Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of Feedback on Residential Electricity Demand – Results from a field trial in Austria

This paper analyzes the effects of providing feedback on electricity consumption in a field trial with more than 1500 households in Linz, Austria. Participation in the pilot group was random, but households could choose between two feedback types: access to a web portal or written feedback by post. Results from cross section OLS regression suggest that feedback provided to the pilot group results in electricity savings of around 4.5% for the average household. Results from quantile regressions imply that for households in the 30th to the 70th percentile, feedback on electricity consumption is statistically significant and effects are highest in absolute terms and as a share of electricity consumption. For percentiles below or above this range, feedback appears to have no effect. Finally, controlling for a potential endogeneity bias induced by non random participation in the feedback type groups, we find no difference in the effects of feedback provided via the web portal and by post.
Feasibility study for the use of a Floating-Electrode Dielectric Barrier Discharge for skin disinfection in the context of neonatal sepsis

A preliminary in vitro feasibility study for the use of a Floating-Electrode Dielectric Barrier Discharge (FE-DBD) plasma source to induce skin disinfection in the context of preventing neonatal sepsis is performed. The FE-DBD is a copper electrode, enclosed in an insulating material and a thin plate of quartz. The quartz is placed parallel above the substrate which is to be disinfected and is used as secondary electrode. Short damping kHz voltage pulses are fed to the electrode, which leads to lamentary microdischarges between the quartz and the substrate. By changing the pulse frequency, pulse width, duty cycle, gap distance and the to be treated surface, the properties of the plasma formed between the quartz and the substrate are a ected. For di erent settings of these ve variables, the relative light intensity, maximum voltage in one pulse and power dissipation in the plasma are studied. FTIR spectrometry is used to get quantitative insight in the chemistry in the discharge, but the path length was too short to obtain species densities. The e ect of treatment of a FE-DBD on bacteria and skin is investigated. Staphylococcus aureus are placed with small drops on cover glass and treated for di erent settings. The inactivation of S. aureus is more e ective and there is more light emission when the power dissipation in the plasma is higher. Also human skin with S. aureus is treated, the inactivation of bacteria is less e ective. The inactivation of S. aureus is compared with the inactivation of three other staphylococci which are also found in neonates with sepsis and it is similar. Treatment of the skin did not show any clear di erence in metabolic activity of the skin cells. The growth of the skin cells seems even to be stimulated for a more intense treatment. Histology shows local damage in the skin samples, the damage is very small and are therefore not causing a visible drop in the metabolic activity. The skin samples are not completely at, a higher part of the skin will have a higher impact of discharges, which will cause this local damage. The detrimental e ects on skin are a cause of concerns and the investigation of a plasma source that does not use the neonatal skin as second electrode is recommended based on the outcome of this study. A lot of research needs
Aren’t the fundamental concepts of work systems mostly about actions?

The scope of this paper is to „infuse‟ the so called work sys-tem approach (WSA) with a suggested theoretical basis. WSA is a generic approach for understanding information systems in organizations with its aim set on high relevance. By relating the, so called, work practice approach the endeavor of the paper is to elaborate on actions as a theoretical and more rigorous basis for WSA. The results from this elaboration are then used to dispute some lines of criticism that has been raised against WSA. The study can be characterized as ex-plorative and the results points out a direction that states that further cross fertilization between the two approaches would be fruitful.
Early Childhood Health and Development in India: A Review of the Evidence and Recommendations for the Future

This paper documents temporal trends and interstate and intrastate disparities in child health and cognitive ability in India, and reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on policy interventions that may help ameliorate these gaps. We show that despite rapid improvements in early childhood health across much of India over the past three decades, many areas still experience persistently high rates of infant mortality, low rates of child immunization, and low levels of child academic achievement. We outline a series of interventions with a strong theoretical and empirical evidence base for improving physical and cognitive development of young children in these areas, including improved nutrition and sanitation, parental stimulation, and caretaker focus on cognitive and emotional development of the child. We then describe various challenges that must be overcome before these interventions can be carried out successfully, as other market failures and issues of state capacity are often present. We conclude by recommending that as India scales up programs aimed at early childhood health and development, it must (a) collect extensive data to understand where programs should be deployed in order to maximize their impact and (b) perform rigorous program evaluations to ensure that interventions which have been shown to work in more favorable settings are also successful in the Indian context.
Investigating MOS-X Ratings of Synthetic and Human Voices

