Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Real-time appearance-based gaze tracking

Gaze tracking technology is widely used in Human Computer Interaction applications such as in interfaces for assisting people with disabilities and for driver attention monitoring. However, commercially available gaze trackers are expensive and their performance deteriorates if the user is not positioned in front of the camera and facing it. Also, head motion or being far from the device degrades their accuracy. This thesis focuses on the development of real-time time appearance based gaze tracking algorithms using low cost devices, such as a webcam or Kinect. The proposed algorithms are developed by considering accuracy, robustness to head pose variation and the ability to generalise to different persons. In order to deal with head pose variation, we propose to estimate the head pose and then compensate for the appearance change and the bias to a gaze estimator that it introduces. Head pose is estimated by a novel method that utilizes tensor-based regressors at the leaf nodes of a random forest. For a baseline gaze estimator we use an SVM-based appearance-based regressor. For compensating the appearance variation introduced by the head pose, we use a geometric model, and for compensating for the bias we use a regression function that has been trained on a training set. Our methods are evaluated on publicly available datasets.
A Point Cloud Alignment Algorithm Based on Stereo Vision Using Random Pattern Projection

This paper proposes a point cloud alignment algorithm based on stereo vision using Random Pattern Projection (RPP). In the application of stereo vision, it is rather difficult to find correspondences between stereo images of texture-less objects. To overcome this issue, RPP is used to enhance the object’s features, thus increasing the accuracy of the identified correspondences of the stereo images. In the 3D alignment algorithm, the down sample technique is used to filter out the outliers of the point cloud data to improve system efficiency. Furthermore, the extracted features of the down sample point cloud data were applied in the matching process. Finally, the object’s pose was estimated by the alignment algorithm based on object features. In experiments, the maximum error and standard deviation of rotation are respectively about 0.031°and 0.199°, while the maximum error and standard deviation of translation are respectively about 0.565 mm and 0.902 mm . The execution time for pose estimation is about 230ms.
Using statistical learning theory for modeling the uncertainty in business and engineering systems: a qualitative introduction

Presents a qualitative introduction and justification of the application of statistical learning theory to uncertainty modeling in business and engineering systems. Using simple mathematical tools and metaphorical images, the main variables that govern the uncertainty in a physical system are defined. A general expression of uncertainty models is then obtained. The structure of this expression is the same as that of the uncertainty models that have been developed by rigorously applying the results of statistical learning theory.
A competitive Neyman-Pearson approach to universal hypothesis testing with applications

A new generalization of the Neyman-Pearson approach to the problem of composite hypothesis testing is proposed. The resulting universal test is shown to be efficient in the sense of achieving exponential decay of both types of error for all values of unknown parameters, whenever such an efficient universal test exists. The best universally achievable error exponents are identified and conditions for the existence of efficient universal tests are established.
Route packets, not wires: on-chip interconnection networks

Using on-chip interconnection networks in place of ad-hoc global wiring structures the top level wires on a chip and facilitates modular design. With this approach, system modules (processors, memories, peripherals, etc.) communicate by sending packets to one another over the network. The structured network wiring gives well-controlled electrical parameters that eliminate timing iterations and enable the use of high-performance circuits to reduce latency and increase bandwidth. The area overhead required to implement an on-chip network is modest, we estimate 6.6%. This paper introduces the concept of on-chip networks, sketches a simple network, and discusses some challenges in the architecture and design of these networks.
Characterization and tracking control of a nonlinear electrohydraulic valve-cylinder system

