Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acceleration of hough transform algorithm using Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

The Hough Transform is a popular tool for feature detection in digital image processing due to its robustness to noise and missing data. However, the computational cost associated to its voting scheme has prevented software implementation to achieve real time performance. This paper demonstrates the parallel computing power of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) in area of image processing. In this paper, we have presented an algorithm for performing Hough Transform on digital images using NVIDIA GPU with the support of MATLAB Parallel Computing Toolbox in order to achieve faster execution. The advantage of using GPU for general purpose computation is to speedup the performance which can be achieved by the parallel architecture of GPU. In this paper, we have harnessed this property of GPU to accelerate the process of Hough Transform for shape or feature detection and the performance of processing of Hough Transform using CPU and GPU are compared.
Toward a simplified perceptual quality metric for watermarking applications

This work is motivated by the limitations of statistical quality metrics to assess the quality of images distorted in distinct frequency ranges. Common quality metrics, which basically have been designed and tested for various kind of global distortions, such as image coding may not be efficient for watermarking applications, where the distortions might be restricted on a very narrow portion of the frequency spectrum. We hereby want to propose an objective quality metric whose performances do not depend on the distortion frequency range, but we nevertheless want to provide a simplified objective quality metric in opposition to the complex Human Visual System (HVS) based quality metrics recently made available. The proposed algorithm is generic (not designed for a particular distortion), and exploits the contrast sensitivity function (CSF) along with an adapted Minkowski error pooling. The results show a high correlation between the proposed objective metric and the mean opinion score (MOS) given by observers. A comparison with relevant existing objective quality metrics is provided.
A Multibank Buffer Design with STT-MRAM for High-Bandwidth Low-Power On-Chip Interconnects

Network-on-Chip (NoC) is a widely accepted inter-core communication infrastructure for Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs ). It is critical that NoC provides both low latency and high bandwidth within limited on-chip power and area budgets. SpinTransfer Torque Magnetic RAM (STT-MRAM), a high density and low leakage memory, offers more buffer capacities with t he same die footprint, thus helping increase network throughp ut in NoC routers. However, its long latency and power overhead associated with write operations still need to be addressed . In this paper, we propose the first NoC router design that uses only STT-MRAM, which provides much larger buffer space with less power consumption. To hide the multicycle writes, we em ploy a multibank STT-MRAM buffer, a virtual channel with mul tiple banks where every incoming flit is seamlessly pipeline d to each bank alternately. Our STT-MRAM design has aggressively reduced the retention time, resulting in a significan t reduction of the latency and power overheads of write operatio ns. To overcome flit losses caused by the reduced retention time, we propose cost-efficient dynamic buffer refresh schemes th at minimize unnecessary refreshes with minimum hardware over heads. Simulation results show that the proposed STT-MRAM NoC router improves throughput by 21.6% and achieves 17% savings in the total router power compared with a convention al SRAM based NoC router.
Augmenting Media Performance with Interactive Technology

Music performance has always been driven by performers with audience listening to the performance. The audience does not expect to interact with the performers or even participate in the performance. This paper presents an attempt to use computer-based instruments to support traditional musical instruments to deliver an interactive media music performance in Hong Kong where such kind of performance is still regarded brand new. The interactive features employed not only enhance the interaction between the performers and the audience, but also change the way performers collaborate with each other. These were demonstrated by a performance held in July 2009 at Jockey Club Creative Arts Center in Hong Kong. This paper examines these features and analyzed the results achieved in the performance as well as the problems remained, with a view to formulate further research in this area.
Fast roll-out of fibre to the Cabinet: Practical approach for activation of cabinets

Over the past few decades the demand for bandwidth for Internet access has been growing at an unprecedented rate, and this growth is not likely to slow down in the near future. Rolling out Fibre to the Cabinet/Curb networks quickly will be the only way for telecom operators to meet the growing customer demand. This requires a fibre connection to the cabinets or even closer to the homes. This raises the important question which cabinets should be provided with fibre and active equipment if the operator wants to reach as many customers with as little investment as possible. To this end, we formulate the problem as the new Partly Covered Single Source Capacitated Facility Location Problem. Since this problem is shown NP-hard, we develop a very fast heuristic to approximate the optimal solution. Extensive experiments with a number of real-life data sets of Dutch cities have been performed to benchmark the results against the optimal solution. The results show that the heuristic performs well, and leads to close-to-optimal solutions with negligible computation times.
Performance Evaluation of Empirical Mode Decomposition Algorithms for Mental Task Classification