The objectives of this research were to (1) evaluate and compare two versions of the expanded Mean Opinion Scale, one using the original 15 items (MOS-X) and the other a four-item version with one item for each of the four factors of the MOS-X (the MOS-X2), and (2) establish preliminary benchmarks for the interpretation of ratings collected using these questionnaires. Respondents (n = 865) provided ratings for 56 thirty-second recordings of speech samples – 53 from recordings of synthetic voices made from 2001 through 2017 and three from professional human voice talents. Both questionnaires had acceptable psychometric quality (reliability and validity), but the factor structure of the MOS-X did not exactly match the expected structure. The MOS-X2 had a stronger statistical relationship to outcome metrics of Likelihood-to-Recommend (LTR) and Overall Quality than the MOS-X. The very old samples (those using technologies from 2001-2002) received consistently poor ratings. A few of the synthetic voice samples came close to the ratings given to the professional human voice talents. Either questionnaire version is acceptable for use, but due to its stronger statistical relationship to the key outcome metrics of LTR and Overall Quality and its shorter length, it is more effective and efficient to use the MOS-X2. The mean MOS-X and MOS-X2 for the ratings of the professional human voices were both about 85 (after conversion to a 0-100 point scale), so a synthetic voice with mean ratings at or approaching 85 would be very good. Ratings over 70 are, relative to the set of voice samples in this study, above average.
Congenital Complete Absence of the Left Pericardium

Congenital absence of the pericardium is a rare condition, which can be isolated, but most frequently associated with other cardiac or extracardiac congenital anomalies. Generally, most the patients with pericardial absence are asymptomatic. In some cases, partial pericardial defects can be life threatening, because of heart and lung herniation and ventricular entrapment. The pericardium has a supporting and protecting role for the heart and the proximal great vessels (ascending aorta and pulmonary arterial trunk), so absence of the pericardial layers allows important thoracic displacement of the heart. Diagnosis is established by the relevant radio-imaging findings suggestive of complete absence of the pericardium, with characteristic cardiac silhouette abnormalities. We present a case with complete absence of the left pericardium in an asymptomatic young male patient. A review of literature focusing on congenital pericardial defects and the radiological findings of this condition, focused on cardiacMR imaging, is also presented.
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) A geospatial analysis of cinema markets in The Netherlands and Flanders (1950-1975)

Citation for published version (APA): Noordegraaf, J., Visser, J., Boter, J., Biltereyst, D. , Meers, P., & Kisjes, I. (2017). (Not) Going to the movies: A geospatial analysis of cinema markets in The Netherlands and Flanders (1950-1975). In R. Lewis, C. Raynor, D. Forest, M. Sinatra, & S. Sinclair (Eds.), DH2017: Digital Humanities 2017: Conference Abstracts: McGill University & Université de Montréal Montréal, Canada August 8 – 11, 2017 (pp. 545-547). McGill University. https://dh2017.adho. org/abstracts/DH2017-abstracts.pdf
CAREER: Quality Automation: Push-Button Automatic Program Repair

Overview. Modern software engineers have a wide variety of analyses, tools, and infrastructure available to support their QA activities, from both research and practice. However, actually ﬁxing bugs remains a largely manual and expensive process. There simply are not enough high-quality developer hours to dedicate to ﬁxing all defects, and developers often make mistakes in ﬁxing bugs by hand. Research in automated program repair (APR) oﬀers promise in mitigating these costs. To achieve true practical beneﬁt, such techniques must (1) produce patches of consistently and assuredly high quality, and (2) integrate naturally into the QA processes and analyses that developers already use in maintaining and evolving their code. The goal of this proposal is to make automated repair technology robust and useful enough that developers run it as naturally as they currently do compilers, linters, and other ﬁrst-class QA tools. The proposed work develop new APR approaches that explicitly integrate into and then proactively improve real-world program quality.
The effects of high atomic material in photon beams at the interface

