Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reimagining the role of citizens in smart city projects

The technological focus of many Smart City projects relies on top-down innovations, ignoring the role that citizens can play in improving their local communities. In this paper we outline our approach to supporting citizens in playing an active role in urban innovation, from the crowdsourcing of initial ideas through to facilitating citizen involvement in the realization of community projects. This extends previous work in the field by exploring how to go beyond identifying issues and ideas to securing a commitment from citizens to assisting a project intended to address an identified issue.
A sample-and-clean framework for fast and accurate query processing on dirty data

In emerging Big Data scenarios, obtaining timely, high-quality answers to aggregate queries is difficult due to the challenges of processing and cleaning large, dirty data sets. To increase the speed of query processing, there has been a resurgence of interest in sampling-based approximate query processing (SAQP). In its usual formulation, however, SAQP does not address data cleaning at all, and in fact, exacerbates answer quality problems by introducing sampling error. In this paper, we explore an intriguing opportunity. That is, we explore the use of sampling to actually improve answer quality. We introduce the Sample-and-Clean framework, which applies data cleaning to a relatively small subset of the data and uses the results of the cleaning process to lessen the impact of dirty data on aggregate query answers. We derive confidence intervals as a function of sample size and show how our approach addresses error bias. We evaluate the Sample-and-Clean framework using data from three sources: the TPC-H benchmark with synthetic noise, a subset of the Microsoft academic citation index and a sensor data set. Our results are consistent with the theoretical confidence intervals and suggest that the Sample-and-Clean framework can produce significant improvements in accuracy compared to query processing without data cleaning and speed compared to data cleaning without sampling.
Comparison of the activity of selamectin, imidacloprid and fipronil for the treatment of dogs infested experimentally with Ctenocephalldes canis and Ctenocephalides felis felis

Twenty-four beagles were randomly allocated into four groups of six and housed in separate cages. Each dog was infested with 25 Ctenocephalides canis and 25 Ctenocephalides felis felis and two days later (day 0) the dogs in groups 1, 2 and 3 received a spot-on application of selamectin (6 mg/kg), imidacloprid (10 mg/kg), or fipronil (6.7 mg/kg), respectively, while the dogs in group 4 were not treated. The dogs were combed 48 hours later, the fleas were removed, counted and their species were determined. All the dogs were reinfested with the same number of the two species of fleas on days 7,14,21,28 and 35, and the efficacy of the treatments was calculated 48 hours after each infestation. The mean numbers of fleas on the control dogs were 19.8 C canis and 14.7 C felis felis. The three treatments were effective for the full 35 days of the trial; over the first 28 days, the efficacy of selamectin ranged from 81 to 100 and 92 to 99 per cent against C felis felis and C canis, respectively, the efficacy of imidacloprid ranged from 98 to 100 per cent and the efficacy of fipronil was 100 per cent against both species. There were no significant differences between the three treatments.
Exploring the Relevance of Case Study Research

The purpose of this article is to recount some highlights of a personal journey of a case study researcher. The researcher not only hopes to give a methodological and scholarly approach to the research but also intends to share some personal exciting and disappointing experiences during the journey. The article gives a detail on identifying the research problem, selection of the adequate research method, selection of the research organization, data collection, analysis and making sense of the data, publishing the results and extending research into post-doctoral research.
A verifiable, bidder-resolved Auction Protocol

