Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Enabling data Driven projects for a modern Enterprise

With the growing volume and demand for data a major concern for an Organization trying to implement Data Driven projects, is not only how to technically collect, cleanse, integrate, access, but even more so, how and why to use it. There is a lack of unification on a logical and technical level between Data Scientists, IT departments and Business departments, as it is very unclear where the data comes from, what it looks like, what it contains and how to process it in the context of existing systems. So in this paper we present a platform for data exploration and processing, which enables Data-Driven projects, that does not require a complete organizational revamp, but provides a workflow and technical basis for such projects.
Signature Verification using Normalized Static Features and Neural Network Classification

Signature verification is very widely used in verification of the identity of any person. Now a days other biometric verification system has been evolved very widely like figure print, iris etc., but signature verification through computer system is still in development phase. The verification system is either through offline mode or online mode in online systems the dynamic information of a signature captured at the time the signature is made while in offline systems based on the scanned image of a signature. In this paper, a method is presented for Offline signatures Verification, for this verification system signature image is first pre-processed and converted into binary image of same size with 200x200 Pixels and then different features are extracted from the image like Eccentricity, Kurtosis, Skewness etc. and that features are used to train the neural network using back-propagation technique. For this verification system 6 different user signatures are taken to make database of the feature and results are analysed. The result demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methodology when compared with other existing studies. The proposed algorithm gives False Acceptance Rate (FAR) as 5.05% and False Rejection rate (FRR) as 4.25%. Full Text: PDF DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.11591/ijece.v6i6. 10909
Fuzziness for classification and visual query interface: platform independent query model with self-adaptive fuzzy capabilities

Imprecision provides a range of freedom in expressing personal and group opinions. It is the common style for expressing opinions in formal and informal daily communications. However, the research community neglected imprecision until 1960s and all automated database management systems are still based on crisp values. Thanks to Prof. Zadeh who initiated the research efforts on fuzziness; his seminal work in 1960s stimulated, prepared for and produced the current interest to incorporate imprecision (fuzziness) in automated systems. In general, fuzziness can be specified using one of three alternative approaches, namely manually by the user, semi-automated or fully automated. These three approaches are considered and investigated further in my research described in this dissertation. I demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of these alternatives by concentrating on data mining and query coding. In particular, I am describing how they can be incorporated in building classification model and user-centric query interface. A classification model enriched with fuzziness expresses the classification rules using fuzzy terms which are more understandable by humans whether experts or naive. In other words, the outcome from the classifier model will be expressed using fuzzy terms instead of crisp values. Though the three alternative approaches can be equally applied in building the classifier model, this study concentrates on employing the semi-automated method to specify the fuzzy sets and their corresponding membership functions. The user-centric query interface is very common application that allows expressing both the input and the output using fuzzy terms. This is becoming a need in the evolving internet-based era where web-based applications are very common and the number of users accessing structured databases is increasing rapidly. Restricting the user group to only experts in query coding must be avoided. In this regard, I developed a user-friendly visual user interface that facilitates expressing queries using both fuzziness and traditional method. The fuzziness is not expressed explicitly inside the database; fuzziness is absorbed and effectively handled by an intermediate layer which is incorporated between the front-end visual user-interface and the back-end database. Test results and user studies demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach to handle and deal with fuzziness. My results should open the gate wide for other applications to consider fuzziness as described in this thesis. Index Terms: classification, fuzziness, user interface, query coding, visualization, user study.
Compact UWB monopole antenna with quadruple band notched characteristics

ABSTRACT A compact planar Ultrawideband (UWB) monopole antenna with quadruple band notch characteristics is proposed. The proposed antenna consists of a notched rectangular radiating patch with a 50 Ω microstrip feed line, and a defected ground plane. The quadruple band notched functions are achieved by utilising two inverted U-shaped slots, a symmetrical split ring resonator pair (SSRRP) and a via hole. The fabricated antenna has a compact size of 24 mm × 30 mm × 1.6 mm with an impedance bandwidth ranging from 2.86 to 12.2 GHz for magnitude of S11 < −10 dB. The four band notched characteristics of proposed antenna are in the WiMAX (worldwide interoperability for microwave access) band (3.25–3.55 GHz), C band (3.7–4.2 GHz), WLAN (wireless local area network) band (5.2–5.9 GHz) and the downlink frequency band of X band (7–7.8 GHz) for satellite communication are obtained. The measured and simulation results of proposed antenna are in good agreement to achieve impedance matching, stable radiation patterns, constant gain and group delay over the operating bandwidth.
Sentinel-1-based flood mapping: a fully automated processing chain

