Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DOME II: A Parallelized BTF Acquisition System

Bidirectional Texture Functions (BTFs) provide a realistic depiction of the appearance of many real-world materials as they contain the spatially varying light scattering behavior of the material surface. Since editing of existing BTF data is still in its early stages, materials have to be measured from real-world samples. In contrast to the related Spatially Varying BRDFs (SVBRDFs), the reflectance information encoded in a BTF also includes non-local scattering effects and therefore does not obey energy conservation or reciprocity. While this higher degree of freedom also contributes to an increased realism, it inadvertently calls for an extensive measurement of reflectance samples, as many regularization approaches from BRDF measurement do not apply. In this paper, we present an automated, parallelized, robust, fast and transportable setup for the acquisition of BTFs from flat samples as well as 3D objects using camera and light arrays: the DOME II. In contrast to previous camera array approaches, the present setup, which is comprised of high-quality industry grade components, overcomes several issues regarding stability, reliability and precision. It achieves a well balanced state-of-the-art acquisition performance in terms of speed and quality at reasonable costs.
A representative and accurate characterization of inter-contact times in mobile opportunistic networks

A representative characterisation of inter-contact times between nodes is essential for the performance evaluation of mobile networks. The most common characterization of inter-contact times is based on the study of the aggregate distribution of contacts between individual pairs of nodes. The problem with this aggregate distribution is that it is not always representative of the individual pair distributions, especially in the short term and when the number of nodes in the network is high. Thus, deriving results from this characterisation, can lead to inaccurate performance evaluations results. In this paper, we propose and evaluate two new methods for characterising the inter-contact times distribution in mobile networks. We prove that these characterizations have a higher representativeness, thereby improving the accuracy of the derived performance results. For evaluating the precision of the different characterizations we use the epidemic routing protocol, which has an analytical performance expression that is based on a contact rate lambda. We derive from each of the characterizations the corresponding lambda values. Then, we compare the results obtained using the analytical expression with simulation results using both synthetic and real contact traces. It is shown that the new characterization methods are very accurate, even for reduced contact traces and high number of nodes.
Embodiment, simulation and meaning

Approaches to meaning differ in ways as fundamental as the questions they aim to answer. The theoretical outlook described in this chapter, the embodied simulation approach, belongs to the class of perspectives that ask how meaning operates in real time in the brain, mind, and body of language users. Clearly, some approaches to meaning are better suited to this question than others. Mechanistic models that bridge levels of analysis—from the brain and its computations to the functions and behaviours they support—and that recruit the convergent tools of empirical cognitive science are particularly well equipped. The embodied simulation approach is an example of this type of approach. The fundamental idea underlying the embodied simulation hypothesis is a remarkably old one. It’s the notion that language users construct mental experience of what it would be like to perceive or interact with objects and events that are described in language. Carl Wernicke described the basic premise as well as anyone has since (and with remarkably little modern credit, as Gage and Hickok (2005) point out). Wernicke wrote, in 1874:
The program dependence graph and vectorization

Previous attempts at vectorizing programs written in a sequential high level language focused on converting control dependences to data dependences using a mechanism known as IF-conversion. After IF-conversion vector optimizations are performed on a data dependence graph. However, IF-conversion is an irrevocable process which can introduce high run-time overhead if the input program is not amenable to vectorization. This paper uses a program dependence graph as the intermediate representation for a vectorizing compiler. A program dependence graph explicitly represents both control and data dependences, allowing guard values to be generated for vectorized statements. Techniques have been developed to perform code motion on vectorization candidates, to validly eliminate all unnecessary control and data dependence cycles, and to regenerate the newly vectorized program consistent with a topological ordering based on the control and data dependences.
The new Soviet incentive model

Suppose y is a "performance indicator" for an enterprise. As examples, y might stand for output, profits, cost savings, or factor productivity. With standard piecework reward systems the manager of an enterprise will try to convince his superiors that y is likely to be small, thereby entitling him to a lower target which is easier to fulfill. A new reform in the Soviet economy is aimed at stimulating more ambitious plans by making the bonus size depend on the plan target as well as the degree to which it has been fulfilled. This novel incentive scheme is modelled in the present paper and its basic properties are analyzed. Some applications and extensions are proposed.
Information Economics: Linking Business Performance to Information Technology

