Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An improved NAS-RIF blind image restoration based on higher order statistics

The original NAS-RIF blind image restoration algorithm is proposed by D.Kunder and D.Hatzinakos in 1996. This method can restore image when free of noise, but in the presence of noise it can not make greatly well, usually lead to obviously amplification of noise. So based on the defect of the algorithm, a denoise method using higher order statistic (HOS) is proposed. In this method, the blurred image is divided into blocks and third order cumulants is calculated. While image segmentation technology is applied in the every iteration to find the precise object support region in order to improve the performance of the algorithm. Finally, computer simulations show that the proposed method can restore blurred and noised images with whole black, whole white or whole gray background
The Impact of Debt Policy on Financial Performance of Romanian Listed Companies

The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of listed companies’ indebtedness on their financial performance. Theoretical research was relied on the specialty literature concerning the analysis of the capital structure and financial structure of the company based on calculation of the financial structure ratio and financial leverage. This paper focuses on the analysis of debt policy impact on companies’ financial performance using the financial leverage method. The financial leverage method reflects the influence of debt policy on company’s return on equity, as well as the ways it engages loans to finance operating assets so it can get higher return on equity. The main aim of this paper is to investigate and analyze the determinants of leverage effect and financial structure of companies that are operating in Romanian food industry, namely manufacturing of dairy products. The conclusion that emerges in this study is the importance of choosing and establishing funding sources by an enterprise, according to funding costs, in order to obtain the optimal combination between external financing resources and internal funding.
Biochemical and Metabolic Modeling and Simulation with Modelica

In the drug industry, the later a substance is discharged from the drug development pipeline, the higher the financial cost. In order to reduce the number of lead compounds a number of computerized systems have been suggested, and in most of these systems modeling and simulation of the lead compound’s effects on different metabolic pathways are essential. In these systems, substances that are expected to be harmful or lethal can be removed at an early stage and a reduced number of lead compounds can be chosen for the concluding tests. Given Modelica’s previous success with modeling and simulation of huge and complex systems it is likely that it will also be suitable for modeling, simulation, and visualization of metabolic pathway systems, e.g., those systems used in the drug industry. A Modelica library designed to be used for modeling, simulation, and visualization of metabolic pathways is the specialpurpose library Metabolic, an extension of the abstract Modelica library BioChem.
Large Antenna Analysis of Multi-Cell Full-Duplex Networks

We study a multi-cell multi-user MIMO full-duplex network, where each base station (BS) has multiple antennas with full-duplex capability supporting single-antenna users with either full-duplex or half-duplex radios. We characterize the up- and downlink ergodic achievable rates for the case of linear precoders and receivers. The rate analysis includes practical constraints such as imperfect self- interference cancellation, channel estimation error, training overhead and pilot contamination. We show that the 2X gain of full-duplex over half-duplex system remains in the asymptotic regime where the number of BS antennas grows infinitely large. We numerically evaluate the finite SNR and antenna performance, which reveals that full-duplex networks can use significantly fewer antennas to achieve spectral efficiency gain over the half-duplex counterparts. In addition, the overall full-duplex gains can be achieved under realistic 3GPP multi-cell network settings despite the increased interference introduced in the full-duplex networks.
Secure and Efficient ECC: Radix-16 Scalar Multiplication without Pre-Computation

The use of Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is widely playing a crucial role and is reporting with a great hope of advancing security and performance related benefits for the high end applications. The scalar multiplication algorithms used in ECC are having the scope for gaining the computational efficiency. A smaller key length is the most appropriate to receive the same level of security strength using this technique. Finding the more efficient technique for accelerating the scalar multiplication through the research gap is one of our objectives. The manuscript presentation claims the proposed Radix-16 scalar multiplication without pre-computed operations, which is theoretically computing 6.25 percent faster than the recently proposed Radix-8 scalar conversion technique on software performance basis and 8.33 on hardware basis. This is showing the more appropriateness for reduced instruction set computing with resistance to the simple side channel attacks and safe-error fault attacks. The further extension of proposed work is to find the future applied scope for low memory devices.
DIRECT POSITION KINEMATICS OF A THREE REVOLUTE- PRISMATIC-SPHERICAL PARALLEL MANIPULATOR

In this work, the direct position kinematics of a 3 degree-of-freedom parallel manipulator with three identical limbs, type revolute-prismatic-spherical (RPS), is analyzed. In contrast to the previous studies on this class of manipulators, the revolute joints of the proposed manipulator are actuated rather than the prismatic joints. Direct position kinematics of the manipulator leads to a system of three nonlinear equations in three unknowns that are reduced to a univariate polynomial of degree eight and two quadratic equations in sequence using Sylvester dialytic elimination method. In addition, to show the efficiency of the presented method a numerical example is provided.
Associations between Fine Motor and Mathematics Instruction and Kindergarten Mathematics Achievement

