Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bidirectional Reflectance Model Validation and Utilization.

Abstract : This report describes a method for using bidirectional reflectance information previously reported in the Eleventh Supplement to the Target Signature Analysis Center: Data Compilation and further validates the bidirectional reflectance model originated and extended under recent contracts. It includes bidirectional reflectance model parameters for a variety of paints. Parameters were extracted from measurement data reported in the Eleventh Supplement. Reduced reflectance data are also provided; these data may be used with the computer model or, optionally, in an interpolation procedure for estimating reflectances without the aid of a computer. The computer model makes it possible to calculate bidirectional reflectance data from a very small amount of measured data. Accuracy demonstrated in the Model Validation section indicates that the model is very effective, although improvement can still be obtained at large receiver zenith angles. The interpolation procedure also shows excellent agreement with measurement. (Author)
Real Time Collision Detection For Complex Simulations Based On Hybrid Multi Resolution Approximation Of CAD Models

This paper presents models and ideas at the foundation of a new collision detection engine for manufacturing systems simulation. The fast and reliable collision detection method proposed is based on an hybrid approach (usage of mixed type of bounding volumes shape and positioning) capable to satisfy the requirement of a quick and consistent detection while dealing with huge 3D models.
Evaluating and Improving a Scrum Project Management Tool Aimed at Distributed Teams

The intersection of two recent IT evolutions appear to be a source of conflict: large majorities of IT resources are being moved to off-shore locations while increasingly popular Agile development methodologies greatly value tight-knitted co-located development teams. These distributed Agile teams use a wide variety of digital (and physical) tools to support them during their work processes. The goal of this study was to evaluate a tool that was built specifically to support these teams in as many aspects of their daily workflow as possible. This case tool aims specifically at the Scrum framework for software development. The tool was analyzed using three distinct methods: by comparing the tool with the Scrum guidelines and other scientific literature, by analyzing usage data that was gathered throughout several months of usage, and by observing directly the users of the tool and prospects interested in purchasing a license of the tool over a prolonged period of time. Two new features were designed and implemented, based on the analysis of the tool. These features were deemed useful, but not sufficient to increase the perceived value of the case tool significantly. There appears to be very little reason for the distributed teams within the setting of the case company to use a tool that is as broad in functionality as the case tool. The distributed teams work independently and are relatively small, the majority of the communication takes place through synchronous communication channels, rendering the asynchronous case tool relatively useless. Further research should focus on the requirements for tool support in a more complex environment. Version 1.0 Public Version Thesis Title Evaluating and Improving a Scrum Project Management Tool Aimed at Distributed Teams
Construction of an OO Framework for Text Mining

We describe how we constructed a Java class library for text mining and information retrieval. The system consists of Facades around a database, a search engine and a text mining tool. We discuss the design of the object models we used for each of these elements and how they evolved as different databases and search engines became available. Then we discuss how we needed to evolve the system further in work with our customer. Finally we discuss the eventual fate of the system after the customer adopted the final version of the code, showing what we learned from the experience. Introduction We began building Java applications for text mining and information retrieval in 1995, shortly after Java was released. We reported on the first application interface in 1997, discussing the advantages of Prompted Query Refinement [1] to help users focus their queries. The initial system was built using a Unix-based internal research level search engine and a set of binary tables for term lookups. The communication between the Java applet and the server was provided using a low-level socket interface. We then embarked on a more ambitious project, working with the Giga Information group, to index their consultant reports and provide a more sophisticated way for their user to search and review these reports. This system consisted of a Windows NT server, an IBM product search engine and a database of the terms and relations discovered by our TALENT [2] text mining tools. In this initial modest-sized collection, we used a Microsoft Access database and wrote a Java RMI server to provide information to a Java applet client [3]. In a follow-on project, we extended this design further to include major sentences in each document, which could be used to construct a variable length document summary [4].
Cryptography: Theory and Practice,Second Edition