The effect of Z-material on the dose distribution of 6, and 15 MV photon beams was studied. The calculated central percentage depth dose distributions, with and without the material were compared. The percentage depth dose values at the interface below the prosthesis were lower for all energies by as much as 5% compared with percentage depth dose values without the materials. For each radiation beam, the dose enhancement factors (DEFs) at the distal interface were calculated. To verify the DEFs calculated at the interface, the Thermoluminescence dosimeters (TLDs) were used for comparison. The DEF values agree well within 1.5%. The results revealed that the DEF calculated at the interface increased with increasing the photon beam energy as well as increasing material thickness.
Patterns of care and outcomes for adjuvant treatment of pT3N0 rectal cancer using the National Cancer Database.

Background The standard of care in locally advanced rectal cancer is preoperative chemoradiation followed by surgical resection. However, the optimal treatment paradigm is currently controversial for patients with pathological T3N0 (pT3N0) in the era of total mesorectal excision (TME). Given the paucity of data, we conducted an analysis using the National Cancer Database (NCDB) to identify patterns of care and outcomes. Methods We utilized the NCDB to identify 7,836 non-metastatic, pT3N0 rectal cancer patients who did not receive neoadjuvant therapy from 2004-2014. Univariate and multivariable analysis for factors affecting treatment selection were completed using logistic regression. Overall survival (OS) analyses were completed using Cox regression modeling, incorporating propensity scores with inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) and conditional landmark analysis. Results There was a significant improvement in OS in patients receiving adjuvant chemotherapy (P<0.01) or radiotherapy (RT) with chemotherapy (P<0.01) vs. observation alone. There was no significant difference between RT vs. observation (P=0.54) and chemotherapy vs. chemotherapy with RT cohorts (P=0.15). Multivariable analysis showed age, gender, race, insurance status, income, Charlson-Deyo Comorbidity Condition (CDCC) score, facility location, grade, surgical margin, RT, and chemotherapy to be statistically significant predictors of OS. After correcting for indication and immortal time biases, chemotherapy, with or without RT, improved OS compared with observation [hazard ratio (HR) 0.48, P<0.001]. This benefit was maintained in the margin negative cohort. Conclusions Practice patterns vary in the management of pT3N0 rectal cancer patients. This analysis suggests that the use of adjuvant therapy, particularly adjuvant chemotherapy with or without RT, appears to improve OS.
A Fast Algorithm for Matrix Eigen-decompositionn

We propose a fast stochastic Riemannian gradient eigensolver for a real and symmetric matrix, and prove its local, eigengap-dependent and linear convergence. The fast convergence is brought by deploying the variance reduction technique which was originally developed for the Euclidean strongly convex problems. In this paper, this technique is generalized to Riemannian manifolds for solving the geodesi-cally non-convex problem of ﬁnding a group of top eigenvectors of such a matrix. We ﬁrst propose the general variance reduction form of the stochastic Riemannian gradient, giving rise to the stochastic variance reduced Riemannian gradient method (SVRRG). It turns out that the operation of vector transport is necessary in addition to using Riemannian gradients and re-traction operations. We then specialize it to the problem in question resulting in our SVRRG-EIGS algorithm. We are among the ﬁrst to propose and analyze the generalization of the stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) to Riemannian manifolds. As an extension of the linearly convergent VR-PCA, it is signiﬁ-cant and nontrivial for the proposed algorithm to theoretically achieve a further speedup and empirically make a difference, due to our respect to the inherent geometry of the problem.
Non Destructive Testing of CMC Engine Internal Parts from X-ray Tomographic Images

