Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Model-Driven Software Modernization

This thesis elaborates the Model-Driven Software Modernization (MDSM), that has been identified by us, and is defined as a group of approaches toward modernization of legacy code. MDSM approaches are based on models, tools and processes known from the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) that aims in automation of modernization process. This thesis describes identified MDSM approaches and related standards. Additionally, it suggests that certain kinds of modernization can be implemented in a more efficient way, when a new approach, that has been proposed by the authors, is used. An exemplary modernization, that solves selected industry problem, is implemented to demonstrate that the alternative approach is feasible. In addition, the availability of tools for MDA, which can be adopted in MDSM process, is discussed and guidelines for implementing MDSM are proposed.
Energy-efficient mobile system design: the user's perspective

Mobile systems, such as smart-phones and Pocket PCs, are likely to become personal servers for future pervasive computing. This dissertation highlights the energy efficiency bottleneck such systems face in achieving this goal: the slow-user problem, i.e., an increasingly powerful computer spends most of its energy waiting for a constantly slow user. To tackle this bottleneck, it proposes to evaluate and improve the energy efficiency of a mobile system from the user's perspective. The dissertation first highlights the slow-user problem and the importance of user interfaces and human factors. It offers a theoretical analysis for interface power and energy requirements, and a comprehensive energy characterization of state-of-the-art user interfaces. Based on this characterization, it presents a comparative study of their energy efficiency. It then tackles the slow-user problem in three different ways. First, it proposes to increase user productivity without much power overhead with a Bluetooth-based personal-area network of low-power interfacing devices. The network consists of a wrist-watch, single-hand single-tap multi-finger keypad, smart speech portal, and information-capturing devices. They synergistically provide a user with natural and power-efficient access to a mobile system. Second, it proposes to reduce the interfacing power requirement without decreasing user productivity much. Motivated by the memory-cache theory, the dissertation shows how a low-power interface cache device can be used to host simple interactive tasks outsourced from a mobile system, and thus improve the overall energy efficiency. Third, the dissertation proposes to aggressively power-manage a mobile system in its idle periods during human-computer interaction. It uses user interface information to predict user delays based on history and theories from the field of psychology. It shows that such a delay prediction can be combined with power management to significantly reduce idle power consumption.
Error diffusion CGHS for optical processing

Computer-generated holograms (CGHs) are becoming increasingly popular as flexible, general-purpose optical elements. To reduce the complexity of optical architectures and/or increase the number of optical data processing functions that can be performed, the CGH has to be designed for a lensless system. A CGH is a sampled device and the transfer function of the CGH will be the Fresnel transform of a non-ideally sampled function. The Fresnel transform of a non-ideally sampled function has not been studied before and in this thesis we introduce a Fresnel sampling theorem that formalizes the sampling requirements for a Fresnel transform to avoid aliasing. It is proven that under realistic conditions the effect of non-ideal sampling will be a simple weighting of the output as in the case of a sampled Fourier transform. Error diffusion provides better noise and space-bandwidth performance when compared to older cell-encoding CGII techniques. With optimum standard error diffusion the quantization noise performance is minimized by propagating errors committed during quantization to neighboring function points. The selection of diffusion coefficients defines the spectrum where the quantization noise will be a minimum. By modulating the propagated errors, the quantization noise can be reduced at the modulation frequency. The resulting spectrum of minimum noise provides a deeper minimum in a narrower region compared to standard optimum error diffusion, which is especially useful in optical correlation applications. We call this extension modulated error diffusion. We provide design examples, simulation and optical laboratory results for various optical data processing applications of these new CGHs. These include the encoding of grey-level data on a binary mask using error diffusion, a binary matched spatial filter where the inverse Fourier transform lens is included on the CGH and a new CGH implementation of the optical Hough transform.
Vibration -based damage identification and health monitoring of civil structures

Civil structures undergo progressive deterioration due to ageing under the effects of environmental conditions. This deterioration has become a worldwide concern. In addition, natural and man-made hazards such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and explosions can also cause structural damages or exacerbate existing damage. Vibration-based structural damage identification and health monitoring has been the subject of significant research in structural engineering over the past decade. The research work presented in this dissertation consists of: (1) a comparative study of output-only system identification techniques as applied to the Alfred Zampa Memorial Bridge based on dynamic field test data, through which the performance of different output-only system identification methods applied to the bridge vibration data and corresponding to different excitation sources is investigated; (2) development of a simulation framework for wind-induced ambient vibration response of Vincent Thomas Bridge using a detailed three-dimensional finite element model of the bridge and a state-of-the-art stochastic wind excitation model, which provides a validated framework to study the effects of realistic damage scenarios in long-span cable-supported bridges on their identified modal parameters; (3) damage identification of a full-scale seven-story reinforced concrete building slice tested on the UCSD-NEES shake table using a sensitivity-based finite element model updating strategy based on the modal parameters identified from ambient vibration data; (4) development and implementation of a state-of-the-art long-term continuous monitoring system on the Voigt Bridge Testbed, which will serve as a live laboratory for structural health monitoring technologies; (5) development of an automated system identification procedure for extracting modal parameters of the Voigt Bridge as a function of time; and (6) investigation of the environmental effects on the identified modal parameters of the Voigt Bridge and objective criterion for damage detection under varying environmental conditions. The research work presented and the results obtained in this dissertation contribute significantly to the development of robust and reliable vibration-based structural health monitoring systems for large and complex real-world structures
Contrasting Effects of Plant-Soil Feedbacks on Growth and Morphology of Two Clonal Plants

