Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Minimum latency broadcast algorithms for wireless sensor networks

Broadcast is a fundamental operation in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Given a source node with a packet to broadcast, the aim is to propagate the packet to all nodes in an interference-free manner whilst incurring minimum latency. This problem, called Minimum Latency Broadcast Scheduling (MLBS), has been studied extensively in wireless ad-hoc networks, whereby nodes remain on all the time, and has been shown to be NP-hard. However, only a few studies have addressed this problem in the context of duty-cycled WSNs. In these WSNs, nodes do not wake-up simultaneously, and hence, not all neighbors of a transmitting node will receive a broadcast message at the same time. Unfortunately, this Minimum Latency Broadcast Scheduling problem in Duty-Cycled WSNs (MLBSDC) remains NP-hard and multiple transmissions may be necessary due to different wake-up times. Moreover, existing studies addressed the MLBSDC problem only over the idealistic interference model, i.e., the RTS/CTS interference model, in which, if two or more nodes transmit simultaneously to a single node, collision occurs and thereby, corrupting the message. However, this idealistic interference model does not take into account the interference from transmissions outside a receiver’s transmission range. This thesis, therefore, investigates the MLBSDC problem under different interference models, i.e., the RTS/CTS, protocol, and physical interference model. Different from the RTS/CTS interference model, the other two models reflect the fact that the successful reception of a message is subject to interference from transmissions outside the receiver’s transmission range. This thesis proposes a series of approximation algorithms. Specifically, the main contributions of this thesis are as follows.
Factors Affecting Adrenal Gland Involvement in Patients Who Underwent Radical Nephrectomy for Renal Cell Carcinoma

Aim: We investigated pathological characteristics of adrenal involvement in patients who underwent radical nephrectomy (RN) for renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Materials and Methods: 49 patients (34 male, 15 female) who underwent RN and simultaneous ipsilateral adrenalectomy due to RCC were included. Patient and tumor characteristics, histopathologic features, disease stage, and radiologic computerized tomography (CT) features were studied in order to see if any of them are associated with pathological evidence of adrenal involvement. Results: Presence of adrenal irregularity (P = 0.002), venous thrombosis (P = 0.010), tumor necrosis (P = 0.031), and lymph node (LN) involvement (P = 0.013) on CT, increased Fuhrman grade (P = 0.037), and presence of capsular invasion (P = 0.027) and perirenal fatty tissue invasion by RCC (P = 0.011) were found to be significantly associated with ipsilateral adrenal involvement. There was no statistically significant association with location of the tumor in the upper pole of the kidney (P = 0.077), increased tumor size (P = 0.098), pathologic stage (P = 0.085), presence of vascular invasion (P = 0.067), and metastasis despite higher incidence of them in the group with adrenal involvement. Conclusions: Risk factors for ipsilateral adrenal involvement by RCC appear to be the presence of adrenal gland irregularity, venous thrombosis and necrosis on CT, increased Fuhrman grade, presence of capsular and peripheral fatty tissue invasion, LN involvement, and metastasis. Therefore, we recommend ipsilateral adrenalectomy particularly in this patient group.
Performance of uncoded overlapping PPM under communication constraints

The performance of uncoded overlapping pulse position modulation (OPPM) with at most two pulse positions per pulsewidth is investigated for an optical direct-detection channel under communication constraints. It is shown that under bandwidth and throughput constraints OPPM, with two pulse positions per pulsewidth, outperforms PPM when the overlap is chosen properly and the throughput is greater than 0.2 nats/slot. This makes it possible to increase the throughput and/or decrease the energy of the OPPM system, while maintaining the same performance as PPM. The energy saving when using OPPM instead of PPM to transmit reliably a given amount of information is determined for different values of overlapping indices. The maximum throughput that can be achieved under average power and bandwidth constraints (with error probability not exceeding 10/sup -5/) is also determined. <<ETX>>
Diagnostic acceptability measure for speech communication systems

The Diagnostic Acceptability Measure (DAM) resulted from an extensive program of research on the perceptual correlates of the acceptability of processed speech. Validated on a sample of 210 system-conditions (including virtually every presentday digital voice system) it yields ten experimentally independent diagnostic scores, six based on perceptual qualities of the signal, four on perceptual qualities of the background. Estimates of intelligibility, pleasantness and overall acceptability are obtained from direct judgments and by multiple nonlinear prediction from diagnostic scores. Extremely reliable results are achieved through calibration of individual listeners on the basis of short and long-term performance characteristics.
A Global Sensitivity Analysis Methodology for Multi-physics Applications