The introduction of Ceramic Matrix Composites (CMCs) for aircraft engines gas turbine components aims at increasing the turbine performance and in-service life on the one hand, and on the other hand saving weight, hence reducing fuel consumption. Material health control of turbine parts is an essential procedure, given the criticality of their operating performance. X-ray tomography is a particularly suitable technique for non destructive testing. However, the images produced by this 3D imaging method can be very large, making computations very time- and memory consuming, especially for characterizing complex porous materials such as CMCs. Voxaya SAS and IRT Saint-Exupery designed and tested a specific non destructive testing workflow based on Voxaya’s software, Voxilon, for the analysis of CMC engine internal parts from X-ray tomographic images. We present how Voxilon’s innovative architecture and rapid algorithms allows swiftly processing a large number of tomographic images and automatizing the sensitivity analysis of input parameters.
REMOTE SENSING ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN DAYTIME GROUND BRIGHT TEMPERATURE AND LAND-USE TYPES OF CITY——WITH SHANGHAI AS AN EXAMPLE

Weakening the effect of heat island by environment construction is one of the key aspects for city development.To assure the reasonable planning of city construction,it is helpful analyzing the effect of land use types on ground heat distribution to get scientific data.In this study,by using Landsat ETM+ daytime remote sensing data of Shanghai,the inversion of ground bright temperature(GBT),the compose of color map and the classification of land use were made.On this basis,the relationships between daytime GBT distribution and land use types of city were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively.The results show that there are close relations between GBT distribution and land use types.By taking the GBT of resident sections(except that haven't landscapes of vegetation and water) as reference temperature,the water sections play a role of decreasing GBT both in summer and in winter,the soil and vegetation sections can decrease GBT in summer,but increase GBT in winter,and the other city establishment sections will increase GBT both in summer and in winter.The statistical formula obtained in this study may be used in programming of city environment and forecasting of heat island effect.
Building A Virtual Multidisciplinary Team

This study introduces an effort in the direction of an effective dynamic mini-courseware design during the practice of learners from multidisciplinary in higher education including several areas of professions such as learning science, computing, information science, artistic design, curriculum development, management, marketing, and law. The nature of a heterogeneity in a multidisciplinary team contributes pecific mental cognition and expertise when achieving socio-emotion and task over a social representation in a common representational space (Gloor, 2006; Vlad - Petre Gl ă veanu; 2014). The finding suggests heterogeneity of teamwork is not limited to a boundary of location, enriched by a virtual multidisciplinary members in a Design Thinking process encompassing; Diverse inspiration, Sharing empathy, Generate idea, Competing prototype/solutions, and Pilot-testing via a widespread of geography and time differences. A promising result empowering the VR multidisciplinary team for a “power of thinking” through a communication technology that nurturing an iterative process of thinking with social-ethical practices with the end-users’ empathy sharing.
Energy Savings Over a 3-year Opt-in Rewards-based Residential Behavioral Program

This study evaluates savings for a residential behavioral program at Commonwealth Edison (ComEd), a large Midwestern US utility, implemented by C3 Energy and the Illinois Citizens United Board (CUB). 1 The program is a web-based, opt-in program designed to generate energy savings by providing customers with information about their energy usage, tips to reduce energy consumption, and reward points for energy savings. We compare three quasi-experimental methods to estimate savings, with the understanding that finding similar savings from the three methods confers “convergent validity” on the estimates. The first method is the variation-in-adoption (VIA) approach used by Harding and Hsiaw (2013), in which program savings are estimated using only data from program enrollees, with late enrollees serving as controls for early enrollees. The second and third methods are matching methods that draw on the same set of program enrollees and their 1:1 nonprogram matches, but the two are distinguished by the method used to estimate savings. The first is regression with pre-program matching (RPPM) described in Ho et al. (2007) and the second is matching with bias correction (MBC) introduced by Abadie and Imbens (2011). For both of these, matching is based on Euclidean distance in monthly energy use over a 12-month pre-program period. A 2-month pre-program “test window” comparing the average use of program customers and their matches provides a proxy test for selection bias, which is always a concern with opt-in programs. The three methods generate similar estimates for program savings: 3.81%, 3.86%, and 3.57% for the VIA, RPPM, and MCB approaches respectively.
Associative Contour Processing

