Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Prosthetic Breast Reconstruction

A prosthesis breast reconstruction (108) suitable for implantation into a hollow of a breast after intervention lumpectomy in which a mass of tissue is excised from the breast prosthesis breast reconstruction (108) comprising: a compressible body implant with a sealed interior without liquid (170) configured at least generally to match the implant shape that matches the shape of the tissue mass excised from the breast and having an ovoid shape; and a holding structure with the shape of the implant configured to maintain the implant body mentioned shape of the implant based, said retaining structure with the shape of the implant comprises a coil spring (172) configured to prevent falling mesh 174 configured to prevent undesired widening fixing a certain area of ​​the implant body (170); breast reconstruction prostheses mentioned have a lower density tissue mass excised from the breast total density.
Expressing Knowledge about Protein Interactions in Attempto Controlled English

Scientists are challenged by an ever-increasing number of scientific papers which makes it hard for them to keep track of the relevant literature. A promising solution of this problem is to provide scientists with computational support accessing and evaluating scientific results. A well-known approach is to use natural language processing (NLP) together with the techniques of text mining and summarizing. In this thesis we suggest another approach: the results of scientific papers are summarized by its authors in a formal language, and these formal summaries are added to the papers. In this way we make the results of scientific papers readable and – to some degree – understandable by computers. As formal language we use Attempto Controlled English (ACE) that is a controlled natural language [7]. Controlled natural languages combine the natural look and feel of natural languages with the processability of formal languages. This makes them to prime candidates for the formal representation of scientific results. Since they are easy to learn and understand, a researcher has not to spend a lot of time learning a complicated formal language. To demonstrate the practicality of our approach, we build an ontology for protein interactions in ACE and show how scientific results can be expressed using this ontology. Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank Norbert E. Fuchs who brought me into the fields of logic and controlled natural languages. He made it possible for me to do my diploma thesis on this interesting topic. His support during the four months was indispensable. Furthermore I thank Kaarel Kaljurand for his help on the parser and his general comments to the thesis. Next, I would like to thank Michael Schroeder who suggested the cooperation between Zurich and Dresden which allowed me to spend one exciting month in Dresden. A big thank goes to Loic Royer who supported me during the time in Dresden and who was a big help in digging into the field of bioinformatics, which was a completely new field for me. I have to thank all the people of the Attempto group in Zurich and of the bioinformatics group in Dresden. They made my four months of hard work exciting, pleasant, and fruitful. Last but not least, I would like to thank Michael Hess who was the responsible professor and made it all possible.
Assessing Asynchronous Discussions: An Exploratory Hybrid Model

Given the increasing import of asynchronous discussions to achieving learning objectives, this analysis proposes an exploratory assessment model that involves three levels of analysis, i.e., argument structure, disagreement, and interaction. The model promotes objective, systematic assessment; streamlines the assessment process; and clearly defines expectations for students, which realizes more meaningful and focused discussions.
Transaction management on multidatabase systems

Two components of transaction management in multidatabase systems are concurrency control and reliability. Multidatabase systems constructed from autonomous independent database managers are an alternative to homogeneous integrated distributed database systems. Multidatabase transaction management has long been of interest, but general solutions to the problems have only recently been forthcoming. Early approaches were either read-only or permitted updates to only one of the underlying databases at a time, required modification to the underlying database systems, or suggested that the DBMS scheduler be replaced with another which controlled transactions from "above". The most pessimistic scenario is assumed in this research, where individual database managers on the multidatabase system are totally autonomous. The work contributes first by demonstrating the importance of and provide a formal model for multidatabase systems. The formalism is capable of capturing the issues related to both concurrency control and reliability. The second contribution is to provide two new concurrency control algorithms which permit global updates that span multiple databases. The correctness of these algorithms is demonstrated using an extension of the well-known serializability notion called multidatabase serializability. Most importantly the thesis contributes by reporting on the development of algorithms which guarantee reliability. The algorithms facilitating reliability ensure both transaction atomicity and crash recovery.
Networking Virtual Sound and Physical Space in Audio-Augmented Environments

This paper describes strategies to create multimodal coherences between sound and space in Audio-Augmented Environments. Visitors to AAEs wear motion-tracked wireless headphones displaying a location-aware, adaptive audio presentation augmenting the physical space with virtual sound-scenes. The work underlying this paper was done by the author during the course of the LISTEN project at Fraunhofer IMK[1][2]. In the first half, the concept of the ‘perceptual device’ is introduced, which allows attaching audio content to a physical space. In the second part this i s supported by practical examples from the publicly accessible AAE “Macke Labor”. The “Macke Labor” was installed at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, opening in October 15 2003. It was developed by the author with an interdisciplinary team of collaborators. The paper is rounded off with the description of the sonification technique used in the evaluation of the recorded tracking and event data of the “Macke Labor”.
Authentication Under Denial-of-Service Attacks