ABSTRACT Research Findings: This study investigates the role of fine motor and mathematics instruction in mathematics achievement in an international sample of kindergarteners from the United States and China. Multilevel modeling was used to assess the interaction between students’ entering skills and classroom time spent on basic math, higher-order math and fine-motor instruction. For American children, the effect of basic math and higher-order math instruction on student achievement depended on entering skills; however, fine motor instruction had negative average effects on student achievement and did not depend on students’ entering skills. Instruction time was not a significant predictor of achievement for Chinese students. Practice or Policy: Though fine motor skills have a robust correlation with mathematics achievement, a causal link has not been established. Our study indicates that time spent in fine motor instruction does not advance mathematics achievement in kindergarten and in fact may weaken mathematics achievement, given the limited time in the instructional day. American teachers in our sample who spent more time in fine-motor instruction tended to spend less time on basic math and higher-order mathematics instruction. Educators should weigh instructional trade-offs carefully and work to tailor instruction to students’ skill levels.
Increasing Robustness of SAT-based Delay Test Generation Using Efficient Dynamic Learning Techniques

Due to the increased speed in modern designs, testing for delay faults has become an important issue in the post-production test of manufactured chips. A high fault coverage is needed to guarantee the correct temporal behavior. Today's ATPG algorithms have difficulties to reach the desired fault coverage due to the high complexity of modern designs. In this paper, we describe how to efficiently integrate the reuse of learned information into state-of-the-art SAT-based ATPG algorithms and, by this, reduce the number of unclassified faults significantly. For further reduction, a post-classification phase is presented. Experimental results for ATPG for delay faults on large industrial circuits show the robustness and feasibility of the approach.
Secure and easy-to-use registration of mobile and stationary devices to wireless ad-hoc CE networks

This paper describes a solution to the problem of registering mobile and stationary devices to a wireless ad-hoc network of consumer electronics (CE) devices in a secure and easy-to-use way. Here, secure means firstly, that the devices to be registered and the networks these devices shall be registered with are the ones that the user specified. Secondly, that no masking or man-in-the-middle attacks are possible. In addition, easy-to-use means that the registration does not require complex user actions like typing in keys, that the probability of an unintended registration is low, and that the registration can take place on every CE device itself, i.e. without the need for additional PDAs or PCs. This is achieved by a) an intuitive user interface where the user identifies devices audio-visually and b) by a protocol that ensures that only one registration instance at a time is executed in some environment.
A Framework for the Design of Distributed Databases

This work presents a framework to handle the class fragmentation problem during the design of distributed object databases. The framework works in the conceptual level, and thus uses the object data model to capture the application semantics represented by the user. The proposed framework integrates three modules. The heuristic module defines a set of heuristics to drive the fragmentation of object databases and incorporates them in a methodology that includes an analysis algorithm, horizontal and vertical class fragmentation algorithms. The theory revision module automatically improves the analysis algorithm through the use of an artificial intelligence technique named theory revision, using fragmentation schemas with previously known performance presented as examples. Finally, the branchand-bound module uses optimization techniques to perform an intelligent search for an optimal fragmentation schema through a larger space of hypotheses when compared to the space of hypotheses covered by the heuristic approach.
Representing spatial information for limb movement: role of area 5 in the monkey.

How is spatial information for limb movement encoded in the brain? Computational and psychophysical studies suggest that beginning hand position, via-points, and target are specified relative to the body to afford a comparison between the sensory (e.g., kinesthetic) reafferences and the commands that generate limb movement. Here we propose that the superior parietal lobule (Brodmann area 5) might represent a substrate for a body-centered positional code. Monkeys made arm movements in different parts of 3D space in a reaction-time task. We found that the activity of area 5 neurons can be related to either the starting point, or the final point, or combinations of the two. Neural activity is monotonically tuned in a body-centered frame of reference, whose coordinates define the azimuth, elevation, and distance of the hand. Each spatial coordinate tends to be encoded in a different subpopulation of neurons. This parcellation could be a neural correlate of the psychophysical observation that these spatial parameters are processed in parallel and largely independent of each other in man.
Design and evaluation of reliability-oriented task re-mapping in MPSoCs using time-series analysis of intermittent faults