Brain Computer Interface (BCI), a direct pathway between the human brain and computer, is one of the most pragmatic applications of EEG signal. The electroencephalograph (EEG) signal is one of the monitoring techniques to observe brain functionality. Mental Task Classification (MTC) based on EEG signals is a demanding BCI. Success of BCI system depends on the efficient analysis of these signal. Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is a filter based heuristic technique which is utilized to analyze EEG signal in recent past. There are several variants of EMD algorithms which have their own merits and demerits. In this paper, we have explored three variant of EMD algorithms named Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD),Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) and Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise (CEEMDAN) on EEG data for MTC-based BCI. Features are extracted from EEG signal in two phases; in the first phase, the signal is decomposed into different oscillatory functions with the help of different EMD algorithms and eight different parameters (features) are calculated for each function for compact representation in the second phase. These features are fed into Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier to classify the different mental tasks. We have formulated two different types of MTC, the first one is binary and second one is multi-MTC. The proposed work outperforms the existing work for both binary and multi mental tasks classification.
From Camps to Schools: The Participation of Refugee Children in Greek Public Education

Abstract:Based on an ethnographic fieldwork in Greece, this study focuses on the government’s attempt to provide education for children living in Athens’s refugee camps, as well as the actors involved in this effort, interrogating the problematic phenomena and interconnectedness of crisis, hospitality, and solidarity. During the past decade, Greece has become the center of international attention in connection with the two crises that are both also local variations of wider global problems. First, being hit hard by the financial crisis and subsequent austerity measures, present-day Greece can be taken as a case of a country in chronicity, where crisis has become normalized. Second, as a consequence of interrelated international phenomena, Greece witnessed an increase in immigration, and the EU-Turkey deal of 2016 created a bottlenecked country, where presently about 65,000 refugees wait in so-called frozen transience. The issue of refugee education is investigated in this context. This article argues that refugee education cannot be understood solely on economic or political terms but needs to be situated into a broader cultural context, as well.
Lost in Transition: The Changing Dynamics of Traditional Nuäär Gender Roles and the Migrant Experience

This study examines transitional patterns of family relationships in new cultural settings by focusing on the choices and challenges confronting a little known and vulnerable migrant group, the Nuaar of South Sudan and Ethiopia. It explores how the concepts of gender identification and gender roles, especially men’s roles, have changed within Nuaar families as a result of migration and resettlement experiences. The study uses a qualitative research strategy by applying a constructivist theoretical framework, which emphasises how knowledge is constructed through human experience and interaction. It also applies an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates perspectives from sociology, psychology, and refugee and forced migration studies to identify gaps in the literature and contribute new knowledge to understanding and debates about the Nuaar in particular and the migrant experience in general. The methods employed to collect data included focus groups, participant observation, semi-structured interviews and document analysis. A total of 44 men and women ranging in age from 18 to 65 years participated in semi-structured interviews or focus group discussions between April and December 2014. Participant observations and home visits were also conducted to gain insight into how men, women and family groups interact and cope with adapting to their new environment, and the impacts of this on gender roles and practices. The data was analysed and interpreted intensively using constructivist grounded theory to show how Nuaar men and women experience and cope with the challenges of changing gender roles in a new country and social environment. The thesis attempts to capture the dynamic and diverse nature of Australian Nuaar experiences during this community’s periods of displacement, transition, refugee life and resettlement in Australia. The findings reveal profound ongoing changes in Nuaar cultural traditions and particularly in the renegotiation of how masculinities are defined and experienced through resettlement, which creates many problems within Nuaar families. The research also shows the ways in which Nuaar men have been struggling with loss of the traditional status conferred by manhood, and their resistance to seeing their partners and their children depart from traditional Nuaar culture despite the transformations brought about by resettlement. The thesis also explores the significance of coping strategies used by Nuaar migrants in dealing with these resettlement challenges and the renegotiation of gender roles that this involves.
Link-Rate Assignment in a WDM Optical Mesh Network with Differential Link Capacities: A Network-Engineering Approach

Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks are characterized by maturity, high-capacity, agility, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. Today, optical transmission rates are increasing from 10 Gbit/s to 100 Gbit/s which increases the network's flexibility for capacity provisioning. We study the problem of dimensioning optical WDM networks under traffic growth. Particularly, we study link-rate assignment and capacity expansion (namely network engineering). Our study shows that, with careful link-rate assignment, the network's traffic can be satisfied and any traffic growth can be accommodated using the network's current resources with some additional resources so that cost is minimized. Our study also shows that, by careful selection, only a few links with high rates can meet the capacity needs of the network and that any additional high-rate links (extra cost) may not significantly improve the network's efficiency.
Resilient reintegration as a result of psychotherapy: a grounded theory analysis of clients’ experiences

