Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The dynamic structure of scenes and gestures

This thesis investigates the role of dynamics in computer vision. Feature tracking, super-resolution and gesture identification are each improved through the novel use of dynamics proposed in this thesis. For improvement of feature tracking, identified dynamics are utilized to facilitate location and appearance forecasting for rigid object motion in video. To identify the dynamics of rigid objects, a novel method is proposed that utilizes Caratheadory-Fejer (CF) interpolation with dynamics recovered from a factorization algorithm. Identified dynamics are combined with recovered object structure to predict the appearance and location of rigid bodies. Forecasted object properties are then demonstrated to improve tracking of objects in video sequences. The enhancement of super-resolution is made possible by a novel method for the reintroduction of dynamics to non-planar objects recovered from video. Previous methods for super-resolution have been formulated based on a two dimensional scene model. The use of dynamics with recovered non-planar structures generalizes image registration for scenes with arbitrary shapes. Superior super-resolution for non-planar scenes is demonstrated through the combination of dynamics and recovered scene structure. A novel method for gesture identification of dynamic gestures is the final topic proposed in this thesis. A technique called non-rigid segmental hidden Markov models (NRSHM) is presented and demonstrated to be both robust, accurate and tractable for human gesture recognition. Gesture recognition is performed in real time and capable of producing gesture based computer interfaces for human motion recovered from a moving camera.
The Influence of Rubrics and Peer Assessment on Students’ Works via Google Platform

Abstracts. This study examines how rubrics and peer assessment can be successfully applied in a classroom to maximize learning outcome. Students find obstacles in assessing the quality of their works. Furthermore, the lecturer is not able to facilitate all students’ working process. Online platform is also used to cut the complex procedure which affects teaching and learning effectiveness. Data were collected through the result score of students’ works and questionnaires which were analyzed using T-Test SPSS software. The students submitted the work twice on the first work submission and the revision. After getting peer assessment, students revised the work and submitted the work. The finding revealed that rubrics and peer assessment help students to maximize their work. There are some significant progress from the two version of works. However, it needs preliminaries process and learning environmental readiness which limit them to be used in wider context. Keywords : Rubrics, Peer Assessment, Students’ work.
XML Query Answering using Tree based Association Rules

Mainly two approaches are used to access XML document: keyword-based search and query-answering. The first one comes from the tradition of information retrieval. Where most searches are performed on the textual content of the document; this means that no advantage is derived from the semantics conveyed by the document structure. As for query-answering, since query languages for semi structured data rely the one document structure to convey its semantics, in order for query formulation to be effective users need to know this structure in advance, which is often not the case. When users specify queries without knowing the document structure, they may fail to retrieve information which was there, but under a different structure.
Beyond the Conventional -A Sociological Criticism of Sen’s Capability Approach-

Ilk olarak Amartya Sen tarafindan gelistirilen yapabilirlik yaklasimi kalkinma, refah, yoksulluk, sosyal secim kurami, esitsizlik ve adalet ile ilgilenmeyi amac edinmis bilim insanlari ve siyasa yapicilar tarafindan siklikla basvurulan yeni bir degerlendirme cercevesidir. Soz konusu yaklasim, bireylere ve onlari cevreleyen cok cesitli sosyal/kurumsal farkliliklara iliskin sosyolojik bir bakis acisini kullanarak, faydaci, liberteryen ve Rawlscu sosyal adalet teorileri gibi kimi ana akim siyasal adalet yaklasimlarini elestirmektedir. Bu sebeple, ilgili literaturde siklikla “sosyolojik yonelim” olarak isaret edilmektedir. Bu calisma, yapabilirlik yaklasiminin sosyal ve kurumsal cesitliliklere isaret eden sosyolojik perspektifi daha cok rekabet halinde oldugu adalet teorilerini elestirmek icin kullandigini, fakat “bireylerin bir nedene dayali olarak deger verdiklerini gerceklestirebilmeleri” olarak ortaya koydugu kendi ozgun onerisinin analitik dokusunu olusturmak icin ayni sosyolojik bakis acisini kullanmadigini tartisarak, kendisine atfedilen bu ozelligi tam anlamiyla hak etmedigini iddia etmektedir.
The Go Programming Language