Experiments are conducted to draw inferences about an entire ensemble based on a selected number of observations. This applies to both physical experiments as well as computer experiments, the latter of which are performed by running the simulation models at different input configurations and analyzing the output responses. Computer experiments are instrumental in enabling model analyses such as uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis. This report focuses on a global sensitivity analysis methodology that relies on a divide-and-conquer strategy and uses intelligent computer experiments. The objective is to assess qualitatively and/or quantitatively how the variabilities of simulation output responses can be accounted for by input variabilities. We address global sensitivity analysis in three aspects: methodology, sampling/analysis strategies, and an implementation framework. The methodology consists of three major steps: (1) construct credible input ranges; (2) perform a parameter screening study; and (3) perform a quantitative sensitivity analysis on a reduced set of parameters. Once identified, research effort should be directed to the most sensitive parameters to reduce their uncertainty bounds. This process is repeated with tightened uncertainty bounds for the sensitive parameters until the output uncertainties become acceptable. To accommodate the needs of multi-physics application, this methodology should be recursively applied to individual physics modules. The methodology is also distinguished by an efficient technique for computing parameter interactions. Details for each step will be given using simple examples. Numerical results on large scale multi-physics applications will be available in another report. Computational techniques targeted for this methodology have been implemented in a software package called PSUADE.
Neuronal Dynamics: From Single Neurons To Networks And Models Of Cognition

What happens in our brain when we make a decision? What triggers a neuron to send out a signal? What is the neural code? This textbook for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students provides a thorough and up-to-date introduction to the fields of computational and theoretical neuroscience. It covers classical topics, including the Hodgkin-Huxley equations and Hopfield model, as well as modern developments in the field such as Generalized Linear Models and decision theory. Concepts are introduced using clear step-by-step explanations suitable for readers with only a basic knowledge of differential equations and probabilities, and are richly illustrated by figures and worked-out examples. End-of-chapter summaries and classroom-tested exercises make the book ideal for courses or for self-study. The authors also give pointers to the literature and an extensive bibliography, which will prove invaluable to readers interested in further study.
Two-Year Results of Intravitreal Triamcinolone Acetonide Injection for the Treatment of Macular Edema Due to Central Retinal

We investigated intravitreal triamcinolone acetonide injection for the treatment of macular edema due to central retinal vein occlusion in 20 patients. Mean central macular thickness at 3 days, 1, 3, 6, 12, 18, and 24 months postoperatively was different than baseline. Visual acuity did not change. Intravitreal triamcinolone injection significantly improves short-term anatomy, but recurrences and steroid-related complications were noted in the longer term.
Discuss: toward a domain independent representation of dialogue

While many studies have demonstrated that conversational tutoring systems have a positive effect on learning, the amount of manual effort required to author, design, and tune dialogue behaviors remains a major barrier to widespread deployment and adoption of these systems. Such dialogue systems must not only understand student speech, but must also endeavor to keep students engaged while scaffolding them through the curriculum. Crafting robust, natural tutoring interactions typically involves writing tightly scripted behaviors for a wide variety of student responses and scenarios. Combining statistical machine learning with corpus-based methods in natural language processing presents a possible path to reducing this effort. Advances in reinforcement learning have been applied toward dialogue systems to learn optimal behaviors for a given task. However, these learned dialogue policies are tightly coupled to the specific dialogue system implementation. For content-rich applications such as intelligent tutoring systems, there is an immediate need to learn tutoring strategies and dialogue behaviors that can be leveraged across a variety of materials, concepts and lessons. Further generalization will require an intermediate representation of dialogue that can abstract the conversation to its underlying action, function, and content. This work introduces the Dialogue Schema Unifying Speech and Semantics (DISCUSS), an intermediate linguistic representation that captures the semantics and pragmatics of speech while also allowing for domain-independent modeling of tutorial dialogue. To better understand the benefits of the DISCUSS representation, a corpus of computer-mediated tutorial dialogues was manually tagged with DISCUSS labels. These data were then used for three different tasks: utterance classification, dialogue move selection, and learning gains prediction. System performance in these tasks demonstrate the utility and viability of the DISCUSS representation for analyzing and automating dialogue interactions. Utterance classifiers achieve DISCUSS labeling performance on par with inter-annotator agreement levels. System performance in ranking and selecting follow-up questions illustrates the usefulness of DISCUSS-based features for modeling and identifying the factors behind human decision making when teaching. Correlating features of the dialogue with measured learning gains in students shows how DISCUSS-derived metrics provide a detailed account of real tutoring strategies and student behaviors. Together these results represent a step toward more domain-independent mechanisms for modeling dialogue.
Key Components of an Information Security Metrics Program Plan