ABSTRACT Although most psychotherapists would agree that psychotherapy helps clients build their psychological resilience, there are very few data on how best to conceptualize resilience enhancement and which are the specific resilience factors that are developed or reinforced in psychotherapy. The aim of this study was to explore resilience development through psychotherapy. Semi-structured qualitative in-depth interviews were conducted with 13 clients who had experienced a major loss or adversity and have sought psychotherapy in order to cope with its impact. Data were analyzed using grounded theory. Our analysis of the data resulted in a tentative framework which depicts resilience enhancement through psychotherapy as reconstruction of meaning. The changes that clients experienced as a result of psychotherapy were conceptualized as resilient reintegration and comprised six areas: (1) authentic self-esteem, (2) psychological empowerment, (3) reconstructed meaning, (4) change in emotional experiencing, (5) acting differently, and (6) relating differently. The findings suggest that psychotherapy promoted a wide range of outcomes which have been consistently linked to higher resilience in the literature. Furthermore, our findings showed that the psychotherapeutic outcome for these participants may be conceptualized in terms of positive transformation and resilience enhancement.
Author's response to reviews Title:Development of waist circumference percentiles for Japanese children and an examination of their screening utility for childhood metabolic syndrome - a population-based cross-sectional study

Rie Matsushita (rriefuru@yahoo.co.jp) Tsuyoshi Isojima (isojimat@aol.com) Ryuzo Takaya (ped013@poh.osaka-med.ac.jp) Eiichiro Satake (satabow@gmail.com) Rie Yamaguchi (lrs0701@hama-med.ac.jp) Kazuteru Kitsuta (kitta_k@hotmail.com) Eiko Nagata (amn_e@hama-med.ac.jp) Shinichiro Sano (sanosin2u@yahoo.co.jp) Toshiki Nakanishi (toshiki@hama-med.ac.jp) Yuichi Nakagawa (ynyuichi@kbd.biglobe.ne.jp) Takehiko Ohzeki (tohzeki@kyoritsu-wu.ac.jp) Tsutomu Ogata (tomogata@hama-med.ac.jp) Yasuko Fujisawa (yasuko@hama-med.ac.jp)
Perceptual Representations for Classification of Everyday Sounds

In the recognition and classification of sounds, extracting perceptually and biologically relevant features yields much better results than the standard low-level methods (e.g zero-crossings, roll-off, centroid, energy, etc.). Gamma-tone filters are biologically relevant, as they simulate the motion of the basilar membrane. The representation techniques that we propose in this paper make use of the gamma-tone filters, combined with the Hilbert transform or hair cell models, to represent everyday sounds. Different combinations of these methods have been evaluated and compared in perceptual classification tasks to classify everyday sounds like doors and footsteps by using support vector classification. After calculating the features a feature integration technique is applied, in order to reduce the high dimensionality of the features. The everyday sounds are obtained from the commercial sound database “Sound Ideas”. However, perceptual labels assigned by human listeners are considered rather than the labels delivered by the actual sound source. These perceptual classification tasks are performed to classify the everyday sounds according to their function, like classifying the door sounds as ”opening” and ”closing” doors. In this paper, among the gamma-tone-based representation techniques, other spectral and psycho-acoustical representation techniques are also evaluated. The experiments show that the gamma-tone-based representation techniques are superior for perceptual classification tasks of everyday sounds. The gamma-tone filters combined with a inner hair cell model and with the Hilbert transform yield the most accurate results in classifying everyday sounds.
Music Enhancement Using Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with Penalty Masking

The implementation of nonnegative matrix factorization may simply be carried out on a stepwise basis. However, this mechanism could lead to longer convergence time than that by designing a suitable cost function with additional penalty terms. Moreover, the decomposed matrices do not necessarily reflect the real situation and physical meaning the block-oriented decomposition is processing. For music enhancement in the noisy environment, this shortcoming may be alleviated by imposing strong constraints on noise components via iteratively adaptive processing. To characterize the ever-changing features in their frequency with respect to time, we also introduce a perception based filtering as the preprocess for more reliable noise detection. As a result, one example of numerical design based on a reverberant room recording is shown to demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.
LEARNING INTERACTION IN AN AVATAR-BASED VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT: A PRELIMINARY STUDY