ABSTRACT This article presents an automated Sentinel-1-based processing chain designed for flood detection and monitoring in near-real-time (NRT). Since no user intervention is required at any stage of the flood mapping procedure, the processing chain allows deriving time-critical disaster information in less than 45 min after a new data set is available on the Sentinel Data Hub of the European Space Agency (ESA). Due to the systematic acquisition strategy and high repetition rate of Sentinel-1, the processing chain can be set up as a web-based service that regularly informs users about the current flood conditions in a given area of interest. The thematic accuracy of the thematic processor has been assessed for two test sites of a flood situation at the border between Greece and Turkey with encouraging overall accuracies between 94.0% and 96.1% and Cohen’s kappa coefficients (κ) ranging from 0.879 to 0.910. The accuracy assessment, which was performed separately for the standard polarizations (VV/VH) of the interferometric wide swath (IW) mode of Sentinel-1, further indicates that under calm wind conditions, slightly higher thematic accuracies can be achieved by using VV instead of VH polarization data.
Quantitative Evaluation of Reading Ability with Simulated Prosthetic Vision

Visual prostheses are devices to recover visual sense by means of electrical timulation to the visual nervous system. Although the ultimate goal is to restore excellent human visual function, presently it is aimed to realize the minimal visual function in order to carry out specific tasks in our daily lives. The purpose of this study is to determine specifications of the visual prosthesis which can realize the above function. In this study we have developed a simulator which enables us to experience prosthetic vision using real-time image processing. Here we selected "reading" as one of the most typical tasks in our daily lives, and quantitatively estimated reading ability with the simulated prosthetic vision. We used the MNREAD, a commonly-used reading ability test. As a result, it was observed that the range from 4 to 8 was appropriate as a gray level. In addition, it was suggested that the size of a pixel affected the reading performance, though it was less influential than the gray level.
Chinese Term Extraction System Based on Mutual Information

An automatic Chinese term extraction system based on mutual information is presented.Firstly,the system gets term candidates by calculating internal associative strength of characters string using mutual information. Then, term selection from term candidates is done using basic word dictionary, common collocations suffix, prefix bank and some term POS composing rules. Experiment shows the precision is 72.19%, recall is 77.98% and F measure is 74.97%.
Multi-rate data fusion for dynamic displacement measurement of beam-like supertall structures using acceleration and strain sensors

Accurate measurement of dynamic displacement is important for the structural health monitoring and safety assessment of supertall structures. However, the displacement of a supertall structure is difficult to be accurately measured using the conventional methods because they are either inaccurate or inconvenient to be set up in practice. This study provides an accurate and economical method to measure dynamic displacement of supertall structures accurately by fusing acceleration and strain data, which are generally available in the structural health monitoring system. Dynamic displacement is first derived from the measured longitudinal strains based on geometric deformation without requiring mode shapes. An optimization technique is utilized to optimize the deployment of strain sensors for achieving more accurate strain-derived displacement. The strain-derived displacement is then combined with measured acceleration via a multi-rate Kalman filtering approach. Applications to a numerical supertall structure and a laboratory cantilever beam verify that the proposed method accurately estimates displacement including both high-frequency and pseudo-static components, under different noise cases and sampling rates. A full-scale field test on the 600 m-high Canton Tower is implemented to validate the applicability of the proposed method to real supertall structures. Error analysis demonstrates that the data fusion displacement is more accurate than the global position system-measured displacement in the time and frequency domains.
Situation-oriented requirements engineering

The establishment of smart environments, Internet of Things (IoT) and sociotechnical systems has introduced many challenges to the software development process. One such main challenge is software requirements gathering which needs to address issues in a broader spectrum than traditional standalone software development. Consideration of bigger picture that includes software, its domain, the components of the domains and especially the interactions between the software and the surrounding domain components, including both human and other systems entities, is essential to gathering reliable requirements. However, most of the traditional Requirements Engineering approaches lack such comprehensive overlook of the overall view. The main objective of this work is to introduce a human-centered approach to Requirements Engineering in order to push the boundaries of traditional concepts to be more suitable for use in the development of modern socio-technical systems in smart environments. A major challenge of introducing a human-centered approach is to effectively identify the related human factors; especially, since each individual has unique desires, goals, behaviors. Our proposed solution is to use the observational data sets generated by smart environments as a resource to extract individual’s unique personalities and behaviors related to the software design. The concept of situations defined in our earlier study is used to represent the human and domain related aspects including human desires, goals, beliefs, interactions with the system and the constrained environment. In the first stage of this work, a computational model called situation-transition structure is developed to understand the discrete factors and behavior patterns of
Deep activity recognition on imaging sensor data