I. LINKING BUSINESS PERFORMANCE AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. 1. Introduction to Information Economics. 2. Challenges and Problems. 3. Information Value in the Business Domain. 4. Information Value and the Technology Domain. 5. Information Economics and Organizational Planning. 6. Costs, Benefits, and Value. 7. Linking Business and Information Technology. II. ELEMENTS OF INFORMATION ECONOMICS. 8. Cost-Benefit Analysis. 9. Information Economic Tools. 10. Value Linking and Value Acceleration. 11. Value Restructuring. 12. Innovation. 13. Business Domain Values and Risks. 14. Technology Domain Values and Risks. III. APPLYING INFORMATION ECONOMICS. 15. The Basis for Value. 16. The Corporate Decision Process. 17. Applying Information Economics in a Corporate Setting. 18. Summing Up Information Economics. APPENDICES. A. Glossary of Accounting Terms. B. Generation of Monthly Cash Flows. C. Benefits, Costs, and Risks. D. Cost Curves for Data-Managed Systems. E. Conversion of Scores to Project-Weighted Values. References. Index.
Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer Assay for High-Throughput Screening of ADAMTS1 Inhibitors

A disintegrin and metalloprotease with thrombospondin type I motifs-1 (ADAMTS1) plays a crucial role in inflammatory joint diseases and its inhibitors are potential candidates for anti-arthritis drugs. For the purposes of drug discovery, we reported the development and validation of fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) assay for high-throughput screening (HTS) of the ADAMTS1 inhibitors. A FRET substrate was designed for a quantitative assay of ADAMTS1 activity and enzyme kinetics studies. The assay was developed into a 50-µL, 384-well assay format for high throughput screening of ADAMTS1 inhibitors with an overall Z’ factor of 0.89. ADAMTS1 inhibitors were screened against a diverse library of 40,960 total compounds with the established HTS system. Four structurally related hits, naturally occurring compounds, kuwanon P, kuwanon X, albafuran C and mulberrofuran J, extracted from the Chinese herb Morus alba L. , were identified for further investigation. The results suggest that this FRET assay is an excellent tool, not only for measurement of ADAMTS1 activity but also for discovery of novel ADAMTS1 inhibitors with HTS.
Experimental Study of Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 Handover Performance

In this paper the optimized handover mechanisms including the dual-interfaces hard handover and network-layer soft-handover are proposed to improve the handover performance when adopting the hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) protocol. A HMIPv6 test-bed based on Linux is set up and a series of experimental studies on network-layer handover are performed. From the test results we can see that the soft-handoff algorithm can provide the seamless and smooth user experience in the network overlapped regions, because the packet loss rate, delay and jitter are obviously improved due to the redundant packets transmission over multiple wireless links simultaneously.
Fast Voronoi Diagrams and Offsets on Triangulated Surfaces

Abstract : We apply the Fast Marching Method on triangulated domains to efficiently compute Voronoi diagrams and offset curves on triangulated manifolds. The computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is optimal, O(M log M), where M is the number of vertices. The algorithm also applies to weighted domains in which a different cost is assigned to each surface point.
RESULTS OF WATER VAPOUR RADIOMETRY TESTS AT THE VLA

We report on the results of one year of tests of a three-channel water vapour radiometer (WVR) on two VLA antennas. The output from one of the circularly-polarized feeds of a standard VLA 22-GHz receiver is split on exiting the dewar; one signal path leads to a temperature-stabilized plate on which the WVR detection system is mounted, the other leads to the normal astronomical system electronics. We measure the correlation between fluctuations in astronomical phase (assumed to be dominated by the troposphere), , and the WVR difference output from the two antennas, on various timescales. We find that in all cases applying a correction derived from the WVR improves the rms phase, for observing frequencies ranging from 8 GHz to 43 GHz. The improvement is most dramatic when the sky is clear and the tropospheric phase fluctuations are large. When there are clouds present the WVR output is contaminated by the fluctuations in system temperature caused by liquid water, and the correlation between and the WVR output is not as good. However, even in this case the RMS phase is still improved by applying a correction derived from the correlation.
ADAPTIVE CHANNEL EQUALIZER FOR WIRELESS COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