It is well known that simple proportional, integral, and derivative control yields poor tracking performance due to the friction- and flow-related nonlinearities in electrohydraulic servo-systems. Nonlinear effects are more significant in proportional valve having deadband and non-matched ports with potential application in systems with complex ground friction in off-road vehicles or complex inertia loads in simulators meant for pilot training. A feedforward-based controller has been designed here by performing a number of characterization experiments for achieving good tracking performance overcoming severe nonlinearities. An algebraic model of friction has been developed for including hysteresis beyond the static friction zone in a double-rod piston-cylinder arrangement. A proportional valve with non-matched ports and large deadband has been characterized in terms of command signal to flow gains for each metered port and a leakage coefficient. Also, a dynamic model for the valve with embedded control has been constructed. All these models have been integrated together to predict the piston-motion dynamics. A simple theoretical analysis with a fixed command excitation revealed that following the initial transients a sustained oscillation over a constant mean piston velocity could exist for low pump pressure and valve damping due to the flow-motion coupling. The bandwidth and damping coefficient of the valve flow have been estimated through a comparison between the predicted and experimentally measured piston displacement variation with time. Besides evaluating the feedforward using the algebraic friction model along with assuming incompressible flow and negligible valve leakage, the predictions of the complete model were used to ascertain the proportional, integral, and derivative gains to be implemented in real-time control. Up to 0.5 Hz sinusoidal excitation, the proposed control revealed excellent tracking performance. Controls with only proportional, integral, and derivative and proportional, integral, and derivative together with feedforward exhibited noticeable phase shifts, respectively, from frequencies 0.0625 Hz and 0.6 Hz. Hence, the proposed controller can be useful in low-cost, low-power, precision applications up to 0.5 Hz input excitations.
Input filter design for sliding mode controlled matrix converters

This paper presents the input filter design for sliding mode controlled matrix converters. A global sliding mode control approach is considered for the converter with input filter to guarantee near unity input power factor operation and voltage or output current control. The sliding surfaces are directly obtained from the global system equations (matrix converter and input filter) written in the phase canonical form. The association of these sliding surfaces with the state-space vectors technique allows the choice of the most appropriate switching strategy. The proposed new input filter design considers the maximum allowed displacement factor introduced by the filter, as well as the ripple present at the capacitor voltages. Simulation results are obtained and discussed.
A profile-based energy-efficient intra-task voltage scheduling algorithm for hard real-time applications

Intra-task voltage scheduling (IntraVS), which adjusts the supply voltage within an individual task boundary, is an effective technique for developing low-power applications. In this paper, we propose a novel intra-task voltage scheduling algorithm for hard real-time applications based on average-case execution information. Unlike the original IntraVS algorithm where voltage scaling decisions are based on the worst-case execution cycles, the proposed algorithm improves the energy efficiency by controlling the execution speed based on average-case execution cycles while still meeting the real-time constraints. The experimental results using an MPEG-4 decoder program show that the proposed algorithm reduces the energy consumption by up to 34% over the original IntraVS algorithm.
Scheduling and allocation of single-chip multiprocessors for multimedia

Software synthesis is an increasingly important problem in the design of digital signal processing systems, since multimedia systems in particular are increasingly implemented using a combination of programmable and hardwired processing elements. This paper describes new algorithms for system-level software synthesis, namely the scheduling and allocation of a set of tasks executing on a heterogeneous multiprocessor. The algorithm is hierarchical: it takes advantage of the hierarchical structure of the system's task graph to hierarchically allocate and schedule processes on the multiprocessor to meet the hard real-time constraints on the tasks. Our algorithm takes into account both the on-chip and off-chip data communications and the behaviors of data cache memories. It can significantly improve task schedulability by carefully scheduling processes and data transfers to minimize data cache misses and off-chip data accesses.
Real time simulation and visualization of NC milling processes for inhomogeneous materials on low-end graphics hardware

Simulation and visualization of NC milling processes has become an important step in computer aided manufacturing. The usage of stock materials with specific locally varying properties (such as density, accuracy, color, etc.) is becoming more important with new technologies emerging in the material industry. The authors' approach, using volumetric representation, has been adapted to these needs and copes with inhomogeneous material properties. Taking color as one possible material property, their approach enables the visualization of milled wood or compound materials. Furthermore, their approach has been developed with the usage of low-end graphics hardware in mind. The algorithms have been optimized to ensure interactive update rates even on standard personal computers without hardware graphics acceleration.
An asymptotic analysis of BLAST-like systems

A random matrix model is introduced that probabilistically describes the multi-path propagation between a transmitting and receiving antenna array with a limited number of scatterers for indoor environments. The model allows to analytically calculate signal-to-interference and noise ratios and channel capacities for communication systems that apply, similar to the BLAST (Foschini 1996) proposal, antenna arrays at both ends of the wireless link to boost spectral efficiency.
Intelligent Database Driven Reverse Dictionary