This paper is concerned with authenticated communication using public keys which has been designed to minimize the potential for denial-of-service attacks in an ad-hoc network. To this aim, we use substantial hardware support and require certain properties from the network. We show how communication partners get the public keys and how keys can be changed. We consider various methods of attack and their effect on our system. Although we can diminish the attack possibilities, we cannot completely protect our system from denial-of-service attacks due to its ad-hoc nature.
An Algorithm for Initial Fluxes of Metabolic P Systems

A central issue in systems biology is the study of efficient methods inferring fluxes of biological reactions by starting from experimental data. Among the different techniques proposed in the last years, the theory of Metabolic P systems, which is based on the Log-Gain principle, proved to be helpful for deducing biologi- cal fluxes from temporal series of observed dynamics. According to this approach, the algebraic systems provided by the Log-Gain principle determine the reaction fluxes underlying a system dynamics when initial fluxes are known. Here we propose a heuristic algorithm for estimating the initial fluxes, that is tested in two case studies.
Two-dimensional mapping of expansive unknown areas

I 7 Introduction . 1.1 . 1.2 Problem Statement . 3 . 3 I . 3 Related Research . 7 1.4 Approach . 1 . 5 Overview . Pose Estimation by Feature Matching . 9 . 9 2.1 Approach . 7 2.1.1 World Model . 2.1.2 Features . 2. I . 3 Feature Prediction . 2.1.4 Feature Extraction . 2.1 S Feature Matching . 2.1. 6 Error Minimization . 13 2.2 Results . 2.3 Discussion . Pose Estimation by Iconic Matching . 25 3. I Using a Hand Measured Map. 3. I . I Correspndeuce Determination . 3. I . 2 Correspondence Error Minimiz . 28 . 3.2 Using a Scan-Generated Map . 3.3 One to One Matching . 3.2.1 Results . 3.3. I Results . 3.4.1 Results . 3.5. 1 Results . Comparison to Feature-Based Method . _ Comparison to Cox's and Gonzalez's A . 34 3.4 One to Many . 3.5 Multiple Sirnulta . 3.6 3.7 . 39 3.8 Discussion . Contour Mapping Theory . 40 4.1
Agents for Plan Monitoring and Repair

Abstract : A key aspect to the successful planning and execution of tasks in an agent-enabled organization is the timely access to up-to-date information. Agents making decisions on behalf of human users need to access and verify information from multiple heterogeneous information sources, such as internal organizational databases (personal schedules, staff lists), real-time sensors (traffic and weather updates), as well as many types of public information (airline schedules, restaurant listings, etc). To address the problems of accessing and verifying information from heterogeneous sources, we developed a set of techniques for learning to recognize the content of the required information. The capability makes it possible to automatically access and maintain wrappers to extract data from online sources. It also provides semantic interoperability among software agents: to verify information from other agents, identify semantic mismatches in data, as well as automatically determine the type of information being communicated by an agent.
Optimization of aspect-instantiation strategies in the JIT-compiler

Aspect-instantiation policies define the rules how aspect instances are, looked-up and instantiated. Current aspect-oriented languages implementations are restricted to generating bytecode for realizing the semantics of aspect instantiation. Often however, bytecode is not expressive enough to support the most efficient optimizations. The ALIA4J framework for implementing execution environments with support for aspect-oriented languages allows implementing the semantics of language features in terms of bytecode generation and JIT-compilation. In this thesis a JIT compilation strategy for aspect-instantiation is developed that supports a variety of aspect-instantiation policies, ranging from singleton and per-object policies to per-multiple-object policies. The compilation strategy is benchmarked and its performance is compared to state-of-the-art aspect-oriented language implementations.
Mapping a Landscape of Texts

What does ‘mapping’ mean when applied to a large corpus of artistic documents one wishes to examine? How can the methodologies of ‘distant reading’ (Franco Moretti) be applied to contemporary performative writing? In order to translate a corpus of texts into a spatial map, this paper proposes to use tools from computational linguistics and information visualization. For the research project ‘Belgium is Happening’, a large corpus of performative writings from Flemish and Dutch post-war theatre was digitized. These were processed computationally in order to determine their intertextual distances. Next, the set of all document nodes and their intertextual distances was visualized as a series of network graphs. The resulting graphs clearly distinguish authorship clusters. They make clear which authors wrote in a closely related style, and help to identify specific subgenres of experimental writing and style. Such a map literally provides a bird's eye view of the different experimental texts, and it also makes it possible to question existing groupings in literary history using the results of the automatic clustering approach.
A Scalable Cluster-based Web Server with Cooperative Caching Support