An information security metrics program can provide organizations with a resource to manage, monitor, control, or improve aspects of an information security program. A set of five key components necessary to include when developing a plan for an information security metrics program is presented. Components are framed in relation to criteria from Chew et al. (2008), and include associated tasks designed to a) increase accountability, b) improve information security effectiveness and c) demonstrate compliance. Key Components of IT Security Metrics Program 4 This page intentionally left blank Key Components of IT Security Metrics Program 5 Table of
In Search for More Knowledge: Regular Polysemy and Knowledge Acquisition

This paper describes the process of the extraction of implicit knowledge from WordNet and EuroWordNet. This knowledge is an extension of the explicit knowledge structures already provided by the wordnets in the form of synsets and semantic relations, and is contained both within (Euro)WordNet’s hierarchical structure and the glosses that are associated with each WordNet synset. The extended knowledge comes in the form of frame structures containing regular polysemic patterns and automatically extracted relations that link the participating concepts in these patterns.
Death Associated to Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus ST8 Infection in Two Dolphins Maintained Under Human Care, Italy

The present study describes the isolation of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) from respiratory tract of 2 dolphins of different origin, a stranded juvenile Risso's dolphin (Grampus griseus) and a captive born common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) calf, which died in the same institution at 1-month distance from the other. A complete microbiological and genetic investigation confirmed the presence of MRSA clone-complex 8, sequence type (ST) 8, spa-type t008 in both individuals. This strain differs from the one previously reported in walruses and dolphins and has never been described in dolphins before, but it is randomly isolated from Italian human patients. Vertical transmission of the infection may also occurs in other species and considering the description and location of the pathological lesions, this seems to be the most likely route of transmission implied in the young bottlenose dolphin. Staphylococcus aureus is known as an opportunistic agent, usually secondary to other pathogens, but its multiple antibiotic resistance and its zoonotic implications suggest a thorough and strict application of animal management hygiene protocols.
Comparison of hamstring/quadriceps ratio between isoinertial and isokinetic measurements

OBJECTIVE: To determine the applicability and predictive accuracy of an isoinertial resistance machine for the assessment of hamstring/quadriceps conventional (concentric) ratio (CR). METHOD: Thirty-two resistance trained young men (23.53 ± 3.2 yrs) were tested using dedicated instruments to obtain the peak torque (PT) of the right knee extensors and flexors as well as the corresponding one repetition maximum (1RM) values. All measurements were conducted in the concentric mode. RESULTS:Significant ( p< 0.05) correlations were indicated between knee extensor and flexor PT and 1RM values (r = 0.73 to 0.75), as well as between PT and 1RM CR values (r = 0.65). However the isoinertial CR values (0.42 ± 0.05) were significantly ( p< 0.05) greater than their isokinetic counterparts (0.36 ± 0.04). CONCLUSION: Caution should be used when comparing isoinertial CR with population-specific isokinetic normative scores.
Field test performance results for D-AMPS in PCS bands with array processing

For the digital-AMPS (D-AMPS or IS-136) standard, performance gains for diversity and interference cancellation are quantified for a prototype system that implements a combination of array processing and adaptive equalization using MLSE techniques. For the site location, field tests show a 3.5 dB C/N improvement at 1% bit error-rate for a four-branch space and polarization diversity receiver relative to a receiver with two space diversity antennas. A 5 dB C/I improvement is observed for an interference cancellation receiver with two antennas and one interferer present, and 9 dB gain in C/I is measured for a combined space-polarization diversity antenna configuration. Furthermore, measurement results confirm that interference cancellation performance is not dependent upon the angular separation between the desired and interfering mobiles.
Towards an appropriate software refactoring tool support

Refactoring is a technique that is concerned with changing internal software design while external software behaviour is preserved. Although the refactoring process seems to be clear and well defined, there are difficulties with regard to its automation. Various refactoring tools have been developed so far, which makes not easy for a developer to choose an appropriate tool to work with. This paper tries to compare some refactoring tools with respect to the automation and coverage, reliability, configurability, scalability and discoverability and so gives directions for the appropriate software refactoring tool selection.
Measuring the shape of time-varying objects