The Data rates and spectrum efficiency of Wireless Mobile Communication have been significantly improved over the last decade or so. Recently, the advanced systems such as 3GPP LTE and terrestrial digital TV broadcasting have been sophisticatedly developed using OFDM and CDMA technology. In general, most mobile communication systems transmit bits of information in the radio space to receiver. The radio channels in mobile radio systems are usually multipath fading channels, which cause inter symbol interference (ISI) in the received signal. To remove ISI from the signal there is a need of strong equalizer which required the knowledge on the channel impulse response. (LMS) Least Mean Square, (RLS) Recursive Least squares and (PSO) Particle swarm optimization algorithms are used to implement the adaptive channel equalizer. The results are measured in terms of mean square error (MSE) and bit error rate (BER) Vs the number of iterations.
Violent gaming and player aggression: Exploring the effects of socio-psychological and technology influences

Given the high levels of violence in South Africa, there is widespread concern among the public that video game violence may be increasing the risk of aggression in players and consequently leading to violence. Employing the General Aggression Model (GAM), this study set out to examine the influence of socio-psychological factors such as excessive gaming and pathological gaming, and technology factors such as interactive richness on player aggression. The research model was tested using survey data collected from 101 university students. Regression analysis indicates that only pathological gaming explains a small variance in player aggression. Contrary to prior studies that make strong claims that violent video game playing leads to aggressive behaviour, these factors made only a negligible contribution to predicting player aggression in this study. Future research should focus on testing multiple pathways that culminates into player aggression. Violent gaming technologies may not be influencing aggressive behaviour as much as stimulating pre-aggressive individuals already predisposed by other socio-psychological factors. Future research should test the above factors with more contextual based socio-psychological factors, within the individual aggressor's family and close-knit social environment. Intervention and prevention programs may be better served by insights into the aggressor's personal, family, and social context rather than technology related behaviours.
Role-based identity recognition for telecasts

Semantic queries involving image understanding aspects require the exploitation of multiple clues, namely the (inter-)relations between objects and events across multiple images, the situational context, and the application context. A prominent example for such queries is the identification of individuals in video sequences. Straightforward face recognition approaches require a model of the persons in question and tend to fail in ill conditioned environments. Therefore, an alternative approach is to involve contextual conditions of observations in order to determine the role a person plays in the current context. Due to the strong relation between roles, persons and their identities, knowing either often allows inferring about the other. This paper presents a system that implements this approach: First, robust face detection localizes the actors in the video. By clustering similar face instances the relative frequency of their appearance within a sequence is determined. In combination with a coarse textual annotation manually created by the broadcast station's archivist the roles and consequently the identities can be assigned and labeled in the video. Starting with unambiguous assignments and cascading appropriately most of the persons can be identified and labeled successfully. The feasibility and performance of the role-based person identification is demonstrated on basis of several programs of a popular German TV show, which consists of various elements like interview scenes, games and musical show acts.
GASOLINE CONSUMPTION AND CITIES - A COMPARISON OF U.S. CITIES WITH A GLOBAL SURVEY AND SOME IMPLICATIONS

Gasoline consumption per capita in ten large US cities is found to vary by up to 40 per cent, due primarily to land use and transport planning factors, rather than price or income variations. The same patterns, though more extreme, are seen in a global sample of thirty two cities where average gasoline consumption in US cities was nearly twice as much as in Australian cities, four times higher than european cities and ten times as much as asian cities. Allowing for gasoline price, income and vehicle efficiency explains only half of these differences. Physical planning and transport planning policies are suggested for reducing gasoline consumption (a).
User Authentication Using Combination of Behavioral Biometrics over the Touchpad Acting Like Touch Screen of Mobile Device

Now mobile devices are developed to serve various functions, storing the sensitive information. In order to protect those information and mobile systems from unauthorized users, the authentication system must be installed unavoidably. Additionally, the development of the mobile system is moving forward to the touch screen system for user friendly and quick access mechanism. In this paper, we proposed behavioral manners of users over the touchpad acting like touch screen that is able to detect the finger pressure. These behaviors are keystroke dynamics and the finger pressure. The finding has shown that, the finger pressure gives the discriminative information more than keystroke dynamics with the k-NN analytical method. Moreover, using only the finger pressure produces high accuracy rate of 99%.
An Analysis of Data Access Patterns in Integer Benchmarks