Security and privacy have become crucial factors in auction design. Various schemes to ensure the safe conduction of sealed-bid auctions have been proposed recently. We introduce a new standard of privacy for auctions (“full privacy”), that prevents extraction of bid information despite any collusion of participants. This requirement is stronger than other common assumptions that prohibit the collusion of certain third-parties (e.g., distinct auctioneers). Full privacy can be obtained by applying a secret sharing scheme in which the bidders jointly compute the selling price on their own without uncovering any additional information. No auctioneers or other trusted third parties are used to resolve the auction. The major contribution of this work is the fully private (M + 1)st-price auction protocol in which only the winning bidders and the seller learn the selling price. To the best of our knowledge there is no other cryptographic auction protocol that achieves a similar level of privacy. The auction outcome cannot be changed or nullified by dishonest bidders because the protocol is publicly verifiable. As full privacy is our main goal, the drawback of the presented protocol is efficiency. Without relaxing any security demands, it is only applicable for high-security auctions with relatively few bidders in reasonable time.
Exploring SIMD for Molecular Dynamics, Using Intel® Xeon® Processors and Intel® Xeon Phi Coprocessors

We analyse gather-scatter performance bottlenecks in molecular dynamics codes and the challenges that they pose for obtaining benefits from SIMD execution. This analysis informs a number of novel code-level and algorithmic improvements to Sandia's miniMD benchmark, which we demonstrate using three SIMD widths (128-, 256and 512bit). The applicability of these optimisations to wider SIMD is discussed, and we show that the conventional approach of exposing more parallelism through redundant computation is not necessarily best. In single precision, our optimised implementation is up to 5x faster than the original scalar code running on Intel®Xeon®processors with 256-bit SIMD, and adding a single Intel®Xeon Phi™coprocessor provides up to an additional 2x performance increase. These results demonstrate: (i) the importance of effective SIMD utilisation for molecular dynamics codes on current and future hardware; and (ii) the considerable performance increase afforded by the use of Intel®Xeon Phi™coprocessors for highly parallel workloads.
Abstract Number: 015-0106 Price and Service Competition in an Outsourced Supply Chain

Number: 015-0106 Price and Service Competition in an Outsourced Supply Chain Yue Jin Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, Ireland Blanchardstown Industrial Park Blanchardstown, Dublin 15 Ireland yuejin@alcatel-lucent.com Jennifer K. Ryan Department of Decision Sciences and Engineering Systems Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 110 8th Street, Center for Industrial Innovation, Suite 5015 Troy, NY 12180 ryanj6@rpi.edu POMS 21st Annual Conference Vancouver, Canada May 7 to May 10, 2010 Abstract We study the dual-sourcing problem faced by a buyer who outsources the manufacturing of a given product to multiple symmetric suppliers who compete on both price and service level. The buyer allocates demand to the suppliers using a two-dimensional score function with an exponential form, which specifies the relative importance of price vs. service level, in order to minimize his own costs, while the suppliers choose their prices and service levels to maximize their own profits. We characterize the optimal allocation policy for the buyer, considering the impact of the buyer’s decisions on the suppliers and considering how the suppliers compete against each other to earn a larger portion of the buyer’s demand. We prove the existence of a unique equilibrium and characterize the equilibrium behavior of the system. We show that the equilibrium prices and service levels, as well as the buyer’s equilibrium cost, are increasing in the number of suppliers. We conclude that the increase in operational costs caused by the splitting of demands among a large number of suppliers outweighs any competitive benefits that would be achieved from sourcing from a large number of suppliers.We study the dual-sourcing problem faced by a buyer who outsources the manufacturing of a given product to multiple symmetric suppliers who compete on both price and service level. The buyer allocates demand to the suppliers using a two-dimensional score function with an exponential form, which specifies the relative importance of price vs. service level, in order to minimize his own costs, while the suppliers choose their prices and service levels to maximize their own profits. We characterize the optimal allocation policy for the buyer, considering the impact of the buyer’s decisions on the suppliers and considering how the suppliers compete against each other to earn a larger portion of the buyer’s demand. We prove the existence of a unique equilibrium and characterize the equilibrium behavior of the system. We show that the equilibrium prices and service levels, as well as the buyer’s equilibrium cost, are increasing in the number of suppliers. We conclude that the increase in operational costs caused by the splitting of demands among a large number of suppliers outweighs any competitive benefits that would be achieved from sourcing from a large number of suppliers.
Night-time lighting alters the composition of marine epifaunal communities

