Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Data Analysis: A Model Comparison Approach, Second Edition

This completely rewritten classic text features many new examples, insights and topics including mediational, categorical, and multilevel models. Substantially reorganized, this edition provides a briefer, more streamlined examination of data analysis. Noted for its model-comparison approach and unified framework based on the general linear model, the book provides readers with a greater understanding of a variety of statistical procedures. This consistent framework, including consistent vocabulary and notation, is used throughout to develop fewer but more powerful model building techniques. The authors show how all analysis of variance and multiple regression can be accomplished within this framework. The model-comparison approach provides several benefits:
Interactive Topic Modeling

Topic models have been used extensively as a tool for corpus exploration, and a cottage industry has developed to tweak topic models to better encode human intuitions or to better model data. However, creating such extensions requires expertise in machine learning unavail-able to potential end-users of topic modeling software. In this work, we develop a frame-work for allowing users to iteratively reﬁne the topics discovered by models such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) by adding constraints that enforce that sets of words must ap-pear together in the same topic. We incorporate these constraints interactively by selectively removing elements in the state of a Markov Chain used for inference; we investigate a va-riety of methods for incorporating this information and demonstrate that these interactively added constraints improve topic usefulness for simulated and actual user sessions.
Space-Time Block Coding for Wireless Communications

Space-time coding is a technique that promises greatly improved performance in wireless networks by using multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver. Space-Time Block Coding for Wireless Communications is an introduction to the theory of this technology. The authors develop the topic using a unified framework and cover a variety of topics ranging from information theory to performance analysis and state-of-the-art space-time coding methods for both flat and frequency-selective fading multiple-antenna channels. The authors concentrate on key principles rather than specific practical applications, and present the material in a concise and accessible manner. Their treatment reviews the fundamental aspects of multiple-input, multiple output communication theory, and guides the reader through a number of topics at the forefront of current research and development. The book includes homework exercises and is aimed at graduate students and researchers working on wireless communications, as well as practitioners in the wireless industry.
Focus effects on Cantonese tones: an acoustic study

This paper discusses how the prosodic marking of sentential focus influences the acoustical pattern of F0 in Cantonese monosyllabic words. Results indicate that tone identities are maintained regardless of the focus conditions, and that a substantial pitch range expansion is associated with narrow focus. Pitch range is affected by the tone-focus interaction. The pitch range differences between the broad focus and narrow focus readings of each target word are insignificant.
A new assistive communication system for the serious disabled

In this research, we realized an assistive system based on lips images recognition [1][2][3] for the communication of the disabled. This system is composed of the software system mainly and the auxiliary hardware system. In the software system, we developed a recognition algorithm for the open/close status of lips images, including the face detection, the face tracking, the lips pattern recognition, the lips locations and extraction, the lips images processing, etc., and developed a fuzzy algorithm to recognize long tone/silence or short tone/silence of Morse codes [4]. After the fuzzy recognition, the open/close statuses of lips images can be transferred to Morse codes to input the letters, achieving the functions of word processing. Regarding the hardware of the lips-control assistive communication system, we have primarily realized the remote control system for electrical home appliances. Once the system obtains information of open/close statuses of lips images after recognition, the original parallel port interface of general computer and RF module can be used to carry out further remote control functions of home appliances. In conclusion, we have completed an assistive communication system for the disabled without wearing any appurtenance. After finishing some word processing tests and home appliance control tests for the whole system, we believe that the new augmentative assistive communication system will be more helpful for the serious disabled especially with vertebra damaged. We hope our study can improve the communication abilities of the disabled and make some contributions to society.
Action scheduling in humanoid conversational agents

This paper presents an approach to action scheduling in lifelike humanoid agents. The action scheduler constitutes a module in the agent which links the mental processes to the physical actions of the agent. It receives requests from the agent's behavior generating modules and schedules them to be executed at the appropriate time, handling such tasks as speech-to-action synchronization, concurrent and overlapping behavior blending
Evaluate and Improve GUI Testing Coverage Automatically