A large number of hardware faults are being caused by an increasing number of manufacturing defects and physical interactions during operation. This poses major challenges for the design and testing of modem Multiprocessor System-on-Chips (MPSoCs). Intermittent faults constitute a major part of hardware faults and their fault rates can be used as an indicator of the wear-out in a Processing Element (PE). We propose a run-time task re-mapping method that uses this information to improve the useful lifetime of MPSoCs. We also propose a scenario-aware system-level fault injection technique for intermittent faults to evaluate system-level design techniques in MPSoCs. Our performance results conclusively show that our strategy significantly scales on reliability metrics with respect to number of PEs. Specifically, we show that our method can achieve an increase in lifetime of up to 16% and tolerate up to 30% more faults than state-of-the-art techniques.
Cloud Computing Issues at Design and Implementation Levels - A Survey

--------------------------------------------------------------------- ABSTRACT ------------------------------------------------------------- Cloud Computing is an emerging paradigm in the advanced network arena that facilitates the users to access shared computing resources through internet-on-demand. Cloud Computing has been widely used since it brings tremendous improvements in business. Cloud users are expected to grow exponentially in the future. In order to meet the demands of future cloud users, a full-fledged survey analyzing the various issues is the need of the hour. The different classifications presently available do not present the issues at micro levels. Amongst the various issues, the ones at design and implementation levels are of utmost importance since they directly affect the performance of the applications. Hence the cloud issues at those levels are presented in this paper from the available literature. This paper also attempts to outline a few possible solutions for some of the issues.
Exploration of Known and Unknown Early Symptoms of Cervical Cancer and Development of a Symptom Spectrum - Outline of a Data and Text Mining Based Approach

This position paper delineates the structure of some experi- ments to detect early symptoms of cervical cancer. We are using a large corpora of electronic patient records texts in Swedish from Karolinska University Hospital from the years 2009-2010, where we extracted in total 1,660 patient records with the ICD-10 diagnosis code C53 for cer- vical cancer. We used a Named Entity Recogniser called Clinical Entity Finder to detect the diagnosis and symptoms expressed in these clinical texts containing in total 2,988,118 words. We found 28,218 symptoms and diagnoses on these 1,660 patients. We present some initial findings, and discuss them and propose a set of experiments to find possible early symptoms and/or a spectrum of early symptoms of cervical cancer.
Use relative weight to improve the kNN for unbalanced text category

The technology of text category is widely used in natural language processing. As one of best text category algorithms, kNN is very popular used in many applications. Traditional kNN assumes that the distribution of training data is even, however, it is not the case for many situations. When we used kNN in our Topic Detection and Tracking (TDT) system, it did not perform well due to the bias of training data set. To overcome the obstacle caused by data bias, this paper proposes an approach which uses relative weight to adjust the weight of kNN (RWKNN). When evaluated on the data of TDT2 and TDT3 Chinese corpus, RWKNN proves to be robust on unbalanced data and yields better performance than the traditional kNN.
Circuit Properties Generating Gamma Oscillations in the Mammalian Olfactory Bulb Laboratory of Perception and Memory And

Word counts: 279 words in the abstract and 6 648 words in the text. ABSTRACT The study of the neural basis of olfaction is important both for understanding the sense of smell and for understanding the mechanisms of neural computation. In the olfactory bulb (OB), the spatial patterning of both sensory inputs and synaptic interactions is crucial for processing odor information, although this patterning alone is not sufficient. Recent studies have suggested that representations of odor may already be distributed and dynamic in the first olfactory relay. The growing evidence demonstrating a functional role for the temporal structure of bulbar neuronal activity supports this assumption. However, the detailed mechanisms underlying this temporal structure have never been thoroughly studied. Our study focused on gamma (40-100 Hz) network oscillations in the mammalian OB, which is a form of temporal patterning in bulbar activity elicited by olfactory stimuli. We used computational modeling combined with electrophysiological recordings to investigate the basic synaptic organization necessary and sufficient to generate sustained gamma rhythms. We found that features of gamma oscillations obtained in vitro were identical to those of a model based on lateral inhibition as the coupling modality (i.e., low irregular firing rate and high oscillation stability). In contrast, they differed substantially from those of a model based on lateral excitatory coupling (i.e., high regular firing rate and instable oscillations). Therefore, we could precisely tune the oscillation frequency by changing the kinetics of inhibitory events supporting the lateral inhibition. Moreover, gradually decreasing GABAergic synaptic transmission decreased the degree of relay neuron synchronization in response to sensory inputs, both theoretically and experimentally. Thus, we have shown that lateral inhibition provides a mechanism by which the dynamic processing of odor information might be finely tuned within the OB circuit.
Ulcus terebrans: an unusual cause of paraparesis