The reverse dictionary identifies a concept/idea/definition to words and phrases used to describe that concept. You can enter a single word, phrase, or a few words to get the correct meanings for that sentence. The proposed concepts similarity is applied using similarity for computing the relevancy between concepts verses and the documents or verses in English collections. Reverse Dictionary (RD) is a non alphabetic order dictionary. We present a set of algorithms and the results of a set of experiments showing the retrieval accuracy of our methods and the runtime response time performance of our implementation. Our experimental results show that our approach can provide significant improvements in performance scale without sacrificing the Quality of the result. Our experiments comparing the quality of our approach to that of currently available reverse dictionaries show that of our approach can provide significantly higher quality over either of the other currently available implementations.
CHARACTERISTICS OF HIGHLY CITED PAPERS

Highly cited articles are very different from ‘ordinary’ cited articles. Typically, they are authored by a large number of scientists, often involving international collaboration. The majority of the papers represent regular journal articles (81%), although review articles (12%) are over-represented compared to the national average. The citation curves of highly cited papers follow a typical pattern of rise and decline. However, different types of citation curves can be identified, reflecting possible differences in the cognitive function of the articles. Highly cited papers typically obtain citations from a large number of different journals and from papers representing both close and remote fields. However, this pattern is not very different from the average distribution for all papers. We discuss how the findings can be explained by introducing a conceptual distinction between quality dynamics and visibility dynamics. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.
A model for Java/CORBA and OODBMS distributed architectures

The Java/CORBA paradigm extends Java distributively and allows one to specify and implement multiplatform distributed object architectures. Such multi-client/server architectures, extended with object database management systems (OODBMS) as the principal persistent service, will become object based architectures (or OAs). The analysis and the use of dedicated techniques is required to specify and implement OAs, forcing us to challenge the current design and development approaches. We introduce a model for such an architecture that is based on a semantic distinction between "functional" objects and "data" objects. Functional objects (FOs) are Java/CORBA (client) server distributed objects with well defined (standard) IDL interfaces, data objects (DOs) are FOs "arguments/results" objects persistently stored in the OODBMS. The model relies on constructing a DO-graph, that is used for simple "dataflow" centralized calling mechanism for FOs, and that is induced by correct typed composition of FOs. An example of concrete realization of such a model is the implementation of the Text Retrieval and Enrichment for Vital Information (TREVI) distributed system for the analysis and categorization of natural language English texts (ESPRIT Project EP23311).
Variable rate trellis source encoding

We are concerned with how to efficiently compress an ergodic source. One approach is to design lossy compression algorithms from lossless data compression algorithms. One of these algorithms, the fixed slope lossy algorithm is discussed. We select the kth order adaptive arithmetic coding algorithm with a codeword length function L/sub k/(u/sup n/).
Efficient Schemes for Broadcasting Popular Videos TITLE2

We provide a formal framework for studying broadcasting schemes and design a family of schemes for broadcasting popular videos, called {\it Greedy Disk-conserving Broadcasting} (GDB) scheme. We analyze the resource requirements for GDB, i.e., the number of server broadcast channels, the client storage space, and the client I/O bandwidth required by GDB. The analysis shows that GDB exhibits a tradeoff between any two of the three resources. We compare our scheme with a recently proposed broadcasting scheme, {\it Skyscraper Broadcasting} (SB). With GDB, we can reduce the client storage space by as much as 50\% or the number of server channels by as much as 30\% at the cost of small additional client I/O bandwidth. If we require the client I/O bandwidth of GDB to be identical to that of SB, GDB needs only 70\% of the client storage space required by SB or one less server channel than SB does. In addition, we show that with small client I/O bandwidth, the resource requirement of GDB is close to the minimum achievable by {\it any} disk-conserving broadcasting scheme.
Rate distortion optimized adaptive multiscale vector quantization