Evaluating coverage criteria is a core subject in software testing. Coverage can be evaluated based on several concerns such as: code, requirements, syntax, paths, decisions, graph, etc. The focus of this research is in evaluating the Graphical User Interface (GUI) testing coverage. In this research, several GUI model based methods are proposed and evaluated for the goal of automatically testing user interfaces and evaluate the testing coverage. The user interfaces’ components of tested applications are collected while applications are running and this information is used to build a GUI structural model. This model is used as an input for the process of generating test cases automatically and on considering different aspects of GUI coverage such as GUI paths, edges, nodes, or components. Microsoft NModel and SpecExplorer are used as tools for the GUI model verification. This is usually accomplished indirectly through generating test cases from the model and evaluating the model through the effectiveness and coverage of the generated test cases.
Creating Surface Models in Virtual Reality

The need for modelling objects into a three-dimension representation exists. We investigate the design of a surface modelling tool to map real objects, in real time. Emphasis is placed on achieving a simple yet effective method. Capturing the topology of the object is done via a six-degree-of-freedom input device. A Virtual Reality system is used to stress the interactivity and intuitiveness of the tool.
Novel Statistical Models for Complex Data Structures

Rapid advance in sensor and information technology has resulted in both spatially and temporally data-rich environment, which creates a pressing need for us to develop novel statistical methods and the associated computational tools to extract intelligent knowledge and informative patterns from these massive datasets. The statistical challenges for addressing these massive datasets lay in their complex structures, such as high-dimensionality, hierarchy, multi-modality, heterogeneity and data uncertainty. Besides the statistical challenges, the associated computational approaches are also considered essential in achieving efficiency, effectiveness, as well as the numerical stability in practice. On the other hand, some recent developments in statistics and machine learning, such as sparse learning, transfer learning, and some traditional methodologies which still hold potential, such as multi-level models, all shed lights on addressing these complex datasets in a statistically powerful and computationally efficient way. In this dissertation, we identify four kinds of general complex datasets, including "high-dimensional datasets", "hierarchically-structured datasets", "multimodality datasets" and "data uncertainties", which are ubiquitous in many domains, such as biology, medicine, neuroscience, health care delivery, manufacturing, etc. We depict the development of novel statistical models to analyze complex datasets which fall under these four categories, and we show how these models can be applied to some real-world applications, such as Alzheimer's disease research, nursing care process, and manufacturing.
CAP5512 : Homework 2 The Evolution of Cooperation

Use the GA you implemented for Homework 1 to search strategies to play the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Each strategy is a GA individual. You can use the representation Axelrod used [1] or any other one that you may design. Each strategy remembers the three previous turns with a given player. The fitness of a strategy in the population is defined as the average cumulative score the strategy will obtain after playing 100 times with itself and with every other member of the population. For instance, if you are using a population size 20, you will have to average 20 cumulative scores obtained by playing against each of the 20 population members.
Exploring Speculative Techniques to Improve the Memory System Performance

As processor clock speeds have increased along with microarchitectural innovations, the gap between processor and memory performance has become a greater bottleneck and improvements in memory system design have become more important. This dissertation focuses on improving memory performance through the addition of novel functionalities in the memory system. Specifically, we have proposed two different techniques to hide the latency for memory accesses: Incorrect Speculation and Address Correlation. Both techniques, while based on different ideas, try to reduce or eliminate the misses in the data cache either by prefetching or data forwarding. The two techniques of prefetching and data forwarding by correlated addresses are complementary, one trying to bring the data into the cache before it is requested by the processor, and the other trying to forward the data that is already residing in the cache at one or more correlated addresses on a miss of a requested address. The speculated execution of threads in a multithreaded architecture, plus the branch prediction used in each thread execution units, allows many instructions to be executed speculatively, that is, before it is known whether they actually will be needed by the program. We have examined how the load instructions executed on what turn out to be incorrectly executed program paths impact the memory system performance. We have
MBSLAB: A NEW COLLABORATIVE SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT FOR MULTIBODY SYSTEM ANALYSIS

This article describes a new collaborative simulation environment for multibody system analysis designed to streamline the development, testing and evaluation of new methods for multibody system simulation. The environment, named MbsLab, is made up of 3 components: (1) MbsML, a neutral and extensible XML-based language for describing multibody system models and related information, (2) MbsEngine, an open-source modular simulation tool that uses MbsML as native data format, and (3) MbsBenchmark, a benchmarking suite for multibody system analysis software. The three components can be used together to develop and compare the performance of new simulation methods in a short time. Currently, the environment only supports rigid bodies, but it is expected to grow to support flexible bodies, contact, impact, etc.
Una visión integral para el uso racional de la energía en la aplicación de motores eléctricos de inducción