The Go Programming Language is the authoritative resource for any programmer who wants to learn Go. It shows how to write clear and idiomatic Go to solve real-world problems. The book does not assume prior knowledge of Go nor experience with any specific language, so youll find it accessible whether youre most comfortable with JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Java, or C++. The first chapter is a tutorial on the basic concepts of Go, introduced through programs for file I/O and text processing, simple graphics, and web clients and servers. Early chapters cover the structural elements of Go programs: syntax, control flow, data types, and the organization of a program into packages, files, and functions. The examples illustrate many packages from the standard library and show how to create new ones of your own. Later chapters explain the package mechanism in more detail, and how to build, test, and maintain projects using the go tool. The chapters on methods and interfaces introduce Gos unconventional approach to object-oriented programming, in which methods can be declared on any type and interfaces are implicitly satisfied. They explain the key principles of encapsulation, composition, and substitutability using realistic examples. Two chapters on concurrency present in-depth approaches to this increasingly important topic. The first, which covers the basic mechanisms of goroutines and channels, illustrates the style known as communicating sequential processes for which Go is renowned. The second covers more traditional aspects of concurrency with shared variables. These chapters provide a solid foundation for programmers encountering concurrency for the first time. The final two chapters explore lower-level features of Go. One covers the art of metaprogramming using reflection. The other shows how to use the unsafe package to step outside the type system for special situations, and how to use the cgo tool to create Go bindings for C libraries. The book features hundreds of interesting and practical examples of well-written Go code that cover the whole language, its most important packages, and a wide range of applications. Each chapter has exercises to test your understanding and explore extensions and alternatives. Source code is freely available for download from http://gopl.io/ and may be conveniently fetched, built, and installed using the go get command.
Drapes: A Holistic Approach to Predictive Heating for SmartHome Applications

Home air conditioning is the cause for a substantial portion of total energy usage in many countries. Many home conditioning systems spend much of their energy heating, cooling, or maintaining comfortable temperatures when unoccupied. Allied with an accurate occupancy prediction system, smart conditioning systems could save homeowners a significant amount of money by heating only when there are occupants present. A model to predict occupancy must determine which features of a home are highly correlated with occupancy and which are not. Previous models have used features from a given room or zone, but ignore the relationship between rooms in a home. In this paper, we introduce Drapes, a predictive conditioning system that makes use of a holistic view of a residence to learn occupancy patterns and create heating schedules. We explore Drapes by analyzing seven home occupancy data sets ranging in size from twelve days to eighty. Our experiments and analysis show that Drapes is able to infer zone level occupancy and condition the home accordingly such that, when compared to state of the art heating algorithms without reactive heating components, occupants' discomfort is reduced by approximately 40%, and energy waste is reduced by 15% on average.
Quality Web Information Retrieval: Towards Improving Semantic Recommender Systems with Friendsourcing

Web content quality is crucial in any domains, but it is even more critical in the health and e-learning ones. Users need to retrieve information that is precise, believable, and relevant to their problem. With the exponential growth of web contents, Recommender System has become indispensable for discovering quality information that might interest or be needed by web users. Quality-based Recommender Systems take into account quality criteria like credibility, believability, readability. In this paper, we present an approach to conceive Social Semantic Recommender Systems. In this approach a friendsourcing strategy is applied to better adequate recommendations to the user needs. The friendsourcing strategy focuses on the use of social force to assess quality of web content. In this paper we introduce the main research issues of this approach and detail the road-map we are following in the QHIR Project.
Experiences Implementing Interoperable SOA in a Security- Conscious Environment*

This report describes the results of an academic case study investigating the implementation of secure, interoperable Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) based web services. The report attempts to capture some of the issues faced in implementing security in interoperable SOA and to recommend some ways to overcome the inherent challenges facing secure SOA implementation. This study was conducted as part of a two-semester capstone course in the Software Engineering Masters program at the University of West Florida. Seven different implementations were created of a service offering airline reservations; three of the implementations used the Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) technology package, three used the Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP (LAMP) package, and one the Java/NetBeans/Glassfish package. To demonstrate interoperability, all implementations conformed to a previously defined WSDL interface; conformance was checked using an automated functional tester. Security was provided in the form of an authentication service and identity information and message data were exchanged using SOAP messages in standardized formats. All services were deployed to the cloud using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) platform. The conclusions of the report provide a number of lessons learned touching on the security process, good design of service code and the relative ease of use of the three technology packages.
Relationship between Corruption and Terrorism in African Countries