AimSoil abiotic and biotic conditions are often spatially variable, challenging plants with a heterogeneous environment consisting of favorable and unfavorable patches of soil. Many stoloniferous clonal plants can escape from unfavorable patches by elongating stolon internodes, but aggregate in favorable ones through shortening stolon internodes. However, whether these plants can use their stolons to respond to plant-soil feedbacks (PSFs) is largely unknown. MethodsIn the conditioning phase, we grew either Hydrocotyle vulgaris or Glechoma longituba clonal plants separately in mesocosms to condition bulk soil. In the feedback phase, we grew connected mother and daughter ramets of each species in soil inoculated with the unsterilized or sterilized soil conditioned by conspecifics. We grew the plants for 12 weeks and measured the growth of the mother and daughter ramets separately. ResultsThe daughter ramets of H. vulgaris produced more biomass but shorter stolon internodes when grown in soil with sterilized inocula than with unsterilized inocula. However, no difference was found between the daughter ramets of G. longituba grown in soil with unsterilized and sterilized inocula. For both species, no significant difference was found between the mother ramet or between the daughter ramets when the mother ramet was grown in soil with sterilized and unsterilized inocula. Conclusions﻿The daughter ramets rather than the mother ramet of H. vulgaris experienced negative biotic PSFs. However, PSF had no effects on the daughter or mother ramet of G. longituba. Moreover, physiological integration or plasticity in stolon internode lengths cannot help H. vulgaris alleviate the negative PSFs.
Practice Makes Imperfect: Common Factors in Recent Manual Approach Incidents

Regulators, operators and air pilots often express concern that basic manual flying ability is diminishing on highly automated fleets. Although licensed pilots must demonstrate their ability to operate aircraft manually during recurrent training and proficiency checks about every six months, the opportunities to use these skills in normal operating experience are limited. This paper discusses this problem, and describes three recent aircraft incidents in which manual handling deficiencies were cited as either a contributory or causal factor. These cases provide some evidence that the crew's ability to operate the aircraft manually, even during fairly routine maneuvers, was deteriorated. However, another common factor links these cases. In each of the events, the pilot was about to undergo a proficiency assessment and had deliberately degraded the aircraft's automatics to practice manually handling the aircraft before the evaluation. This suggests that there may be a need for detailed guidance to encourage pilots to participate in regular manual handling practice and to ensure that this practice is conducted in a suitable environment. One alternative might be to increase the amount of time dedicated to manual handling during simulator training and assessment.
Prospective Study into Harmonised Train Accident Precursors Analysis and Management

The goal of this research was to determine railroad accident precursors that are fairly practical and sound, and that can be implemented at a management and operational level. The research: (1) pinpointed accident precursors and developed fault trees to graphically display accident precursors for six types of train accidents; (2) developed a comprehension of current motivations and practices in the European Union; and (3) combined actual understanding of railroad accident monitoring and precursors with theoretical railroad accident precursor fault trees.
A mechanical mosaic method for reflective grating based on diffracted beams orientation

The planer grating with large area plays an important role in the optical encoder for large stroke measurement. Compared with the conventional fabrication techniques such as interference lithography and mechanically ruling for large-area manufacture, splicing small-area grating units into a large integral mosaic grating is promising to reduce the technical difficulty and time-consumption. We proposed a novel grating splicing method to construct large-area mosaic grating applicable for optical encoder. The splicing apparatus is capable of providing four degree-of-freedom including one outof-plane straight motion (ΔZ) and three rotation motions (Δθx, Δθy, Δθz) for mechanically adjusting the grating units. The diffracted beams from the spliced gratings are utilized to guide the adjustment, i.e., zero-order diffracted beams for ΔZ, Δθx, Δθy and first-order diffracted beams for Δθz, respectively. The diffracted-beams orientations of the first grating were adopted as the basic reference, and the posture of the other gratings are continuously adjusted by matching the position of the diffracted beams. Five grating units with 20×20 mm2 area and 1 μm period were spliced together. Finally, a coordinate measuring machine was utilized to evaluate the flatness of the mosaic gratings, showing a good flatness as small as ~60 μm. It is demonstrated that our proposed splicing method is promising to achieve good flatness of mosaic grating potentially applied for large-stroke optical encoder.
A qualitative contextual analysis of U.S. immigration coverage by media during the Obama and Trump presidencies

