Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Wireless metamaterial-inspired rotation sensors

WIRELESS METAMATERIAL-INSPIRED ROTATION SENSORS Ali Maleki Gargari M.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering Advisor: Vakur Behçet Ertürk Co-Advisor: Hilmi Volkan Demir June 2017 Recently steel construction structures have been attracting increasingly more attention due to the speed and ease of their construction. However, to detect potential damages in these structures, long-term and cost-effective health monitoring solutions are required. A rotation-based bending movement, which typically occurs in the load carrying elements of these structures (such as beams), is an example of the aforementioned potential damage. In this thesis, for measuring small bending rotations (10−4 ∼ 10−5 radians) in the structures made of materials such as steel, a novel wireless rotation sensing system with a high level of sensitivity and resolution is proposed and demonstrated. This system consists of two elements: an interrogating antenna and an inter-digital double-layer sensor. The proposed sensing system operates based on the principle of near-field coupling between the antenna and the sensor. Briefly, by rotating one layer with respect to the other, the electromagnetic coupling between the layers changes and the resonance frequency is consequently shifted. This frequency shift can be recorded by tracking the resonance dips in the S11 response of the antenna. In the thesis work, various experiments were systematically performed to characterize the sensing system. A high rotation resolution of 20 μ-radians, an excellent sensitivity level of 28 MHz/degree, and a large dynamic range extending over 40◦ were measured. Furthermore, the validity of measurement results was verified by using full-wave electromagnetics simulator and applying digital image correlation (DIC) method for 2D measurements.
SELF-ASSESSMENT OF LANGUAGE SKILLS AND EVALUATION OF PERFORMANCE IN ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES CLASSROOMS

Although evaluation has been increasingly used in education for a long time, attention to evaluation and its uses in English language teaching is relatively recent. Essentially, evaluation may be carried out to determine if the students achieved a certain level of language proficiency. Recently s elf-evaluation of language skills has been used to find out how students assess their accomplishments in language learning. On the other hand, formal testing is t he most common way to measure achievement and proficiency in language learning that teachers conduct during an academic year. Formal testing is considered to be an effective tool that can help teachers identify students’ strengths and weaknesses and evaluate the effectiveness of teaching. This article focuses on student’s perceptions of success in learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and formal evaluation of their performance in class activities. The methods of the research include the administration of the designed questionnaire, analysis of students’ responses and their statistical treatment by a means of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS 19). The self-evaluation data are compared with the results of formal testing. The conclusions are drawn on the merits of self-evaluation in learning ESP.
Sequence classification applied to user log data An approach to identify characteristics of user sessions in a music streaming service

Applying machine learning techniques to sequential user log data can provide insights about users that can guide companies towards making decisions that improve user experience. Recurrent neural networks have been proven to work well in combination with sequential data and recent research suggests that incorporating residual connections in recurrent structures outperforms standard recurrent structures. In this thesis, we show that residual recurrent neural networks can be applied to user log data from a complex domain in order to identify regularities in user behavior. To our knowledge, no research have been conducted with these model structures in domains other than text and image classification. A proof of concept is implemented in collaboration with Spotify where this approach is used to identify how users behave when they save music in the music streaming service. By conducting experiments with different models, we show that models with increased input complexity slightly outperform models with lower input complexity in the artificial classification task defined in this thesis. We also show that results from a more complex model can be analyzed and provide valuable insights. However, we conclude that the approach is ineffective and needs more developement in order to become sufficient.
Model-based Control of Upper Extremity Human-Robot Rehabilitation Systems

Stroke rehabilitation technologies have focused on reducing treatment cost while improving effectiveness. Rehabilitation robots are generally developed for home and clinical usage to: 1) deliver repetitive and stimulating practice to post-stroke patients, 2) minimize therapist interventions, and 3) increase the number of patients per therapist, thereby decreasing the associated cost. The control of rehabilitation robots is often limited to blackor gray-box approaches; thus, safety issues regarding the human-robot interaction are not easily considered. Furthermore, despite numerous studies of control strategies for rehabilitation, there are very few rehabilitation robots in which the tasks are implemented using optimal control theory. Optimal controllers using physics-based models have the potential to overcome these issues. This thesis presents advanced impedanceand model-based controllers for an endeffector-based upper extremity stroke rehabilitation robot. The final goal is to implement a biomechanically-plausible real-time nonlinear model predictive control for the studied rehabilitation system. The real-time term indicates that the controller computations finish within the sampling frequency time. This control structure, along with advanced impedance-based controllers, can be applied to any human-environment interactions. This makes them promising tools for different types of assistive devices, exoskeletons, active prostheses and orthoses, and exercise equipment. In this thesis, a high-fidelity biomechatronic model of the human-robot interaction is developed. The rehabilitation robot is a 2 Degree-of-Freedom (DOF) parallelogram linkage with joint friction and backlash, and nonlinear dynamics. The mechatronic model of the robot with relatively accurate identified dynamic parameters is used in the human-robot interaction plant. Different musculoskeletal upper extremity, biomechanic, models are used to model human body motions while interacting with the rehabilitation robot model. Humanrobot interaction models are recruited for model-in-loop simulations, thereby tuning the developed controllers in a structured resolution. The interaction models are optimized for real-time simulations. Thus, they are also used within the model-based control structures to provide biofeedback during a rehabilitation therapy. In robotic rehabilitation, because of physical interaction of the patient with a mechanical device, safety is a fundamental element in the design of a controller. Thus, impedancebased assistance is commonly used for robotic rehabilitation. One of our objectives is to achieve a reliable and real-time implementable controller. In our definition, a reliable controller is capable of handling variable exercises and admittance interactions. The controller should reduce therapist intervention and improve the quality of the rehabilitation.
AMH: a new Framework to Design Adaptive Metaheuristics