Marine benthic communities face multiple anthropogenic pressures that compromise the future of some of the most biodiverse and functionally important ecosystems in the world. Yet one of the pressures these ecosystems face, night-time lighting, remains unstudied. Light is an important cue in guiding the settlement of invertebrate larvae, and altering natural regimes of nocturnal illumination could modify patterns of recruitment among sessile epifauna. We present the first evidence of night-time lighting changing the composition of temperate epifaunal marine invertebrate communities. Illuminating settlement surfaces with white light-emitting diode lighting at night, to levels experienced by these communities locally, both inhibited and encouraged the colonization of 39% of the taxa analysed, including three sessile and two mobile species. Our results indicate that ecological light pollution from coastal development, shipping and offshore infrastructure could be changing the composition of marine epifaunal communities.
In-Network On-Demand Query-Based Sensing System for Wireless Sensor Networks

On-demand query-based in-network processing sensor system is used to improve power efficiency being a limited resource in sensing devices. In order to reduce energy consumption, data is only sent when requested and irrelevant data is eliminated through aggregation within an intermediate node. This technique is referred to as the in-network data processing techniques. In order to achieve this, we proposed an On Demand Query Sensing (ODQS) approach, a query-based engine that transfers the sensed data into aggregation functions at both the routing and the sink aggregator. Finally, we evaluated our experiment, and the results showed an improvement in energy saving using the aggregated functions. We also found that the energy consumed at each query is reduced to a significant ratio compared to the static sensing approach.
Objective versus subjective measures of face-drawing accuracy and their relations with perceptual constancies.

We investigated spatial errors nonartists make when drawing a face and the relationships between such errors with measures of perceptual constancies. Participants completed an observation-based free-hand drawing of a face, plus shape and size constancy tasks. Drawings were objectively measured with respect to errors in reproducing spatial relations among facial features as well as subjectively assessed using independent judges’ Likert scale-based holistic accuracy ratings. Results revealed systematic (rather than random) errors in the spatial relations between facial features. Further, although holistic accuracy ratings were negatively correlated with shape and size constancy errors, only some objectively measured spatial drawing errors were reliably correlated with the constancy measures. This suggests that holistic accuracy measurements may be too simplified for understanding the relationship between drawing accuracy and performance in nondrawing perceptual tasks, and that objective accuracy measures represent a useful complementary index of performance.
Time Course of Attentional Bias Components Toward Body-shape Related Pictures Among Women with Fat Negative Physical Self: An Eye Movement Study

Despite evidence indicating fatness and thinness information are processed differently among weight preoccupied and eating disordered individuals, the exact nature of these attentional biases is not clear. In this research, eye movement (EM) tracking assessed biases in specific component processes of visual attention (i.e., orientation, detection, and maintenance of gaze) in relation to body related pictures among 20 women with fat negative physical self (FNPS) and 20 body satisfied young women. Eye movements were recorded while participants completed a dot-probe task that featured fatness-neutral and thinness-neutral picture pairs with the stimuli being presented for 2000 ms. Women with FNPS showed different attentional bias pattern toward fat- and thin-related pictures, with vigilance-maintenance pattern toward fat body pictures and vigilance pattern toward thin body pictures. Specifically, compared to controls, women with FNPS were more likely to direct their initial gaze toward fatness pictures, had a shorter mean latency of first fixation on both fatness and thinness pictures, had longer first fixation and total gaze duration on fatness pictures. Reaction time data showed a maintenance bias towards fatness pictures and difficulty in disengagement from both fatness and thinness pictures among the women with FNPS. In sum, results indicated women with FNPS show initial orienting, speeded detection and initial and total maintenance biases towards fat body pictures in addition to a speeded detection in relation to thin body pictures, which partly supported Vitousek and Hollon's (1990) cognitive model.
10-gb/s operation of an In/sub 0.53/Ga/sub 0.47/As p-i-n photodiode on metamorphic InGaP buffered semi-insulating GaAs substrate