Objective: To describe the occurrence of myasthenia gravis in the Baltic area. Methods: Data were obtained from hospital files recorded during the period 1942 to 1996 from neurologists and the patient organisation. Survival data were checked with the Estonian Citizenship and Migration Board. Prevalence was determined on 1 January 1997. A questionnaire on the course of myasthenia gravis was sent to all the prevalent patients. Results: The size of the population surveyed was 1 462 130. The average annual incidence from 1970 to 1996 was 4.0 per million (women, 5.2; men, 2.6). The point prevalence was 99 per million (women, 133; men 59). The incidence in the younger age group (<50 years) was 3.4 per million (women, 4.8; men, 1.9) and in the older age group (⩾50 years), 5.5 (women, 5.9; men, 4.9). The prevalence ratio was twofold higher in the older age group (p<0.0001)—for men (p = 0.034) as well as for women (p<0.001). Conclusions: Prevalence and incidence values of myasthenia gravis from Estonia are similar to those reported in most studies from Europe and north America. However, there seems to be a higher frequency in the elderly (⩾50 years) in Estonia.
An energy-efficient Service Discovery protocol for the IoT based on a multi-tier WSN architecture

The Internet of Things is expected to foster billions of heterogeneous sensors and actuators that support a wide range of applications. Maximizing the utilization of these sensors is hinged upon the ability to discover their capabilities (ex: measured attributes, location, accuracy, etc.). This process is known as Service Discovery (SD), and can have a local scope (SD within a bounded area), or a global scope. Traditionally, SD is performed using a dedicated gateway that is always active and connected to the Internet. This gateway stores the attributes of sensors within its area. However, this approach may be too expensive in the presence of billions of sensors. In this paper, a novel protocol for local SD is proposed that eliminates the need for a dedicated gateway. The protocol utilizes a multi-tier network architecture in order to achieve two main objectives: energy efficiency and high success rate in satisfying service requests. Energy efficiency is achieved by limiting the number of hops that an SD request has to traverse before being satisfied, while a high success rate is guaranteed using a hierarchical structure of Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs), where information regarding sensor capabilities is stored. Extensive computer simulations are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol in comparison to single level architectures and gateway-based solutions. The results show that the proposed protocol achieves energy efficiency without sacrificing success rate of serving requests.
An Efficient CORDIC-Based Vector Interpolator in Power-Aware 3-D Graphics Rendering

High performance architectures for the data intensive and latency restrained applications can be achieved by maximizing both parallelism and pipelining. In this paper, the CORDIC based hardware primitives of 3-D rotation with high throughput 3-D vector interpolation are presented. The proposed architecture for 3-D vector interpolator, which is based on the redundant CORDIC arithmetic, has been implemented by VLSI.
Dominant speech enhancement based on SNR-adaptive soft mask filtering

In this paper, we present a SNR-adaptive soft mask filter for multi-channel noisy speech enhancement. Incorporating frame-by-frame spectral magnitude ratios into the time-frequency(T-F) mask filter framework, the adaptive filter can be designed robust to changing environments. Experimental results show that the proposed adaptive mask filter can effectively suppress non-stationary noise components even in a closely-spaced microphone pair. Moreover, the soft mask compressed with sigmoidal nonlinearity can reduce musical noises so that improved PESQ values are obtained.
Volatility Long Memory on Option Valuation: Component Garch versus Fractionally Integrated GARCH

Volatility long memory is a stylized fact that has been documented for a long time. Existing literature have two ways to model volatility long memory: component volatility models and fractionally integrated volatility models. This paper develops a new fractionally integrated GARCH model, and investigates its performance by using the Standard and Poor’s 500 index returns and cross-sectional European option data. The fractionally integrated GARCH model significantly outperforms the simple GARCH(1, 1) model by generating 37% less option pricing errors. With stronger volatility persistence, it also dominates a component volatility model, who has enjoyed a reputation for its outstanding option pricing performance, by generating 15% less option pricing errors. We also confirm the fractionally integrated GARCH model’s robustness with the latest option prices. This paper indicates that capturing volatility persistence represents a very promising direction for future study.
Nash-equilibria and N-fold integer programming

Inspired by a paper of R. W. Rosenthal, we investigate generalized Nash-equilibria of integer programming games. We show that generalized Nash-equilibria always exist and are related to an optimal solution of a so-called N-fold integer program. This link allows us to establish some polynomial time complexity results about solving this optimization problem and its inverse counter-part.