Metaheuristics should be configured to perform well on a given problem. Their configuration is either made off-line by automatic algorithm configuration tools or on-line with control mechanisms to adapt their behaviour. The former requires a flexible structure that may be modified during the execution. Therefore, the implementation of such a structure is not straightforward to enable modifications of optimisation strategies and not of parameter values only. In this work, we present AMH, a framework dedicated to the design of configurable metaheuristics. This framework is based on controlling the execution flow of metaheuristics to enable the implementation of flexible structures.
High performance GridRPC middleware

A simple way to offer a Grid access through a middleware is to use the GridRPC paradigm. It is based on the classical RPC model and extended to Grid environments. Client can access to remote servers as simply as a function call. Several middlewares are compliant to this paradigm as DIET, GridSolve, or Ninf-G. Actors of these projects have worked together to design a standard API within the Open Grid Forum. In this chapter we give an overview of this standard and the current works around the data management. Three use cases are introduced through a detailled descriptions of DIET, GridSolve, and Ninf-G middleware features. Finally applications for each middleware are shown to appreciate how they take benefit of the GridRPC API.
Applied data analysis in energy monitoring system

Software and hardware system organization is presented as an example for building energy monitoring of multi-sectional lighting and climate control / conditioning needs. System key feature is applied office energy data analysis that allows to provide each type of hardware localized work mode recognition. It is based on general energy consumption profile with following energy consumption and workload evaluation. Applied data analysis includes primary data processing block, smoothing filter, time stamp identification block, clusterization and classification blocks, state change detection block, statistical data calculation block. Time slot consumed energy value and slot time stamp are taken as work mode classification main parameters. Energy data applied analysis with HIL and OpenJEVis visualization system usage experimental research results for chosen time period has been provided. Energy consumption, workload calculation and eight different states identification has been executed for two lighting sections and one climate control / conditioning emulating system by integral energy consumption profile. Research has been supported by university internal grant No2016/PI-2 «Methodology development of monitoring and heat flow utilization as low potential company energy sources».
Saliency detection by conditional generative adversarial network

Detecting salient objects in images has been a fundamental problem in computer vision. In recent years, deep learning has shown its impressive performance in dealing with many kinds of vision tasks. In this paper, we propose a new method to detect salient objects by using Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). This type of network not only learns the mapping from RGB images to salient regions, but also learns a loss function for training the mapping. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that Conditional GAN has been used in salient object detection. We evaluate our saliency detection method on 2 large publicly available datasets with pixel accurate annotations. The experimental results have shown the significant and consistent improvements over the state-of-the-art method on a challenging dataset, and the testing speed is much faster.
The life cycles of mayflies (Insecta: Ephemeroptera) of the Eastern Ukraine. Second report

The Life Cycles of Mayflies (Insecta: Ephemeroptera) of the Eastern Ukraine. Second Report. — Martynov, A. V. — This article is the second report on the results of investigation of mayflies’ life cycles in Eastern Ukraine. It is shown, that different methods should be used to determine the larval age of the representatives of different families. The paper presents data on life cycles of 18 mayfly species; the larval age structure change during a year for five of these species (Cloeon dipterum, Centroptilum luteolum, Paraleptophlebia submarginata, Ecdyonurus dispar gratificus and Ephemera vulgata) was investigated in detail in model waterbodies. The flight periods of imagoes of investigated species within the Eastern Ukraine are given. Some features of swarming in Leptophlebia marginata and Kageronia fuscogrisea are described. It is shown, that rare European species Metreletus balcanicus has monovoltine life cycle within the region, and overwinters at the egg stage (Us). It is established, that ovoviviparous Cloeon dipterum has 2–3 generations per year (MB-MP) within Eastern Ukraine; the voltinity depends mainly on water temperature in every concrete waterbody. The main part of population of monovoltine Ecdyonurus dispar gratificus overwinters as the egg stage, small its part — as the larval stage.
An Approach to Service Deployment to the Service Cloud