The SONET OC-192 receiving performance of In<sub>0.53</sub>Ga<sub>0.47</sub>As p-i-n photodiode grown on linearly graded metamorphic In<sub>x</sub>Ga<sub>1-x</sub>P buffered GaAs substrate is reported. With a low-cost TO-46 package, such a device exhibits a frequency bandwidth up to 8 GHz, a bit-error rate (BER) of 10 <sup>-9</sup> at 10 Gb/s, a sensitivity of -17.8 dBm, and a noise equivalent power of 3.4times10<sup>-15</sup> W/Hz<sup>1/2</sup> owing to its ultralow dark current of 3.6times10<sup>-7</sup> A/cm<sup>2 </sup>. Eye diagram analysis at 10 Gb/s without transimpedance amplification reveals a statistically distributed Q-factor of 8.21, corresponding to a minimum BER of 1.1times10<sup>-16</sup> at receiving power of -6 dBm
Failure to replicate the structure of a Spanish-language brief Wisconsin Inventory of Smoking Dependence Motives across three samples of Latino smokers.

BACKGROUND Research in smoking is hindered by a lack of validated measures available in languages other than English. Availability of measures in languages other than English is vital to the inclusion of diverse groups in smoking research. To help address this gap, this study attempted to validate a Spanish-language version of the brief Wisconsin Inventory of Smoking Dependence Motives (Brief WISDM). METHODS Data from 3 independent, diverse samples of Spanish-speaking Latino smokers seeking cessation counseling were utilized. Confirmatory factor analyses of 3 known structures of the Brief WISDM were examined for fit within each sample. A separate analysis was also conducted with the 3 samples combined. A post-hoc exploratory factor analyses with the combined sample was also conducted. RESULTS Across 12 confirmatory factor analyses, none of the 3 structures demonstrated good fit in any of the samples independently or in the combined sample. Across the 3 samples, high intercorrelations (>.90) were found among the Loss of Control, Craving, Tolerance, and Cue Exposure scales, suggesting great redundancy among these scales. An exploratory factor analyses (EFAs) further supported these high intercorrelations. Some subscales remained intact in the EFA but accounted for little variance. CONCLUSIONS Overall, this study was unable to replicate the structure of a Spanish-language Brief WISDM in 3 independent samples of smokers. Possible explanations include inadequate translation of the measure and/or true and meaningful differences in the construct of dependence among Spanish-speaking Latino smokers. Both possibilities merit further research.
Stress in Doctors: A Pilot Study of the University Teaching Hospital, Lusaka, Zambia

This study had the objective of explored the stressful aspects of a doctor's job at the University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka, Zambia. Stress can have a serious effect on the work output of a doctor and on their physical and mental health. The data were collected from 41 doctors at UTH using the Perceived Stress Scale and a stress check list. The results revealed that out of the list of 14 possible stressors, Zambian doctors in this sample identified an average of 7.3 aspects of their job (SD=2.7) as being stressful. Lack of resources to carry out their job, the workload, the low level of reward and the long working hours were most frequently identified as stressors.
THEORETICAL NOTE Current Concerns in Visual Masking

Theories of emotion postulate that emotional input is processed independently from perceptual awareness. Although visual masking has a long tradition in studying whether emotional pictures are processed below a supposed threshold of perceptual awareness (subliminal perception), a consensus has yet to be reached. This article reviews current concerns in the use of visual masking. These include a reliable presentation method, the role of masking pictures, common definitions of awareness and their problems, current models of awareness, and neural mechanisms. A useful strategy may be the study of dose– response relationships between awareness and emotion processing that avoids a dichotomous view of awareness and allows conclusions about the relative independence of emotional processing from awareness. Humans laugh at jokes, cry in desperation, and run from the proverbial bear. Because many of these responses are elicited spontaneously and without any apparent effort, emotions appear to occur automatically. Indeed, because consciousness has limited capacity (Marois & Ivanoff, 2005; Roser & Gazzaniga, 2004; Shevrin & Dickman, 1980), theories of emotion suggest that emotional stimuli are processed independently from perceptual awareness, particularly so in detecting and responding to potential
National innovation system capabilities among leader and follower countries: widening gaps or global convergence?