From the Publisher: The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), elliptic curve DSA, the secure hash algorithm these and other major advances over that last five years demanded this comprehensive revision of the standard-setting text and reference, Cryptography: Theory and Practice. Now more tightly focused on the core areas, it contains many new topics as well as thoroughly updated treatments of topics presented in the first edition. There is increased emphasis on general concepts, but the outstanding features that first made this a bestseller all remain, including its mathematical rigor, numerous examples, pseudocode descriptions of algorithms, and clear, precise explanations.New in the Second Edition:· Explains the latest Federal Information Processing Standards , including the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), the Secure Has Algorithm (SHA-1), and the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA)· Uses substitution-permutation networks to introduce block cipher design and analysis concepts· Explains both linear and differential cryptanalysis· Presents the Random Oracle model for hash functions· Addresses semantic security of RSA and Optional Asymmetric Encryption Padding· Discusses Wiener's attach on low decryption exponent RSA Overwhelmingly popular and relied upon in its first edition, now, more than ever, Cryptography: Theory and Practice provides an introduction to the field ideal for upper-level students in both mathematics and computer science.More highlights of the Second Edition:· Provably secure signature schemes: Full Domain Hash· Universal hash families· Expanded treatment of message authentication codes· More discussions on elliptic curves· Lower bounds for thecomplexity of generic algorithms for the discrete logarithm problem· Expanded treatment of factoring algorithms· Security definitions for signature schemes
Analysis, Segmentation and Prediction of Knee Cartilage using Statistical Shape Models

Osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee is one of the leading causes of chronic disability (along with the hip). Due to rising healthcare costs associated with OA, it is important to fully understand the disease and how it progresses in the knee. One symptom of knee OA is the degeneration of cartilage in the articulating knee. The cartilage pad plays a major role in painting the biomechanical picture of the knee. This work attempts to quantify the cartilage thickness of healthy male and female knees using statistical shape models (SSMs) for a deep knee bend activity. Additionally, novel cartilage segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and estimation algorithms from computer tomography (CT) or x-rays are proposed to facilitate the efficient development and accurate analysis of future treatments related to the knee. Cartilage morphology results suggest distinct patterns of wear in varus, valgus, and neutral degenerative knees, and examination of contact regions during the deep knee bend activity further emphasizes these patterns. Segmentation results were achieved that were comparable if not of higher quality than existing state-of-the-art techniques for both femoral and tibial cartilage. Likewise, using the point correspondence properties of SSMs, estimation of articulating cartilage was effective in healthy and degenerative knees. In conclusion, this work provides novel, clinically relevant morphological data to compute segmentation and estimate new data in such a way to potentially contribute to improving results and efficiency in evaluation of the femorotibial cartilage layer.
Soft Computing and Its Applications

From the Publisher: The concept of soft computing is still in its initial stages of crystallization. Presently available books on soft computing are merely collections of chapters or articles about different aspects of the field. This book is the first to provide a systematic account of the major concepts and methodologies of soft computing, presenting a unified framework that makes the subject more accessible to students and practitioners. Particularly worthy of note is the inclusion of a wealth of information about neuro-fuzzy, neuro-genetic, fuzzy-genetic and neuro-fuzzy-genetic systems, with many illuminating applications and examples.
Exploiting caching in heterogeneous mobile environment: Research Articles

Sparse connectivity, limited energy, and restricted memory of Mobile Hosts (MHs) are the main characteristics of today's Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET). Present wireless technology is now enabling MHs not only to have multi-hop communication among themselves, but also to have direct connection with an Access Point (AP) also. The emergence of such heterogeneous technologies brings cooperative caching to reality wherein MHs can access data items from caches at MHs in their neighborhood and can drastically minimize query latency. This key technique reduces the number of uplink channel requests, alleviates server load, and increases data availability. In this paper, we assume a heterogonous mobile environment where combination of ad hoc communication and infrastructured APs can be used to better manage the data needs of MHs through cooperative caching. We call such an environment as Cooperation-based Access Point MANET (CAPMANET). We present a Hop-Oriented Cooperative Caching (HOCC) scheme for CAPMANET which helps in reducing the communication overhead and the query latency. HOCC employs a hybrid Pull with Push (PwP) mechanism to maintain data consistency. Simulation results demonstrate that HOCC outperforms the pure push and pure pull-based strategies by taking advantages of underlying characteristics and avoiding associated weaknesses. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Functional Pearls: A Poor Man's Concurrency Monad

Without adding any primitives to the language, we deene a concurrency monad transformer in Haskell. This allows us to add a limited form of concurrency to any existing monad. The atomic actions of the new monad are lifted actions of the underlying monad. Some extra operations, such as fork , to initiate new processes, are provided. We discuss the implementation, and use some examples to illustrate the usefulness of this construction .
A fully integrated development environment for GOAL in Eclipse