This qualitative analysis examines the frequency and sentiment of immigration-related posts by media organizations and audience reactions on Facebook from the last term of Barack Obama’s presidency and the first term of Donald Trump’s presidency, January 2013–December 2020, under the lens of critical race and agenda building theories. Results indicate that news media have increased posting about this topic since 2013, the sentiment is statistically negative and audiences have elevated their participation over time.
Towards Cosmopolitan Robot: Intelligent Navigation in Extended

IN THE PAST, MOBILE ROBOTS HAVE BEEN CONSTRAINED TO OPERATE IN EITHER AN INDOOR OR AN OUTDOOR ENVIRONMENT, NOT BOTH. SPECIAL PURPOSE REPRESENTA- TIONS AND AD HOC SENSOR TECHNIQUES GEARED TOWARDS TASKS OF NARROW FOCUS HAVE DOMINATED THESE EFFORTS. IT IS THE PURPOSE OF THIS DISSERTATION TO LEAD TOWARDS THE DEVELOPMENT OF A MORE COSMOPOLITAN ROBOT; ONE WHOSE DOMAIN OF INTERACTION IS NOT AS RESTRICTED AS THESE PREVIOUS ATTEMPTS. THE AUTONOMOUS ROBOT ARCHITECTURE (AURA) HAS BEEN DEVELOPED TO MEET THESE CHALLENGES. A "MEADOW MAP", USED FOR GLOBAL PATH PLANNING AND CON- TAINING EMBEDDED ''A PRIORI'' KNOWLEDGE TO GUIDE SENSOR EXPECTATIONS, SERVES AS THE ROBOT''S LONG TERM MEMORY. A LAYERED SHORT TERM MEMORY BASED ON INSTANTIATED MEADOWS REPRESENTS THE CURRENTLY PERCEIVED WORLD. A HIERARCHI CAL PATH PLANNER PRODUCES A GLOBAL PATH FREE OF COLLISIONS WITH ALL MODELED OBSTACLES. SCHEMA THEORY IS EXTENDED TO INCLUDE THE MOBILE ROBOT DOMAIN AND SERVES AS THE PRINCIPAL THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK. THE SCHEMA-BASED PATH EXECUTION SYSTEM HANDLES UNEXPECTED AND DYNAMIC OBSTACLES NOT PRESENT IN THE ROBOT''S WORLD MODEL. THIS MOTOR SCHEMA-BASED NAVIGATION SYSTEM PRODUCES REACTIVE/ REFLEXIVE BEHAVIOR IN DIRECT RESPONSE TO SENSOR EVENTS. IN ADDITION, NEW TECHNIQUES IN THE TREATMENT OF ROBOT UNCERTAINTY WHICH EXPEDITE SENSORY PROCESSING ARE PRESENTED. THESE INCLUDE THE USE OF A SPATIAL ERROR MAP WIT
Assessing Stop-Loss Policy Options through Personnel Flow Modeling

Abstract : The practice of stop-loss retains soldiers who are scheduled to end their voluntary terms of active service during an impending or ongoing deployment. These involuntary extensions are legal and have been employed by the U.S. Army over the past two decades. They provide a highly efficient means for meeting the high-priority needs of deployed units. Because stop-loss keeps soldiers in their units, it generally fills deployment needs in the least amount of time possible and minimizes the budgetary impact of added recruitment, training, and personnel reassignment. Besides bolstering head counts with the soldiers who are generally best matched to their deployed jobs, the practice promotes unit personnel stability by helping to keep intact the units that have trained together for missions. It also keeps in check the extended recruitment and reassignment activities needed to maintain a deployed force during periods of extraordinary demand. This documented briefing examines a set of alternatives to stop-loss when the Army faces a demanding deployment schedule, as it did during operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Detailed manpower flow simulations were used to assess specific stop-loss policy proposals proffered in 2008 by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), focusing on their quantitative effects on deployed-unit fill, personnel stability, and individual deployment tempo for the active enlisted force. To enrich the discussion of the effects of a new stop-loss policy, the briefing also examines brigade combat team cycle lengths and the number of units being rotated into theaters. In the summer and fall of 2008, early results were shared with OSD on a nearly continuous basis while the Secretary of Defense and the President reexamined the stop-loss policy. Their eventual decision to suspend stop-loss for the active Army by January 1, 2010, was consistent with findings presented then and reported here.
Advanced Coding and Modulation for Digital Terrestrial Broadcasting and Cellular Systems