We presentmemoryreferencedatafor theSpecInt95benchmarksthatcanbeusedin evaluatingthe potentialfor prefetchingspatiallycorrelateddata. In contrastwith previouswork, thedatapresentedarefor completeprogramrunsandtraceall executedinstructions.Thedata areclassifiedaccordingto theiraccesspatternsandweshow how typesof accesspatternsarise from the executedbenchmarkcode. Finally, we examinethe accurac y of several published beliefsconcerningmemoryaccesspatterns.Onecommonbelief is that only scientificcode displayssufficiently “regular” behavior for techniques uchasprefetchingto beof benefit.Our conclusionis thatthereis significantamountof “regular” behavior evenin non-scientificcode.
Measuring Similarity Between Mobility Models and Real World Motion Trajectories

Various mobility models have been proposed to represent the motion behaviour of mobile nodes in the real world. Selection of the most similar mobility model to a given real world environment is a challenging issue which has a significant impact on the quality of performance evaluation of different network protocols. In this paper we propose a methodology for measurement of similarity between mobility models used in mobile networks simulation and real world mobility scenarios with different transportation modes. We explain our mobility metrics we have used for analysis of motion behavior of mobile nodes and a pre-processing method which makes our trajectories suitable for extraction and calculation of these metrics considering shape of the road networks and GPS noise. Then we use a feature selection method to find the most discriminative features which are able to distinguish between trajectories with different transportation modes using a supervised learning and feature ranking method. Subsequently, using our selected feature space we perform Fuzzy C-means Clustering to find the degree of similarity between each of our mobility models and real world trajectories with different transportation modes. Our methodology can be used to select the most similar mobility model suitable for simulation of mobile network protocols (such as DTN and MANETs protocols) in a particular real world area.
Habitat fragmentation and landscape change

This chapter begins by summarizing the conceptual approaches used to understand conservation in fragmented landscapes. We then examine the biophysical aspects of landscape change, and how such change affects species and communities, posing two main questions: (i) what are the implications for the patterns of occurrence of species and communities? ; and (ii) how does landscape change affect processes that influence the distribution and viability of species and communities. The chapter concludes by identifying the kinds of actions that will enhance the conservation of biota in fragmented landscapes.
The Information Society as a Complex System

We are all very conscious of living through a revolution — one in which the industrial society is being superseded by the information society. Every day brings new evidence of the breakneck pace of the changes that are currently underway. But while broad awareness may be unavoidable, understanding is not so easy. Both the p ace of the revolution and its multi-faceted nature make it difficult to gain a clear perspective. But here the new science of complexity can perhaps help. It provides a coherent theory that is directly applicable to the emerging society, potentially providing new insights and new understanding. This paper examines several facets of the current revolution from a complexity perspective, and suggests that the relationship between the emerging science and the emerging society will be a rich one.
Robust stability for uncertain switched systems with interval time-varying delay

This paper addresses the design of switching rule for robust stability of a class of uncertain switched system with delay. The system to be considered is autonomous and the state delay is time-varying. Using Lyapunov functional approach, restriction on the derivative of time-delay function is not required to design switching rule for the robust stability of switched systems with time-varying delays. The delay-dependent stability conditions are presented in terms of the solution of LMIs which can be solved by various available algorithms.
Massive data streams in graph theory and computational geometry

Streaming is an important paradigm for handling data sets that are too large to fit in main memory. In the streaming computational model, algorithms are restricted to using much less space than they would need to store the input. The massive data set is accessed in a sequential fashion and, therefore, can be viewed as a stream of data elements. The order of the data elements in the stream is not controlled by the algorithm. There are three important resources considered in the streaming model: the size of the workspace, the number of passes that the algorithm makes over the stream, and the time to process each data element in the stream. In this thesis, we study computational-geometry problems and graph problems in the streaming model. We design algorithms for computing diameter in the streaming and the sliding-window models and prove some corresponding lower bounds. The sliding-window model is a variation of the streaming model in which only more recent data elements in the stream are considered. Previously, work in the streaming model has focused on algorithms that use polylog space. For graph problems, this restriction is too strong. We investigate the computational power of the model with different space restrictions. For a graph of n vertices, our lower bounds show that not many interesting computations can be done when the space restriction is o(n). We also show that, by using n · polylog(n ) space, one can design algorithms that provide approximations to some basic problems, e.g., the all-pairs, shortest-path distance problem. We present two main algorithms that approximate these distances. We also exhibit tradeoffs between the accuracy of the results and the resources used by the algorithms.