This thesis describes the first implementation of a colour encoded structured light (CESL) range-finder capable of measuring the shape of time-varying or moving surfaces. The system is shown to have mean square accuracies of better than 0.5mm when measuring the shape of the human mouth during continuous speech sampled at 50Hz, and better than 0.2mm when measuring static objects of similar dimensions. In order to sample range at video-rates, the images of the scene to be digitised are stored on video tape. This allows the image processing to be performed off-line so the sampling rate of the system only depends on the frame-rate of the video equipment used. The work was motivated by the need to acquire information on mouth shape for acoustics of speech experiments so that the results presented are for measurements of mouth shape and objects relating to the field. The reasons for producing a new system, and the choice of CESL are discussed. The work covers the entire implementation of the range-finder, including code and slide design, feature extraction, feature interpretation, calibration and 3D reconstruction, and performance evaluation. A modification on the Blackman and Tukey classical power density spectrum (PDS) estimator was used for feature extraction which was shown to perform better than other techniques evaluated. The accuracy of detected features and the probability that they were not spurious was determined, based on the feature confidence output by the PDS estimator. Detected features were tracked to produce segments, and encoded as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) which was then matched with the original code sequence using a fast but sub-optimal technique. An existing camera calibration technique was used which was extended to include a second step for projector calibration. The projector model used was linear, had the correct number of degrees of freedom, and was particular to our stripe system.
BORB: Birmingham Object Recognition Battery

Tests Included: Drawing from Memory. Copying. Length Match Task. Size Match Task. Orientation Match Task. Position of Gap Match Task. Overlapping Figures. Minimal Feature View Test. Foreshortened View Task. Object Decision Task. Function Match Task. Associative Match Task. Picture Naming (Short Version). Picture Naming (Long Version).
Implementation of Nexus: Dynamic Hardware Management Support for Multicore Platforms

Current trends in computer architecture focus on multicore platforms. The target of these new platforms is to scale the performance of the system with the number of cores. However, the performance of current archictectures is limited due to thread-level parallelism overhead and programmability. StarSS is a task-based programming model that eases the programmability of multicores and tries to exploit functional parallelism within applications. However, the performance of StarSS does not scale efficiently for fine-grained tasks, as for such tasks the task management overhead becomes significant in comparison to the execution of the tasks. Nexus is a dynamic hardware support system that aims to alleviate the current overhead of StarSS, by offloading the dependency resolution process and the synchronization with the cores to hardware. In this work, we implement Nexus by defining and connecting the new hardware in a Cell archictecture simulator. The scalability, performance, and throughput of the implementation are evaluated for different task sizes and number of cores, using several dependency patterns. Furthermore, different configuration parameters are evaluated, such as the dimension of the new hardware inserted in the existing architecture. Results show a large improvement of the scalability offered by Nexus in comparison with StarSS, especially for fine-grained tasks. Nexus succeeds at alleviating the overhead of StarSS by accelerating the dependency resolution process and the synchronization with the worker cores. Furthermore, the evaluation of the Nexus system dimensions has shown that its scalability decreases slightly with its area.
Safejava: a unified type system for safe programming

Making software reliable is one of the most important technological challenges facing our society today. This thesis presents a new type system that addresses this problem by statically preventing several important classes of programming errors. If a program type checks, we guarantee at compile time that the program does not contain any of those errors. We designed our type system in the context of a Java-like object-oriented language; we call the resulting system SafeJava. The SafeJava type system offers significant software engineering benefits. Specifically, it provides a statically enforceable way of specifying object encapsulation and enables local reasoning about program correctness; it combines effects clauses with encapsulation to enable modular checking of methods in the presence of subtyping; it statically prevents data races and deadlocks in multithreaded programs, which are known to be some of the most difficult programming errors to detect, reproduce, and eliminate; it enables software upgrades in persistent object stores to be defined modularly and implemented efficiently; it statically ensures memory safety in programs that manage their own memory using regions; and it also statically ensures that real-time threads in real-time programs are not interrupted for unbounded amounts of time because of garbage collection pauses. Moreover, SafeJava provides all the above benefits in a common unified type system framework, indicating that seemingly different problems such as encapsulation, synchronization issues, software upgrades, and memory management have much in common. We have implemented several Java programs in SafeJava. Our experience shows that SafeJava is expressive enough to support common programming patterns, its type checking is fast and scalable, and it requires little programming overhead. In addition, the type declarations in SafeJava programs serve as documentation that lives with the code, and is checked throughout the evolution of code. The SafeJava type system thus has significant software engineering benefits and it offers a promising approach for improving software reliability. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)
Elementary Teachers' Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching Prerequisite Algebra Concepts.

The current study investigated the effects of an undergraduate mathematics content course for pre-service elementary teachers. The participants’ content knowledge was quantitatively measured using an instrument comprised of items from the Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching Measures (Hill, Schilling, & Ball, 2004). Using a one-group pretest-posttest design, matched pairs t-tests showed significant gains (p = .000) in both common and specialized content knowledge and in two areas of prerequisite algebra concepts (numbers and equations/functions). Results provide evidence of pre-service teachers developing mathematical understanding beyond common content knowledge within collegiate course settings.