stakeholder engagement and dialogic accounting in American charitable foundations, specifically non-profit organizations that are dedicated to philanthropy. Design/methodology/approach - The research motivation involves whether online interaction through Facebook could represent a channel of dialogic accounting that engages organizational stakeholders. This paper aims to understand if this dialogue is geared to generate a consensus necessary to deliberate over decisions that are shared between all stakeholders, or if a divergent and agonistic perspective, which highlights struggles and differences between actors, prevails. The present study employs a form of content analysis that takes into account the Facebook pages of the 100 largest American philanthropic foundations. Findings - The primary goal of the analysis is to examine the discrepancies in terms of how (and how much) large organizations are using Facebook. The study wants to provide more details on which kind of information large organizations are willing to disclose and collect on Facebook, and to evaluate the level and type of interaction between foundations and users. Research limitations/implications - Further research could build on the present study by providing in-depth case studies and extending the analysis to other social media and other types of organizations. Originality/value - Social media represent a powerful mechanism to engage stakeholders in a polylogic conversation. However, the scholarly literature confirms that further studies are necessary to understand how companies and organization can exploit this potential.
Profile-based Approach for Age and Gender Identification

This paper describes the participation between the LIDIC research group of the UNSL from Argentina and the Language and Reasoning research group of the UAM Cuajimalpa from Mexico at the PAN’s 2016 Author Profiling task. For the proposed method we adopted a profile-based approach, which has been successfully applied in the Authorship Attribution problem. Thus, we proposed a variation of this technique for tackling the Author Profiling task. Performed experiments showed that using about 8000 most frequent character n-grams for the construction of the different profiles, our proposed method obtains a better performance for both the same genre of documents as well as for the cross-genre scenario.