Inspired by the recent success of deep learning (DL) approaches in computer vision domain, this Letter proposes a framework to encode the sensor data into an image representation for the activity recognition task. The signal from sensors is encoded based on the Gramian Angular Field. The encoding technique increases the dimension of the data, captures a local temporal relationship in terms of temporal correlation between time intervals on the geometric interpretation, and can be easily applied to the pre-trained DL architecture. The proposed framework is examined with respect to six popular sensor-based activity recognition datasets. Using the authors' framework, the results show that their approach outperforms most of the state-of-the-art approaches.
A Self-Powered Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting Circuit With an Optimal Flipping Time SSHI and Maximum Power Point Tracking

This brief presents an ultra low power IC design for piezoelectric (PE) energy harvesting, which integrates a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) circuit and a synchronized switch harvesting on inductor (SSHI) circuit. The proposed circuit also has three different operation modes to extend the range of the harvestable power level generated by a PE transducer. The circuit is designed in CMOS and fabricated in BiCMOS 0.25 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> technology with the die size of 2 mm<sup>2</sup>. The measurement results indicate the circuit can harvest energy with the input power ranging from 10 to 34 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu \text{W}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> during MPPT. It achieves peak efficiency of 77% under a PE cantilever voltage of 3.5 V and the battery voltage of 4.2 V.
Direct Energy Trading of Microgrids in Distribution Energy Market

Recent advancement of distributed renewable generation has motivated microgrids to trade energy directly with one another, as well as with the utility, in order to minimize their operational costs. Energy trading among microgrids, however, confronts challenges such as reaching a fair trading price, maximizing participants’ profit, and satisfying power network constraints. In this paper, we formulate the direct energy trading among multiple microgrids as a generalized Nash bargaining (GNB) problem that involves the distribution network's operational constraints (e.g., power balance equations and voltage limits). We prove that solving the GNB problem maximizes the social welfare and also fairly distributes the revenue among the microgrids based on their market power. To address the nonconvexity of the GNB problem, we propose a two-phase approach. The first phase involves solving the optimal power flow problem in a distributed fashion using the alternative direction method of multipliers to determine the amount of energy trading. The second phase determines the market clearing price and mutual payments of the microgrids. Simulation results on an IEEE 33-bus system with four microgrids show that the proposed framework substantially reduces total network cost by 37.2%. Our results suggest direct trading need be enforced by regulators to maximize the social welfare.
Synthesis Theory of Ultra-Wideband Bandpass Transformer and its Wilkinson Power Divider Application With Perfect in-Band Reflection/Isolation

A synthesis theory of ultra-wideband (UWB) bandpass (BP) transformer with short-circuited stubs is proposed in this paper. Based on the short-circuited stub number and their positions, six combination topologies are presented when the transmission line (TL) section is fixed to 4. Although analyzing the characteristic functions of these six combination topologies, the same theoretical Chebyshev transfer function can be summarized. Therefore, by selecting different short-circuited stub number and their positions, we can make a flexible choice of the filtering transformer pattern and keep the Chebyshev response at the same time. Finally, by using the proposed transformer, a UWB BP type Wilkinson power divider can be easily designed. In order to match the numbers and frequencies of output ports reflection zeroes (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S_{22} =0$ </tex-math></inline-formula>)/isolation zeroes (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S_{32} = 0$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) with those of input port reflection zeroes (<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$S_{11} =0$ </tex-math></inline-formula>), one extra TL and one isolation resistor are newly added in the power divider design. One experimental circuit is fabricated, and its measured frequency response verified well the proposed design theory and method.
Information technology decision support and business process change in the USA

Decision making and the nature of decisions themselves are changing with the introduction of new information technology (IT)‐based systems in the construction industry. The use of IT systems relates to and can induce changes in business processes within firms as well as interorganizational project processes between firms. In the USA, some of the world's largest hardware and software producers are developing new generations of systems. The market for such systems is potentially large, and these vendors work in close proximity to powerful engineering and construction organizations as well as leading research establishments. It is likely that some of these systems will become de facto standards. For this and other reasons of industrial competitiveness, developments in US IT decision support systems are of interest to practitioners and researchers around the world. The present paper presents the findings of a UK Department of Trade and Industry Expert Mission to assess the development and use of IT systems in the US construction industry. The mission team included seven members, each with specialist knowledge of different aspects of IT development and implementation. The team visited 18 leading organizations where detailed interviews and seminars were conducted during a 2‐week period. The present paper highlights questions for researchers and systems developers. The main findings indicate fundamental changes to the timing, sequence and hierarchy of decision making.
A Fast-Transient-Response Fully-Integrated Digital LDO With Adaptive Current Step Size Control