We present a new rate-distortion optimized algorithm for adaptive vector quantization. It is based on approximate matching of recurrent patterns. In our approach, the input vector is segmented in variable-sized blocks. The blocks are encoded using a set of codebooks, one for each block size. The codebooks are updated while the data is encoded, with no need for any side information. Also, no prior training is required. We use dynamic programming. techniques to optimize the segmentation tree. It performs well for a wide class of sources, with very good results for highly nonstationary sources, like compound documents.
EVALUATE THE RELIABILITY OF WEB SERVICE MESSAGE EXCHANGE USING AGENTS IN SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE

Web Service is a very powerful tool that has greatly enhanced the efficiency of communication among businesses. Message exchange in Web services can be inherently unreliable. To address this challenge, in this paper we propose an architecture for reliability evaluation. Various Scenarios along with reliability attributes of the proposed architecture are evaluated using ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis method). In addition, a Dynamic Evaluation of web service reliability using agents for the proposed architecture is done using RWS Evaluation Method.
Enhancing Dependency Analysis by Combining Specific Dependency Parsers

Nowadays syntactic dependency parsers show very good performance, which is usually around 85% for Labeled Attachment Score (LAS). In the present work, we studied the combination of different small dependency parsers after an in–depth study of the errors produced by existing parsers at the word level. Each one of these small parsers is able to tackle one single kind of dependency, so its parsing becomes at the word level. These specific parsers are extremely accurate when parsing concrete words, therefore their outputs can be used to replace wrong sections of the outputs given by general purpose parsers. The combined action of all them leads to a more accurate parsing.
ONLINE DOMAINS OF LANGUAGE USE: SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS' EXPERIENCES OF VIRTUAL COMMUNITY AND FOREIGNNESS

This paper examines the use of CMC in both Japanese and English dominated domains by Australian learners of Japanese. The natural, social online communication of 12 Australian university students with 18 of their Japanese contacts was collected for a period of up to four years, resulting in a corpus of approximately 2,000 instances of blogs, e-mails, SNS interactions, chat conversations, game profiles, and mobile phone communications. To supplement this data, interviews were conducted to further explore participants’ Internet communication and L2 use. These interviews, paired with evidence from the corpus of collected data, are analysed using Sealey and Carter’s (2004) social realism framework in order to explore questions of language selection, identity construction and nationality, as well as what it means to be a foreigner online.
Towards higher data rates for IS-136

IS-136+ aims to increase the data rate of IS-136 by using higher modulation formats such as 8-PSK or 16-QAM. It is necessary to adaptively switch between these formats to maintain optimal throughput as the SNR varies. Adaptive modulation is a non-trivial task in practice, because accurate SNR measurements are required, the interference may change more quickly than the feedback round trip, and the optimal switching points are a function of the mobile speed. As an alternative, we present an incremental redundancy ARQ retransmission scheme that not only significantly reduces the dependence on mode switching but also increases the average throughput by 20%.
A piece-wise polynomial fitting method to filter the interferogram phase noise [InSAR]

Among many important factors for the whole interferometric processing, the interferometric phase quality affects the phase unwrapping and the accuracy of the DEM directly. The noise, which exists in the single complex image, affects the judgment of the image. After the interferogram phase (IP) is taken out from the complex images, the distribution of the phase noise is complicated. To get the high quality IP, the IP noise, which always exists, must be eliminated. The IP noise should be distributed continuously in one period and disconnected from one period to another. The polynomial fitting method can eliminate the phase noise in the continuous interval, but it can also add noise in the discontinuous interval, especially in the whole phase interval. This paper brings forward the piece-wise polynomial fitting (PWPF) method that can eliminate the IP noise. The PWPF can be obtained from the range and azimuth director respectively in the whole IP image. The experiment shows this method has a better IP noise eliminating effect.
Design of two-channel equiripple FIR linear-phase quadrature mirror filters using the vector space projection method

A new technique for designing finite impulse response (FIR) quadrature mirror filters (QMFs) is proposed. The approach is based on the vector space projection method (VSPM). Convex constraint sets and their projections that capture the properties of the desired QMFs are given. The proposed approach produces equiripple filters. This method is compared with the classical Johnston's method and is shown to have certain advantages.