Clustering provides a viable approach to building scalable Web systems with increased computing power and abundant storage space for data and contents. We present a pure-Java-based parallel Web server with load balancing features for a heterogeneous cluster environment. Our design introduces a special in-memory cache layer, called the global object space (GOS), which is an integration of specially setaside physical memory of individual participating cluster nodes. The GOS provides a unified view of cluster-wide memory resources and allows transparent accesses to cached objects independent of where they are located physically. The core of the GOS is a mechanism that performs dynamic in-memory caching of frequently requested Web objects. Using a technique known as cooperative caching, a requested Web object can be fetched from a node’s local cache or a peer server’s local cache, with the disk serving only as the last resort. A prototype system based on the W3C’s Jigsaw server has been implemented on a 16-node PC cluster. Three cluster-aware cache replacement algorithms were tested and evaluated. The benchmark results show good speedups with a real-life access log, proving that cooperative caching can have significant positive impacts on the performance of cluster-based parallel Web servers. 1 A preliminary version of this paper appeared in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (Cluster 2001), Newport Beach, California, October 2001, under the title “Building a Scalable Web Server with Global Object Space Support on Heterogeneous Clusters”. 2 Corresponding author: G. Chen, Department of Computer Science & Information Systems, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong / Email: gechen@csis.hku. hk / Fax: (+852) 2559 8447.
L'industrie de défense chinoise : forces et faiblesses du gigantisme

Depuis quelques annees, les consortiums de defense chinois menent des programmes ambitieux qui temoignent d’une nouvelle capacite de R&D. L’integration des capacites civilo-militaires au sein du paysage industriel de defense semble constituer une des cles de ce succes. Si elles ne constituent pas encore des acteurs majeurs au niveau mondial, il semble neanmoins que ces entites, portees par une volonte politique, ambitionnent de se positionner rapidement a l’international.
Hierarchical task network planning: formalization, analysis, and implementation

Planning is a central activity in many areas including robotics, manufacturing, space mission sequencing, and logistics. As the size and complexity of planning problems grow, there is great economic pressure to automate this process in order to reduce the cost of planning effort, and to improve the quality of produced plans. AI planning research has focused on general-purpose planning systems which can process the specifications of an application domain and generate solutions to planning problems in that domain. Unfortunately, there is a big gap between theoretical and application oriented work in AI planning. The theoretical work has been mostly based on state-based planning, which has limited practical applications. The application-oriented work has been based on hierarchical task network (HTN) planning, which lacks a theoretical foundation. As a result, in spite of many years of research, building planning applications remains a formidable task. The goal of this dissertation is to facilitate building reliable and effective planning applications. The methodology includes design of a mathematical framework for HTN planning, analysis of this framework, development of provably correct algorithms based on this analysis, and the implementation of these algorithms for further evaluation and exploration. The representation, analyses, and algorithms described in this thesis will make it easier to apply HTN planning techniques effectively and correctly to planning applications. The precise and mathematical nature of the descriptions will also help teaching about HTN planning, will clarify misconceptions in the literature, and will stimulate further research.
Spatial squeezing techniques for low bit-rate multichannel audio coding

In recent years, significant research has been focused on efficient compression and representation of multichannel spatial audio signals. Recent developments in this area exploit spatial audio cues representing inter-channel mathematical relationships. The original multichannel signal is downmixed to a backward compatible mono/stereo signal, while the spatial cues are utilized for recovering the surround sound. It is shown that, these approaches provide efficient coding of multichannel spatial audio signals, in terms of both bit-rate reduction and perceptual quality. However, drawbacks can be found in these approaches as the spatial cues do not represent perceptually relevant information, which can result in inefficient quantisation, as well as perceptual distortion of the localisation characteristics of the soundfield. Furthermore, in these approaches, as the downmixing and spatial cue derivation algorithm is specifically designed to suit a certain multichannel audio format, the flexibility and extensibility for coding future multichannel audio formats is limited. The Spatially Squeezing Surround Audio Coding (S3AC) is presented in this thesis as an alternative efficient solution for the representation of spatial audio signals. Based on estimating sound source and localisation information in the spatial soundfield, the fundamental idea in S3AC is to represent a surround soundfield with a ‘squeezed’ soundfield by exploiting perceptual localisation irrelevancy. In particular, it is shown that, while limited perceptual precision is required for representing localisation information of a surround soundfield without perceptual distortion, the localisation precision computationally derivable for a small soundfield is adequate
An ontological approach in quality assessment of modelling and simulation.