A process for preparing an integral Saccharomyces cerevisiae cell culture containing the cell bodies and all the products which form during the cell multiplication process, and for stabilizing the resultant product in order to maintain the cell integrity and biological activity unaltered for a long period. The product obtained is useful in human and animal feeding as a growth factor and regulator of bacterial and enzymatic imbalance of the intestine, and as a protein additive in the cosmetics industry.
Parametric Computational Study Of Femoral Growth Plate Orientation Under Specific Loading Conditions

The aim of this study is to predict the shape and orientation of the femoral growth plate under specific loading conditions. Mechanical loads affect not only the mechanical properties of long bones but also the rate and the direction of their growth. Subsequently, loading influences the shape and ultimate functionality of these bones and their corresponding joints. Mechanical stress is a key factor in local regulation of the growth plate, which is responsible for longitudinal growth via endochondral ossification. Bone deformities of femur occur in children who experience abnormal loading on their bones during daily activities, such as in developmental dysplasia of the hip, cerebral palsy, or femoroacetabular impingement. Here we propose that the growth plate aligns in a direction that minimizes shear stress on its surface. An algorithm was developed to determine orientation of the resulting growth plate under various loading conditions. The geometry of the femur was created from medical images of a 7-year-old. The algorithm determined a surface along the principle stress directions, for which in-plane shear stress was minimized. A parametric study was performed considering various application angles of the hip contact force. The anatomical reference values were measured in the models and compared with clinical data. It was shown that the growth plate orientation changed significantly for 15 degrees changes in anterior/posterior and laterally/medially placement of the joint load. This has implications for understanding changes in proximal femoral bone morphology in conditions such as anteversion, coxa valga/vara, and cam morphology, which are caused by altered growth.
SHORT TERM WIND SPEED PREDICTION USING SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE MODEL 1

Wind speed prediction in short term is required to asses the effect of wind on different objects in action in free space, like rockets, navigating ships and planes, guided missiles satellites in launch etc. Forecasting also helps in usage of wind energy as an alternative source of energy in Electrical power generation plants. The wind speed depends on the values of other atmospheric variables, such as pressure, moisture content, humidity, rainfall etc. This paper reports a Support Vector Machine model for short term wind speed prediction. The model uses the values of these parameters, obtained from a nearest weather station, as input data. The trained model is validated using a part of data. The model is then used to predict the wind speed, using the same meteorological information.
Oblivious channels

Let C = {X1,. ,XN} sub {0, 1}n be an [n, N] binary error correcting code (not necessarily linear). Let e isin {0, 1}n be an error vector. A codeword X isin C is said to be disturbed by the error e if the closest codeword to X oplus e is no longer X. Let Ae be the subset of codewords in C that are disturbed by e. In this work we study the size of Ae in random codes C (i.e. codes in which each codeword Xi is chosen uniformly and independently at random from {0, 1}n). Using recent results of Vu [random structures and algorithms 20(3)] on the concentration of non-Lipschitz functions, we show that |Ae| is strongly concentrated for a wide range of values of N and parepar. We apply this result in the study of communication channels we refer to as oblivious. Roughly speaking, a channel W(y|x) is said to be oblivious if the error distribution imposed by the channel is independent of the transmitted codeword x. For example, the well studied binary symmetric channel is an oblivious channel. In this work, we define oblivious and partially oblivious channels and present lower bounds on their capacity. The oblivious channels we define have connections to arbitrarily varying channels with state constraints
An Improved Mesocotyl Elongation Assay for the Rapid Identification and Characterization of Strigolactone-Related Rice Mutants

Strigolactones (SLs) constitute an important class of plant hormones involved in diverse developmental activities in plant growth and host-parasite interaction. Although substantial progress has been made to understand this pathway, the mechanism of action is still elusive especially with its interaction with other phytohormones and downstream targets. Here we have utilized the negative role of strigolactones in rice (Oryza sativa L.) mesocotyl elongation as a morphological marker for the identification and characterization of new developmental mutants. We observed that deep sown seeds develop longer mesocotyl compared with the surface-grown seeds in the dark condition. Based on this observation, we have developed a method to access mesocotyl elongation consisting of the glass vessel and vermiculite as a growth media. Mesocotyl elongation in the modified deep sown system results in a many-fold increase compared to the surface-grown seeds in the dark condition. External application of SLs analog rac-GR24 rescued the elongated mesocotyl phenotype in the mutant defective in SLs synthesis but not the signaling mutant, demonstrating its applicability in the physiological experiments. The modified mesocotyl elongation assay can be used as a rapid method for characterization and identification of suppressors/enhancers and new developmental mutants in the SLs or its associated pathway saving a huge amount of time and space.