For the GOAL agent programming platform, a new, full-fledged IDE was created that provides support for all phases in the agent program development process, with the concepts of integration and adaptation at its base. Using the DLTK framework, a plug-in for the Eclipse platform was created in multiple iterations, continuously evaluating the usability during this process using SUS evaluations. Besides an editing framework, based on newly developed ANTLRv4 grammars, a fully integrated debugging environment was designed and developed. As agent programming languages are based on very different concepts than the more widely supported and documented programming languages like Java and C, this process was not straight-forward. The mapping of popular existing concepts and the creation of new AOP-specific standards has been documented in this work. Besides improving the development support for all different kinds of GOAL developers, this thesis aims to set a new standard in the field of multi-agent programming. Care has been taken to explain all steps in detail, and this work has been made as generally applicable within the multi-agent programming field as possible. Therefore, this thesis is also a full guide to the design and development of a mature and professional IDE for multi-agent programming. The full process of the creation of this IDE is presented in this thesis, with an evaluation of the state-of-the-art through literature and existing IDEs at its foundation. Additionally, a prototype was developed to increase the understanding of the requirements for such an environment.
Spatially aware packet routing for mobile ad hoc inter-vehicle radio networks

Inter-vehicle communication can become an important building block for ITS telematics applications like safety and warning functions. Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) can serve as a local wireless network for exchanging information between cars for cooperative driver assistance applications. For the routing of data packets in such large-scale MANETs consisting of vehicles on the road, geographic multi-hop packet forwarding is a promising approach. However, a main drawback is that it performs poorly in networks with many topology holes. In this paper, we propose a spatially aware packet routing approach to predict permanent topology holes caused by spatial constraints and avoid them beforehand. This approach is generic and can be used in combination with any existing geographic forwarding protocol as an extension. Our simulations demonstrate that spatial awareness can significantly improve geographic forwarding performance in situations with many permanent topology holes, like in dynamic vehicle networks.
Syntactic and Semantic Interoperability Among Hydrologic Models

Development of integrated hydrologic models requires coupling of multidisciplinary, independent models and collaboration among different scientific communities. Component-based modeling provides an approach for the integration of models from different disciplines. A key advantage of component-based modeling is that it allows components to be created, tested, reused, extended, and maintained by a large group of model developers and end users. One significant challenge that must be addressed in creating an integrated hydrologic model using a component-based approach is enhancing the interoperability of components among different modeling communities and frameworks. The major goal of this work was to advance the integration of water related model components coming from different disciplines using the information underlying these models. This was achieved through addressing three specific research objectives. The first objective was to investigate the ability of component-based architecture to simulate feedback loops between hydrologic model components that share a boundary condition, and how data is transferred between temporally misaligned model components. The outcome of this work provides evidence that componentbased modeling can be used to simulate complicated feedback loop between systems and offers guidance as to how different interpolation schemes minimize mass balance error introduced when components are temporally misaligned. The second objective was to promote the interoperability of components across water-related disciplinary boundaries and modeling frameworks by establishing an ontology for components’ metadata. The purpose of the ontology is to assist in im-
E-mail Analysis for Investigators: Techniques and Implementation

E-mail is a common form of communication in regular use today. As such, it is a normal part of investigating a person or a crime. At present, there are many tools to perform bulk analysis and basic searching, but our research advances the state of the art by applying text mining and unsupervised learning techniques to automate the e-mail analysis process. Our key goals are to group similar e-mails together and to identify the concepts (subjects of discussion) of those e-mail groups. We present several new methods to increase the grouping accuracy: e-mail domain analysis and word pair analysis. We also present a technique for concept analysis. These goals are achieved by integrating our research with the capabilities of Weka, an open-source machine learning suite, and WordNet, a lexical database of the English language. We apply this research to the publicly available Enron e-mail dataset. We verify the results by examining the comparative advantage of each new technique.
Node selection in distributed overlays