A 0.6-V 100-mA fully-integrated digital low-dropout regulator (DLDO) with adaptive current step size control is presented in this paper. By dividing the main power PMOSs into ten blocks with different unit-cell sizes, the proposed DLDO can turn-on/-off small power PMOSs in light load and large ones in heavy load conditions. High regulation accuracy in a wide load range and fast transient response are hence achieved. In addition, an auxiliary power MOS block, which consists of both PMOS and NMOS transistors, is adopted to eliminate the limit cycle oscillation (LCO) in light load condition and to further accelerate the response speed. The proposed DLDO is fabricated in a 65-nm low-power CMOS technology with an active area of 0.17 mm2 including an on-chip output capacitor of 1nF. The measured undershoot and overshoot voltages are only 53 and 37 mV, respectively, when the load current changes between 0 and 100 mA. The quiescent current is 34.6 $\mu \text{A}$ , while the maximum current efficiency is 99.96%.
Physical Accessibility and Employment among Older Adults in California

Older adults are delaying retirement and remaining in the paid workforce longer than in previous decades. There are many potential explanations for this trend. In this study, it is hypothesized that the ease or difficulty of traveling may significantly influence the labor force participation of older adults, just as it does for other working-age adults. As they age, older adults can face a number of barriers to mobility. The hypothesis is tested using data from the 2012 California Household Travel Survey (CHTS) and propensity score matching. The paper focuses on the effects of automobile ownership and transit access on the employment status of older adults (60+), controlling for a host of characteristics associated with the likelihood of employment. The analysis shows that transportation access has a substantial and positive association with employment for older adults, particularly older adults living in low-income households (those earning less than $35,000 per year). Access to jobs by public transit is especially influential among low-income older adults who live in households without automobiles. The findings underscore the importance of enhancing the transportation environment such that it allows older adults to travel regularly on their own by car or, in dense urban neighborhoods, by public transit. Limitations to this study suggest the need for additional quantitative analysis of longitudinal data as well as qualitative analysis of data from interviews and focus groups.
Effects of Frequency and Mass of Eccentric Balls on Picking Force of The Coffee Fruit for The As-Fabricated Harvesting Machines

Currently, Vietnam ranks second about the coffee export in the world. To match that position, the use of coffee harvesting tools/machines according to the automatic trend is essential. However, the most common forms of coffee harvesting in Vietnam are manual, improved manual-coffee picking machines that are imported from foreign countries. The above harvesting forms have low productivity and have some disadvantages such as labor cost, labor hiring, high labor cost, and long harvesting time, low harvesting, and post-harvesting quality. Studies of scientists around the world have applied the principle of vibration to produce the picking force for coffee fruits, and the picking force is known to be different from many factors in every region of the world growing coffee. The paper presents the method of design and manufacturing an automatic coffee harvesting machine based on the evaluation of picking force for coffee in Vietnam. The influences of eccentric ball mass and vibrating frequency on the magnitude of the picking force are carefully calculated. On that basis, the experimental programming is applied to find the optimal working point of the picking machine for coffee. The results showed that the eccentric ball mass of 8.5 kg, the rotation speed of the eccentric ball from 480 to 574 rpm would produce the picking force by the coffee fruit of Vietnam.
Comparative Analysis of Symmetrical/Asymmetrical Quasi Z-Source Cascaded Multilevel Inverter with Alternative Phase Opposition Disposition Technique

Abstract This paper presents a detailed comparative analysis between Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Quasi Z-Source Cascaded Multilevel Inverter (QZS-CMI). The comparative analysis investigates for boost operation in both Symmetrical and Asymmetrical System. Analysis is done based on the achieved input current, capacitor voltage of the upper capacitor and parallel capacitor and the two inductors current of DC link (Quasi Z-Source network) which is combined with H-bridge. In Asymmetrical QZS-CMI, the input voltage for three DC sources are given in the ratio of 1:3:9, i. e. the system is designed for 27 level. Asymmetrical QZS-CMI is new system and proposed in this paper for comparative analysis with Symmetrical QZS-CMI. An advanced optimal Alternative Phase Opposition Disposition (APOD) technique is developed and implemented. Symmetrical system has high boosting capability of output voltage, reducing the switching losses, high voltage gain and lower spikes in switching voltage. The comparative study is done and results are verified with Experimental 250 W prototype model and also verified by using MATLAB/ Simulink.