—Computing clouds facilitate rapid and effortless resource allocation. In particular, Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds allow clients to dynamically lease virtual machines that behave similarly to physical servers. However, executing an application by directly using computing cloud resources is complicated and typically involves similar steps as installing and executing an application on a physical machine. Moreover, starting numerous application instances on a single virtual machine may result in poor performance. Thus, we propose developing a web service that acts as a mediator between the leased cloud resources and the cloud users and facilitates the use of the resources. When the mediator web service is used, an application can be started in a computing cloud effortlessly by invoking simple web service operations. Furthermore, in the case of several applications, the workload can automatically be distributed between several virtual machines, resulting in higher performance.
A Comparison of Secure Messaging Protocols and Implementations

In recent years, it has come to attention that governments have been doing mass surveillance of personal communications without the consent of the citizens. As a consequence of these revelations, developers have begun releasing new protocols for end-to-end encrypted conversations and then commonly used chat applications have been updated with implementations of these protocols. New applications have also been developed to support these types of protocols with security in mind from the beginning. These usually contain existing and audited algorithms to ensure the encryption between participants is up to its standards. This thesis investigates protocols for end-to-end encrypted instant messaging, focusing on the existing implementations of one of the recent and popular such protocols, called Signal. The first protocol studied is the Off-the-Record (OTR) protocol, since it was the first such protocol introduced ten years ago, and which most recent protocols are based on, or take inspiration from. Then a large part of the thesis carefully goes through the inner workings of the Signal protocol, which itself is based on OTR. The documentations of three secure messaging protocols is studied to find what types of security and privacy properties they provide. The study of the protocol properties is also based on recent academic articles. The conclusions are summarized and explained with the purpose to be used in the rest of the thesis. A second major part of the document is devoted to analyzing the most used secure messaging applications. A series of experiments is then conducted on these implementations to find out which types of security and usability properties each application provides. Six applications are tested. A major concern is about what kind of information the application gives to the users when cryptographic keys change during conversations, as well as how users can verify the identities of each other. The results of the experiment show that the apps have variations of usability and security properties regarding the user’s account. The apps give different amounts of information to the user about potential security attacks. While some gave enough for the user to know when cryptographic keys change, others do not provide any information. The thesis also gives proposals for improving each application wrt. security, privacy, and usability. Hopefully, the users find the information in this research useful in choosing a particular application, and positively, encourages other researchers to look more carefully into usability and security challenges of secure messaging applications.
A toolkit for measuring early childhood development in low and middle income countries

The Toolkit provides a practical, “how-to” guide for selection and adaptation of child development measurements for use in low- and middle-income countries. Users can follow the proposed step-by-step process to select, adapt, implement, and analyze early childhood development data for diverse purposes and projects. Researchers, evaluators, and program personnel from various disciplines interested in assessing early childhood development in low- and middle-income countries will find the book useful for planning and evaluating interventions, monitoring development over time, or conducting a situation analysis. The book updates and expands a previous 2009 edition, incorporating new research on the use of child development measurement tools in low- and middle-income countries.The ECD Measurement Inventory that accompanies this Toolkit contains 147 measurement tools for children under 8 years. For each test it reports the domains assessed, age range for which the tool is appropriate, method of administration, purpose of the assessment, origin and locations of use, logistics, and cost.
Estilo de vida promotor de salud y sentido de coherencia en adultos jóvenes universitarios

Objective: Promotion of health allows to put into practice theoretical foundations that can improve health behaviors of the population, for which it is necessary to develop a health promoting lifestyle. A positive approach to generate health in young adults is to promote the salutogenic approach to health by encouraging the use of resources the person has and developing a sense of coherence. The main objective of this paper is to identify a health promoting lifestyle and its relationship with the sense of coherence in young adult university students in Sonora, Mexico. Materials and methods: descriptive, correlational study with 300 undergraduate students. Prior informed consent, a sociodemographic data card, the Life Style Questionnaire II and the Sense of Coherence-13 Scale were applied. Results: young adults showed enough general health promoting lifestyle (51.0%), with a higher incidence in women (52.1%). Health sciences students (55.2%) obtained an insufficient health promoting lifestyle and there was statistically significant difference by career. The general sense of coherence was high (52.0%), being predominant in men (58.0%) and in health sciences students (57.2%); there was no statistically significant difference according to gender and careers. It was evidenced that a sufficient health promoting lifestyle fosters the development of a high sense of coherence. Conclusions: it is essential to establish programs for the development of life skills to ensure better health and well-being of future generations of young adults by promoting the development of a sense of coherence.
Basic Analysis of Computer-Mediated Communication: Mean Length of Utterance