With the proliferation of latency aware services such as live video streaming, Internetbased financial trading and the popularity of distributed overlays such as BitTorrent there is a growing need for latency-aware distributed overlays. To make such overlays viable, efficient resource discovery services are needed. Anycast is a routing protocol that sends packets to nodes that are a member of a particular group, with the work presented the Anycast protocol in the distributed overlay domain. Structured and unstructured distributed networks have become a popular way to disseminate data without the need for a fixed infrastructure, however there is a need to provide quality of service (QoS). To meet the demands of applications, an overlay needs to maintain accurate Anycast group membership data, locality information and have minimal protocol overhead. Three protocols are proposed to meet these goals. The Distributed Overlay Anycast Table (DOAT) brings the notion of locality to a structured overlay, while introducing Bloom filters as an efficient data structure to present an overlay that can accurately return a node that is participating in a particular group. The Gossip Overlay Anycast Table (GOAT) is a scalable location-aware unstructured overlay that can provide the probabilistic Anycast routing. Through the use of an efficient discovery protocol and the use of Bloom filters, GOAT is able to provide the advantages of a structured overlay, while mitigating the performance issues typically found in unstructured overlays. The N-casting overlay is an unstructured overlay with the ability to send queries to multiple members of an group, uses a hierarchical decomposition of the Internet and an elegant data structure that offers predictable compression of overlay membership. N-casting shows that unstructured overlays can be scalable and sustain high performance in environments that exhibit realistic membership churn. DOAT, GOAT and N-casting present viable services that implemented at the application layer provide location aware node discovery in QoS-enabled applications.
Latency- and error-tolerant redundant execution

This thesis is motivated by two growing problems in computer system design: that off-chip memory accesses dominate overall performance, and that soft (or transient) errors increasingly corrupt data and cause functionally incorrect execution. We propose skewed redundancy as a solution to both of these problems by executing applications on multiple processor cores available in an emerging class of chip multiprocessor systems. Redundant program execution has long been used to detect and correct errors in microprocessors; however, the vast majority of proposals to date add significant checking overhead and suffer from considerable slowdown. This work makes the observation that not all instructions contribute equally to overall performance, and allowing at least one core to skip those that are among the most expensive to execute (i.e. last-level cache misses) can enable cores to become skewed from each other by thousands of instructions. Such "skewing" has a data prefetching benefit by overlapping many independent cache misses and providing significant speedups of up to 2X over non-redundant execution while still providing 100% soft error coverage within our sphere of replication. In order to compensate for the lost coverage resulting from non-redundantly executing cache misses and their dependent instructions, we leverage existing temporal redundancy techniques that replicate miss-dependent computation within a single pipeline. Finally, we show that our design naturally extends beyond two cores to provide further performance gains while adding error recovery capabilities as well.
Using Adaptive Link Hiding to Provide Learners with Additional Learning Materials in a Web-Based System

This article reports results from a web-based online learning experiment that provided learning support to students in an object-oriented programming course. This support was intended to assist learners in acquiring domain knowledge (in this case object-oriented programming knowledge) which they were to use later for problem solving. The course was delivered using adaptive support techniques in which the system interface adjusts in ways that suit different learners. The impact of using one of the implemented support techniques, adaptive link hiding, is reported here. Using this technique, the system provided links to additional learning materials according to its prediction whether or not a learner was likely to access them. The system’s decision was guided by a machine learning algorithm, the Naive Bayes Classifier (NBC). The system’s prediction was compared to actual access of these additional learning materials, yielding a predictive accuracy of 72%.
The particle-in-cell method for numerical solution of problems in fluid dynamics

The particle-in-cell method is a procedure to be used on high-speed computer for studies of the dynamics of compressible fluids undergoing large distortions. The technique is described for calculation of the dynamics of two fluids confined in a two-dimensional rectangular box. Techniques are also discussed for the extension to numerous other types of problems. The properties, limitations, and uses of the method are discussed.
HETEROGENEOUS EVOLUTION OF SURROGATE MODELS

A neutralizer for cold waving comprising: (i) an oxidizing agent and (ii) at least one compound selected from the group consisting of the compounds having the general formula (I) to (XII), as follows. +TR wherein -R1 and -R2 are independently -CH3, -CH2OH, -CH2Cl, -CH2Br, -CH2I, +TR -CH2COOR6, -CH2CH2COOR6, -CH2COR6, -COR6, -R3, -R4, and -R5 are independently -H, -COR6, -COOR6, -Cl, -Br, -I, -NO2, -OCH3, -OH, and -COOH; -R6 is hydrogen atom, or an alkyl or alkenyl group having up to 3 carbon atoms; -R7 is -H, -OH, or -CH3; and -R8is -H, -COCH(CH3)2, -COCH=C(CH3)2, -COCH3, This neutralizer generates no substantial mercaptan or other unpleasant odor when applied to the hair and forms an elastic and shiny permanent wave.