Modelling and simulation (M&S) is frequently used as problem solving tool, but in many cases the resulting models produce highly uncertain outcomes, often due to a poor body of knowledge on which these models are based. Further the M&S methodology is ill-defined, which leads to irreproducible results of M&S studies. To improve the quality of model based decision support in water management in The Netherlands a ‘good practice’ approach has been chosen. The resulting Good Modelling Practice handbook gives guidelines on what to do, how to do it and what to avoid. Finally, plans are discussed for future expansion of quality assurance for M&S.
Feature selection with a general hybrid algorithm

The Feature Selection problem involves discovering a subset of features, such that a classifier built only with this subset would have better predictive accuracy than a classifier built from the entire set of features. A large number of algorithms have already been proposed for the feature selection problem. Although significantly different with regards to (1) the search strategy they use to determine the right subset of features and (2) how each subset is evaluated, feature selection algorithms are usually classified in three general groups: Filters, Wrappers and Hybrid solutions. In this thesis, we propose a new hybrid system for the problem of feature selection in machine learning. The idea behind this new algorithm, FortalFS, is to extract and combine the best characteristics of filters and wrappers in one algorithm. FortalFS uses results from another feature selection system as a starting point in the search through subsets of features that are evaluated by a machine learning algorithm. With an efficient search heuristic, we can decrease the number of subsets of features to be evaluated by the learning algorithm, consequently decreasing computational effort and still be able to select an accurate subset. We have also designed a variant of the original algorithm in the attempt to work with feature weighting algorithm. In order to evaluate this new algorithm, a number of experiments were run and the results compared to well-known feature selection filter and wrapper algorithms, such as Focus, Relief, LVF, and others. Such experiments were run aver a number of datasets from the UCI Repository. Results showed that FortalFS outperforms most of the algorithms significantly. However, it presents time-consuming performance similar to that of wrappers. Additional experiments using specially designed artificial datasets demonstrated that FortalFS is able to identify and remove both irrelevant, redundant and randomly class-correlated features. The FortalFS time-consumption issue is addressed through parallelism. A parallel version of FortalFS based on the master/slave design pattern is implemented and evaluated. In several experiments, we were able to achieve near optimal speedups.
Wikipedia as Participatory Journalism: Reliable Sources? Metrics for evaluating collaborative media as a news resource

Wikipedia is an Internet-based, user contributed encyclopedia that is collaboratively edited, and utilizes the wiki concept – the idea that any user on the Internet can change any page within the Web site, even anonymously. Paradoxically, this seemingly chaotic process has created a highly regarded reference on the Internet. Wikipedia has emerged as the largest example of participatory journalism to date – facilitating many-to-many communication among users editing articles, all working towards maintaining a neutral point of view — Wikipedia’s mantra. This study examines the growth of Wikipedia and analyzes the crucial technologies and community policies that have enabled the project to prosper. It also analyzes Wikipedia’s articles that have been cited in the news media, and establishes a set of metrics based on established encyclopedia taxonomies and analyzes the trends in Wikipedia being used as a source.
The Archaeological Evidence for Metallurgy and Related Technologies in Mesopotamia, c. 5500–2100 B.C.

In the remarkable expansion of archaeometallurgical studies in the last fifteen or twenty years Mesopotamia, where much pioneer work was done fifty years ago, has steadily slipped from view. This is in marked contrast to the time when Woolley's discoveries in the “Royal Cemetery” at Ur gave the Sumerians an assured place in general studies of early metallurgy. As research priorities in archaeometallurgy in the Near East moved to the investigation of the primary processes of metal exploitation and the development of support technologies, the source zones of Anatolia, of the Negev and Sinai, and of Iran inevitably eclipsed a region which had always been an importer of metals, to a greater or lesser degree already processed. This excluded Mesopotamia from a role as innovator in the basic techniques of metal recovery, and also probably in pioneering the skills of smelting and of alloying copper. Nor, for the same reasons, has Mesopotamia been drawn into the lively debate about the relative significance of external forces and internal transformation mechanisms in the development of metallurgy in prehistoric Europe, for which the primary eastern point of reference was Anatolia. But the certain fact that Mesopotamia had to import all her metal has kept metallurgy among the factors considered in current debates over explanatory models for the emergence of a complex society there in the later fourth and earlier third millennium B.C., some-times giving rise to conclusions hard to reconcile with the sparse archaeological record.