There has been a global outcry and collective effort to tackle social ills through the implementation of anti-graft laws, anticorruption policies, and various counterterrorism strategies across the world. As the fight against corruption and terrorism continues, other nations have been successful in their quest to limit the level of corrupt practices and terrorist attacks while other countries are still highly penetrated by corruption and terrorism. In order to discover a more suitable and realistic way of fighting corruption and terrorism, there is need to examine if the two constructs are related and the direction of the relationship, as the approach will assist if the two social ills should be tackled independently or simultaneously, or mutually. Corruption and terrorism have been the subject of many studies because of their alarming increase over the last two decades. Among the studies conducted on corruption and terrorism are; Adeniran and Owoeye (2018) conducted a prospective study on logistical perspective towards counterterrorism of Boko Haram Insurgency in Nigeria. Lessons were drawn from the Boko Haram's geographical location, evolution and their mode of operations in previous attacks. Boko Haram group was declared terrorist in the north-east part of Nigeria, and the in the global world because the insurgency grew into one of the largest areas of violence in Africa, and major conflict in global ABSTRACT
Electrification of Madrid Fleet Public Transport Company (EMT-Madrid): Strategic Analysis and Implementation

Madrid Public Transport Company (EMT-Madrid) is a property of the Madrid City Council, and it provides the public buses service in the whole city. Madrid, as most of the big cities in the world, is facing problems related to high levels of urban pollution, which directly affects the health and life quality of their inhabitants. EMT, having a fleet of around 2000 buses, has an impact in the mentioned problem and in the global warming. With the Strategic Plan 2017-2020, many new buses will be acquired, resulting in a fleet of natural gas, hybrid and electric vehicles by the end of 2020. The present study has the goal of being the cornerstone of a future strategic plan of the company. To this end, both external and internal analyses of the company have been conducted, which support that the electrification of the whole fleet is the best option in the long term. Furthermore, a Benchmarking of the state of the public transport in other 25 cities and the technology used in them has been conducted. Last, a model that allows replicability of this strategic assessment is proposed, in order to help other Transport Companies and City Councils to decide which transport fleet is the best to implement in their cities depending on their necessities and resources.
Adaptive Finite-Time Fuzzy Funnel Control for Nonaffine Nonlinear Systems

This paper, for the first time, presents an adaptive finite-time fuzzy funnel controller for nonaffine nonlinear systems via backstepping. To ensure the tracking error with prescribed boundedness, a modified transformation for funnel error is developed and embedded in the procedure of control design. The unknown packaged nonlinear functions appeared in the controller design process are approximated by using fuzzy logic systems. It is proved that the proposed method guarantees that the output tracking error falls within a preset funnel and all signals in the closed-loop system are semi-globally practically finite-time bounded (SGPFB). Simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the controller design scheme.
Smooth Risk Functions for Self-Controlled Case Series Models

The self-controlled case series (SCCS) method is commonly used to investigate associations between vaccine exposures and adverse events (side effects). It is an alternative to cohort and case control study designs. It requires information only on cases, individuals who have experienced the adverse event at least once, and automatically controls all fixed confounders that could modify the true association between exposure and adverse event. However, time-varying confounders (age, season) are not automatically controlled. The SCCS method has parametric and semi-parametric versions in terms of controlling the age effect. The parametric method uses piecewise constant functions with a priori chosen age groups and the semi-parametric method leaves the age effect unspecified. Mis-specification of age groups in the parametric version may lead to biased estimates of the exposure effect, and the semi-parametric approach runs into computational problems when the sample size is moderately large. Moreover, both versions of SCCS represent the time-varying exposures using step functions with pre-determined cut-points. A less prescriptive approach may be beneficial when the shape of the relative risk function associated with exposure is not known a priori, especially when exposure effects can be long-lasting. This thesis focuses on extending the SCCS method to avoid the aforementioned limitations by modelling the age and exposure effects using flexible smooth functions. Specifically, we used penalised regression splines based on cubic M-splines, which are piecewise polynomials of degree 3. We developed three new extensions: a method that represents only the age effect with splines, a method that uses splines to model only the exposure effect and a non-parametric SCCS method that represents both effects by splines. Simulation studies showed that these new methods outperformed the parametric and semi-parametric methods. The new methods are illustrated using large data sets. Review of SCCS vaccine studies and directions on how to use the method are also given.
Effects of a Career Exploration Intervention on Students’ Career Maturity and Self-Concept

This study investigated the effects of a career exploration intervention (CEI) on career maturity and self-concept among Malaysian high school students, using a true experimental design (pretest–posttest with a control group). One hundred thirty-nine high school students in Malaysia were recruited and randomly assigned to receive either a CEI or no intervention. Multivariate analyses of covariance showed significant differences in career maturity and self-concept between the experimental and control groups. Career maturity and self-concept were enhanced immediately after the CEI, and the effects were retained after 4 weeks. Students’ evaluation and feedback on the intervention were also collected. Research and practice implications are discussed.
Joint Estimation and Robustness Optimization