A new platform for HDTV transmissions, in the form of a new generation terrestrial digital video broadcasting standard (DVB-T2), has been developed by the DVB Project. A number of technical innovations have been included in DVB-T2 to boost throughput and ruggedness, enhance single-frequency network coverage, and ease both transmitter and receiver implementation. Several strategies have been investigated during the standard definition. This thesis present a research branch of this investigation starting from a multi-antenna overview: a new soft detector for space-time block codes (STBCs) is proposed, which is claim to be more efficient than the state of art techniques. Commercial and technical reasons have suggested the adoption of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). As multiple-antennas techniques are not backward compatible with DVB-T constellations, new modulation methods and iterative demapping schemes, suitable for OFDM in the presence of Rayleigh fading channels, are assessed in terms of diversity gain without spectral or power inefficiencies. A very important role is played by LDPC codes which are one of the principal innovation of the new digital terrestrial standard. We show how all these scenarios change once an LDPC encoding is applied to the systems. We also evaluate the performance of the coded decision directed demodulation (CD3) technique for channel estimation in DVB-T2. Since the insertion of pilot tones in the OFDM signal affects the spectral efficiency, CD3 is able to provide an accurate channel estimation with very few pilots, even in the presence of highly frequency dispersive and time-variant channels, increasing the spectrum efficiency. We give a comparison in terms of achievable throughput between DVB-T2 with CD3, even with multiple antennas, and current DVB-T. A second part is related to a cellular network scenario. Assume a set of nodes drawn uniformly at random on a finite surface having a time slot where each node broadcasts its identifier. This problem becomes of practical and theoretical interest in a dense scenario where the number of available physical resources is much smaller than the total number of nodes in the system. Here we address link level strategies for single-hop peer discovery assuming that peer identifiers are broadcasted via coded transmission and we are interested on simultaneous detection of peers which share the same physical resource then cause reciprocal interference. Several strategies are investigated through system simulations: it is shown that, in general, joint iterative decoding achieves impressive gains compared with interference cancellation even preserving almost the same complexity. Elementary modifications of broadcasted signals such as symbol permutations permit to further improve the system performance. Finally, in order to extend this work, we introduce some channel estimation procedures for primary channel models which suit with multiple detection goal.
A simulation model of wood dynamics in Pacific Northwest streams

OF THE DISSERTATION OF Mark Alan Meleason for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Fisheries Science presented on April 30. 2001. Title: A Simulation Model of Wood Dynamics in Pacific Northwest Streams. Abstract Approved: Stanley V.Approved: Stanley V. Conceptually, the dynamics of wood in streams can be viewed in terms of input and in-channel processes. Input processes are associated with both the riparian (tree fall, bank cutting, windthrow) and upsiope forests (mass failures). In-channel processes include log breakage, movement, and decomposition. A mechanistic view of these processes is presented and served as the basis for the development of a simulation model. STREAMWOOD is an individual based stochastic model that operates on an annual time step at the reach scale. Stream systems that can be simulated range from a single reach to a small basin. Stream wood dynamics considered are tree entry, breakage, movement, and decomposition. Riparian forest inputs are either from a simplified forest gap model built within STREAM WOOD or from a user-specified input file. The model is run under a Monte Carlo procedure and the results are reported as average conditions per reach. STREAM WOOD was developed for coniferous-forested streams of the Pacific Northwest fifth-order and smaller. Species considered include Douglas fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco), western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla (Raf.) Sarg. ), western red cedar (Thuja plicata D. Don ex Lambert), and red alder (Alnus rubra Bong.). Single parameter sensitivity analysis of STREAM WOOD concluded that parameters affecting Redacted for privacy tree growth were the most important in the forest model and decomposition was found to be the most important of the processes tested in the wood model. STRBAMWOOD was used to assess long-term implications of selected riparian management regimes on the standing crop of wood in channels. Total wood volume (volume of all pieces intersecting the channel) strongly related to the width of the non-harvested riparian forest. A riparian forest width of 30 m was associated with 90% of the maximum site potential, which was the standing crop associated with a 75-rn non-harvested forest. Plantation forests (clearcut at time intervals up to 120 years) had very little effect on total wood volume in rip arian forests with non-harvested forests at least 10 m wide. These results suggest that forest age and width of the non-harvested buffer was more important than the rotation age of plantation forests in providing long-term supplies of wood to the streams. ©Copyright by Mark A. Meleason April 30, 2001 All Rights Reserved A SIMULATION MODEL OF WOOD DYNAMICS IN PACIFIC NORTHWEST STREAMS