INSTRUCTION SET Associative algorithms are presented that can ac-The machine model is shown on Fig. 1, where the complish curve propagation with thresholding in 1.5 ps of memory words is = Nz, image size is per iteration, ideal thinning in 6.4 ps per iteration taken to be N N. ~h~ primitive associative opera-and contour tracing and labeling in 66 ps per iterations are given below. tion, while operating on a 512 x 512 image. This performance is achieved in a novel architecture designated Vj = 0,1,2,. , J - 1 and Vk = 0,1,2,-. , K - 1 ARTVM (Associative Real Time Vision Machine) with a modest hardware complement of 64 associative mem-COMPARE: Tj +- TjUkMk(Ajk @ Ck) ory chips (and a microprogrammed controller).
A COMPARISON OF PRESERVICE AND INSERVICE TEACHERS’ MOST-VALUED TECHNOLOGY-SUPPORTED ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING

We examined teachers’ pedagogical reasoning for and the technological knowledge underlying their mostvalued technology-supported activities for teaching and learning. Data from 140 preservice and 100 inservice teachers included open-ended, narrative responses to survey questions. Qualitative research methods guided analysis of the data that identified (a) the technology-supported activities and (b) the technical tools, target users, types of uses, rationales for use, and the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) underlying each activity. Preservice teachers described mostly teacher-focused and fewer student-focused techno-activities, and their reasoning for use focused on the technology’s presentational and engagement effects. A majority of inservice teachers’ techno-activities were student-focused, and their reasoning highlighted the technology’s support for knowledge acquisition of higher-order cognitive skills and collaborative learning. The knowledge underlying all teachers’ techno-activities was predominantly technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK), but inservice teachers also evidenced technological content knowledge (TCK). These results may reveal differences in the teachers’ respective learning experiences or reflect a professional maturation process.
Minimax Classifier with Box Constraint on the Priors

Learning a classiﬁer in safety-critical applications like medicine raises several issues. Firstly, the class proportions, also called priors, are in general imbalanced or uncertain. Secondly, the classiﬁer must consider some bounds on the priors taking the form of box constraints provided by experts. Thirdly, it is also necessary to consider any arbitrary loss function given by experts to evaluate the classiﬁcation decision. Finally, the dataset may contain both categorical and numerical features. To deal with both categorical and numerical features, the numerical attributes are discretized. When considering only discrete features, we propose in this paper a box-constrained minimax classiﬁer which addresses all the mentioned issues. We derive a projected subgradient algorithm to compute this classiﬁer. The convergence of this algorithm is established. We ﬁnally perform experiments on the Framingham heart database for illustrating the relevance of our algorithm in health care ﬁeld.
GENDER GAPS AND IMMIGRANT DIFFERENCES IN LABOUR FORCE PARTICIPATION

RESUMEN Género y país de origen correlacionan de manera significativa con la tasa de actividad. Las mujeres tienden a participar menos que los hombres (brecha de género), y los inmigrantes y sus hijos/as presentan, de media, tasas de participación más bajas en comparación con los nativos (penalización inmigrantes), aunque con diferencias significativas entre grupos de origen étnico (penalización/ventaja étnica). Utilizando datos del Panel de Hogares del Reino Unido (UKHLS), concluyo que las características de la pareja/esposo añaden poco a la explicación de las diferencias por origen étnico, aunque sus recursos en el mercado laboral, sus actitudes hacia los roles de género, y en particular el estatus laboral de su madre (efecto suegra) contribuyen por encima de factores individuales a explicar las diferencias étnicas en la probabilidad de participar de las mujeres.