In this paper we present several technological options to implement the rational use of energy in the application of electric induction motors. The objective is, to reduce the costs associated with the con- sumption of energy. In the perspective to present and in- tegral vision of the problem, each of the variables that in- teract in the motor performan- ce is analyzed, such are: power quality, estimate of the power, charge decrease, high efficiency motors, economic evaluation, application of electronic controllers, repair and maintenance. The final objective is to decrease the costs associated with the con- sumption of energy and to the maintenance of the same, thus far, reducing the cost of pro- duction, and increasing the productivity of the business.
Polarized sensory positioning (PSP) as a sensory profiling technique

Polarized sensory positioning (PSP) was originally developed for easy defi nition of the sensory characteristics of drinking water without presenting too many samples. The method was then revealed to be applicable to various kinds of products (cosmetics, aromas, etc.) and appeared to be a good alternative to classical sensory profiling techniques. PSP is based on comparison with a constant set of references (poles), and provides a new type of sensory data requiring dedicated data analysis. This chapter presents the PSP methodology and its application to the taste of water. Data collection, results reliability and results stability are discussed. Finally, more than a sensory methodology, PSP looks like a philosophy in sensory data aggregation. The applications could be numerous, and the method should be adapted to new problems.
Revisiting the GameFlow model with detailed heuristics

The GameFlow model strives to be a general model of player enjoyment, applicable to all game genres and platforms. Derived from a general set of heuristics for creating enjoyable player experiences, the GameFlow model has been widely used in evaluating many types of games, as well as non-game applications. However, we recognize that more specific, low-level, and implementable criteria are potentially more useful for designing and evaluating video games. Consequently, the research reported in this paper aims to provide detailed heuristics for designing and evaluating one specific game genre, real-time strategy games. In order to develop these heuristics, we conducted a grounded theoretical analysis on a set of professional game reviews and structured the resulting heuristics using the GameFlow model. A selection of the resulting 165 heuristics are presented in this paper and discussed with respect to key evaluations of the GameFlow model.
Trust-based automated recommendation making

Recommender systems are one of the recent inventions to deal with ever growing information overload in relation to the selection of goods and services in a global economy. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most popular techniques in recommender systems. The CF recommends items to a target user based on the preferences of a set of similar users known as the neighbours, generated from a database made up of the preferences of past users. With sufficient background information of item ratings, its performance is promising enough but research shows that it performs very poorly in a cold start situation where there is not enough previous rating data. As an alternative to ratings, trust between the users could be used to choose the neighbour for recommendation making. Better recommendations can be achieved using an inferred trust network which mimics the real world "friend of a friend" recommendations. To extend the boundaries of the neighbour, an effective trust inference technique is required. This thesis proposes a trust interference technique called Directed Series Parallel Graph (DSPG) which performs better than other popular trust inference algorithms such as TidalTrust and MoleTrust. Another problem is that reliable explicit trust data is not always available. In real life, people trust "word of mouth" recommendations made by people with similar interests. This is often assumed in the recommender system. By conducting a survey, we can confirm that interest similarity has a positive relationship with trust and this can be used to generate a trust network for recommendation. In this research, we also propose a new method called SimTrust for developing trust networks based on user's interest similarity in the absence of explicit trust data. To identify the interest similarity, we use user's personalised tagging information. However, we are interested in what resources the user chooses to tag, rather than the text of the tag applied. The commonalities of the resources being tagged by the users can be used to form the neighbours used in the automated recommender system. Our experimental results show that our proposed tag-similarity based method outperforms the traditional collaborative filtering approach which usually uses rating data.
Segmentation TV series into scenes using speaker diarization

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to perform scene segmentation of TV series. Using the output of our existing speaker diarization system, any temporal segment of the video can be described as a binary feature vector. A straightforward segmentation algorithm then allows to group similar contiguous speaker segments into scenes. An additional visual-only color-based segmentation is then used to refine the first segmentation. Experiments are performed on a subset of the Ally McBeal TV series and show promising results, obtained with a rule-free and genericmethod. For comparison purposes, test corpus annotations and description are made available to the community.
A Multivariate Analysis of the Human Factors and Preferences Towards Digital Publishing Platforms for the iPad