The concept of technological catch-up, as it refers to a situation where some less-developed countries have been able to catch up to the world leaders in terms of innovation, has inspired an abundant amount of scholarly attention. However, studies comprehensively focusing on factors considered important for innovation in the literature on national innovation systems (NISs) are rare. This gap is addressed here through a systematic analysis of the different dimensions of NISs. Despite some positive signs, the global differences are growing, that is, the gaps between the best and the weakest performers are widening. Still, whereas on a global scale convergence is far from being the reality, the analysis was able to indicate a group of countries that have been able to catch up to the ‘best in class' countries. Accordingly, there seems to be a clear association between NIS capabilities and the levels of economic development of countries.
Predicting Influential Factors of Secondary Career and Technical Education Teachers' Intent to Stay in the Profession.

Retaining highly qualified career and technical education teachers is important in maintaining and growing quality secondary career and technical education programs. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to identify factors contributing to teacher retention specifically in the area of career and technical education (CTE) and determine predictability of the factors‟ influence on secondary CTE teachers‟ intent to stay in or leave the teaching profession. The career and technical areas of family and consumer sciences, trade and industrial, health occupations, and agriculture in the state of Kansas made up the population for this study. The six factors that data were collected on were educational preparation, teacher commitment, first year teaching experience, skills and abilities, social integration and institutional factors. Participants in this study perceived their educational preparation overall as good. No item was given an overall rating of excellent leaving room for improvement in this area. Overall, participants agreed with their commitment to teaching, items pertaining to the first year teaching experience, and their skills and abilities in the profession. Within the category of social integration, teachers rated that gaining student respect was extremely important. CTE teachers surveyed rated an inner sense of knowing they are doing a good job as extremely important in the construct of institutional factors. All overall ratings of the six factors indicate that teachers tended to agree or rate as important the items under these constructs. Predicting the intent to stay in or leave the profession of teaching was analyzed quantitatively using discriminant analysis. Findings indicate the independent variables of educational preparation, teacher commitment, first year teaching experience, skills and abilities, social integration, institutional factors, and content area did not have an influence in predicting CTE teachers‟ intent to stay in or leave the profession of teaching. This dissertation is approved for recommendation to the Graduate Council.
A novel text detection and localization method based on corner response

Information of text in videos and images plays an important role in semantic analysis. In this paper, we propose an effective method for text detection and localization in noisy background. The algorithm is based on corner response. Compared to non-text regions, there often exist dense edges and corners in text regions. So we can get relatively strong responses from text regions and low responses from non-text regions. These responses provide us useful cues for text detection and localization in images. Then using a simple block based threshold scheme, we get candidate regions for text. These regions are further verified by combining other features such as color and size range of connected component. Finally, Text line is located accurately by the projection of corner response. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our methods.
Applying a flexible microactuator to robotic mechanisms

A flexible microactuator (FMA) driven by an electropneumatic (or electrohydraulic) system has been developed. It has three degrees of freedom-pitch, yaw, and stretch-making it suitable for robotic mechanisms such as fingers, arms, or legs. It is made of fiber-reinforced rubber, and the mechanism is very simple, enabling miniature robots without conventional link mechanisms to be designed. Serially connected FMAs act as a miniature robot manipulator. The kinematics and control algorithm for this type of robot are presented. FMAs combined in parallel act as a multifingered robot hand, with each FMA representing a finger. An algorithm for the cooperative control for such FMAs, the stable region for holding, and its performance have been developed. <<ETX>>