Many real-world optimization problems have input parameters estimated from data whose inherent imprecision can lead to fragile solutions that may impede desired objectives and/or render constraints infeasible. We propose a joint estimation and robustness optimization (JERO) framework to mitigate estimation uncertainty in optimization problems by seamlessly incorporating both the parameter estimation procedure and the optimization problem. Toward that end, we construct an uncertainty set that incorporates all of the data, and the size of the uncertainty set is based on how well the parameters are estimated from that data when using a particular estimation procedure: regressions, the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, and maximum likelihood estimation (among others). The JERO model maximizes the uncertainty set’s size and so obtains solutions that—unlike those derived from models dedicated strictly to robust optimization—are immune to parameter perturbations that would violate constraints or lead to objective function values exceeding their desired levels. We describe several applications and provide explicit formulations of the JERO framework for a variety of estimation procedures. To solve the JERO models with exponential cones, we develop a second-order conic approximation that limits errors beyond an operating range; with this approach, we can use state-of-the-art second-order conic programming solvers to solve even large-scale convex optimization problems. This paper was accepted by J. George Shanthikumar, special issue on data-driven prescriptive analytics.
Clinical comparison of speculum’s influence on intraoperative aberrometry reading

Purpose The aim of this study was to evaluate the influence of four different types of speculums on aberrometry reading (OPD SCAN III [OPD]) and on intraoperative aberrometry reading (optiwave response analyzer, ORA). Patients and methods This prospective, controlled, comparative study of consecutive cases included the evaluation of five eyes of five patients with monofocal intraocular lens (IOL) implantation. Seventeen measures were performed on each patient: for each speculum, there were two measurements on the OPD and another two on ORA with four different types of blepharostats. A control measure was performed on the without blepharostat in the dominant eye of each patient, therefore totalizing 85 measurements. The measures with the blepharostats were as follows: without pressure (WF) or passive measure and after pressure (AF) or active measure to close the eye. The speculum used in all patients was as follows: open-edged wire (Barraquer); threaded with open blade (Lieberman), with 21 mm aperture; wired with solid blade (Barraquer); and threaded with solid blade (Lieberman) with 21 mm opening. An evaluation of the objective refractive data from the OPD and ORA and the corneal astigmatism from the OPD was performed. Results Spherical equivalent (SE) of the OPD with the use of blepharostat compared to the OPD without speculum presented only 37.5% of results without statistical significance. Regarding the SE of ORA with speculum usage, compared to the OPD without blepharostat, only 12.5% were not significant. Regarding the accuracy of the ORA refractive axis with the use of blepharostats, all results presented statistical significance. Conclusion Thus, in the present study, we reached the conclusion between the studied blepharostats that the most suitable for use in the aphakic and pseudophakic capture of the ORA is the open blade threaded blepharostat (Lieberman).
A University/School Partnership Leading to Student Content Gain and Teacher Instructional Change

University professors collaborated with a fth grade science teacher to implement a mixed method study that investigated the e ectiveness of a collaboratively developed planning model on fth grade student science knowledge gain and the impact of coaching on teacher instructional change. For one school year, from the fall through the spring semester, the teacher implemented the planning model and was coached twice monthly by the professors. The research questions were: (1) what is the e ect of the science planning model on fth grade student science content gain on students receiving the treatment and those not receiving the treatment? ; (2) what is the e ect of the science planning model on fth grade at-risk student science content gain and other fth grade student science content gain when both groups receive the treatment? ; and (3) what kind of change occurs in instructional delivery when content experts collaborate with and coach a fth grade classroom science teacher? Science instruction integrating reading and writing strategies enhanced science knowledge gains of at-risk students. Coaching a teacher through the implementation of a planning model shifted instruction from teacher-centered to student-centered and placed the construction of science knowledge onto the students. 1 NCPEA Education Leadership Review: Portland Conference Special Edition, Volume 12, Number 3 (October 2011) note: This manuscript has been peer-reviewed, accepted, and endorsed by the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA) as a signi cant contribution to the scholarship and practice of education administration. In addition to publication in the Connexions Content Commons, this module is published in the Education Leadership Review, Portland Special Issue *Version 1.2: Sep 26, 2011 12:27 pm -0500 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ http://www.ncpeapublications. org http://cnx.org/content/m41130/1.2/ OpenStax-CNX module: m41130 2 (October, 2011), ISSN 1532-0723. Formatted and edited in Connexions by Theodore Creighton and Brad Bizzell, Virginia Tech and Janet Tareilo, Stephen F. Austin State University.