Tablet computers are widely adopted in America today, with 34% of American adults ages 18+ owning these type of devices (PEW, 2013). With the emergence of new portable computer technology, reading has become more popular than ever before on digital devices. In particular, tablet computers have enabled users to read enhanced EBook material that, while still text driven, incorporate all facets of multimedia and technology. With many different digital publishing solutions available for publishers to deploy their content, the goal of this research study was to determine if there are significant differences in user preferences and comprehension for a publication recreated with three different digital publishing solutions (Adobe DPS, iBooks Author, and EPUB). The methodology of this research study was a human factors experiment testing for a significant difference in the reading experience of subjects exposed to one of three digital publications. A field experiment consisting of ninety individuals assessed these publications, thirty for each of the three output formats. Each publication was evaluated by the subjects in terms of the following criteria: • The value added by the multimedia elements of the publication • Their pleasure with the overall experience • Their interaction with the multimedia elements • Their ability to recognize information and comprehend material from the publication The key results of this experiment determined that: • No significant difference among the publications was found for: o The pleasure with the overall experience o The interaction with the multimedia elements • A marginally significant difference among the publications was found for: o The value added by the multimedia elements of the publication • A significant differences among the publications was found for: o The ability to recognize information and comprehend material from the publication Ultimately, these results showed a trend that readers’ of the digital publishing platforms that allowed for greater interactivity experienced more value added by the multimedia elements of the publication and increased ability to recognize information from the publication. However, the pleasure with the overall experience of the publication and the readers’ interaction with the multimedia elements in the publication was determined to not have a significant difference between the publications. Therefore, while readers’ did not tend to interact differently with the multimedia content or experience any greater pleasure based on the publication they read, readers’ of more interactive publications did tend to see more value added by the multimedia elements and were better able to recognize the information they had experienced.
INDEXING THE EVOLUTION OF MOVING OBJECTS WITHIN A 2D SPACE USING THE BRICKR STRUCTURES

A growing number of applications manage mobile objects. The storage and the organization within databases of data describing the evolution of these objects is an open challenge. Data must be managed in efficient structures with respect to both the storage space consumed and the data access through these structures. An indexing method that organizes the evolutions of spatial objects within a 2D space is proposed in this paper. The Dynamic-BrickR access method uses two structures: an underlying permanent R*-Tree structure, and an in-memory dynamic space grid structure, that it used for building the terminal nodes to feed the R*-Tree. Experiments show significant improvements of the DynamicBrickR method over the R*-Tree index, regarding the dead space and the overlapping volumes. The Dynamic-BrickR inherits from the R*-Tree the capability to be used in answering spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal queries.
A Performance Study of Internet Web Servers

In presenting this thesis in partial fullllment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis work or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis or parts thereof for nancial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis. Requests for permission to copy or to make other use of material in this thesis in whole or part should be addressed to: Abstract The phenomenal growth in popularity of the WorldWide Web (WWW or \the Web") has made WWW traac the fastest growing component of network packet and byte traac on the NSFNET backbone. This growth has triggered much recent research activity aimed at improving Web performance and scalability: reducing the volume of network traac produced by Web clients and servers by using le/document caching, and reducing the latency for WWW users by using improved protocols for Web interaction. Fundamental to the goal of improving WWW performance is an understanding of WWW workloads. This thesis presents a workload characterization study for WorldWide Web servers. Six diierent data sets are used in this study: three from academic (i.e., university) environments, two from scientiic research organizations, and one from a commercial Internet provider. These data sets represent three different orders of magnitude in server activity, and two diierent orders of magnitude in time duration, ranging from one week of activity to one year of activity. The research in this thesis is divided into two parts. In the rst part, emphasis is placed on nding workload invariants: observations that apply across all data sets. Ten invariants are identiied. These invariants are deemed important since they (potentially) represent universal truths for all WorldWide Web servers. The second part of the thesis uses the invariants identiied in the workload characterization to suggest performance enhancements …