The subjects are Waseda University and Korea University students who participated in Cross-Cultural Distance Learning (CCDL) project in the academic year 2000. They engaged in synchronous CMC through the use of the software called CU-SeeMe. They had a weekly chat not in groups but on the basis of one-on-one communication. They met the same partners at their specified time and enjoyed chatting for the period of 45 minutes throughout one term. The first 7 sessions of each student are analyzed so that we can track student’s development by calculating MLU of each student in each session
COSTS AND RETURNS OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION, A PILOT STUDY.

THE OBJECTIVES OF THIS STUDY WERE (1) TO OBTAIN ESTIMATES OF COSTS AND RETURNS OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION, (2) TO COMPUTE SOCIAL AND PRIVATE RATES OF RETURN ON INVESTMENTS IN TECHNICAL EDUCATION, AND (3) TO COMPARE THESE WITH ESTIMATES OF THE RATE OF RETURN ON GENERAL EDUCATION AND INVESTMENTS IN TANGIBLE CAPITAL. COSTS AND RETURNS WERE MEASURED BY COMPARING EARNINGS OF A GROUP OF 45 WHITE MALE GASTON TECHNICAL SCHOOL GRADUATES WITH EARNINGS FOR A GROUP OF 45 WHITE MALE HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATES HAVING SIMILAR CHARACTERISTICS. THE COMPARISON COVERED A 7 -YEAR PERIOD. THE ESTIMATED AVERAGE TOTAL COST TO SOCIETY FOR THE TWO YEARS OF TECHNICAL EDUCATION WAS $7,425 PER STUDENT WHICH INCLUDED $5,197 FOR LOSS IN PRODUCTIVITY WHILE IN SCHOOL AND $2,228 FOR COSTS OF PROVIDING SCHOOL FACILITIES SUPPLIES, AND PERSONNEL. THE AVERAGE TOTAL PRIVATE COST PER STUDENT FOR THE TWO YEARS OF TECHNICAL SCHOOLING AMOUNTED TO $4,920. THE AVERAGE ANNUAL INCOME FROM INVESTMENT IN TECHNICAL EDUCATION INCREASED FROM $553 IN THE FIRST YEAR AFTER SCHOOLING TO $1,036 IN THE FOURTH POST -GRADUATE YEAR. THE ESTIMATED SOCIAL . RATE OF RETURN ON INVESTMENTS IN TECHNICAL EDUCATION WAS 16.5 PERCENT AND THE PRIVATE RATE, 22 PERCENT, ASSUMING THAT PER CAPITA REAL EARNINGS WOULD INCREASE OVER TIME AT THE RATE OF
ACTIVE STEERING FOR FACTS TRUTH AND INTERVAL SEPARATED FACILITIES IN WIRELESS DEVICE LINKS

Due to complexity of applications that runs using wireless systems, quality of assurance over these systems has acquired attention. Wireless sensor systems have to be proficient to deal with several applications on similar platform. We intend at growing the reliability to find the best reliability applications minimizing finish-to-finish delay for delay sensitive ones, still when network comes. We practice a mechanism that allows the packets of delay attentive to move all along shortest path additionally to packets by reliability must prevent promising shedding on hotspots. We setup integrity and delay differentiated routing method that's a multi-path dynamic routing method. Recommended system will separate packets of applications by means of separate needs and services information quality in relation to weight used on every packet, and direct them toward sink completely through various pathways to acquire better data reliability for your applying integrity sensitive. It'll present high-quality scalability since only local facts are crucial that simplifies performance.
Structural Translation of Time Petri Nets into Timed Automata

In this paper, we consider Time Petri Nets (TPN) where time is associated with transitions. We give a formal semantics for TPNs in terms of Timed Transition Systems. Then, we propose a translation from TPNs to Timed Automata (TA) that preserves the behavioural semantics (timed bisimilarity) of the TPNs. For the theory of TPNs this result is two-fold: i) reachability problems and more generally TCTL model-checking are decidable for bounded TPNs; ii) allowing strict time constraints on transitions for TPNs preserves the results described in i). The practical applications of the translation are: i) one can specify a system using both TPNs and Timed Automata and a precise semantics is given to the composition; ii) one can use existing tools for analysing timed automata (like KRONOS or UPPAAL or CMC) to analyse TPNs.