Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multirate Integration Properties of Waveform Relaxation with Applications to Circuit Simulation and Parallel Computation

Abstract : Because of the high cost of fabricating an Integrated Circuit(IC), it is important to verify the design using simulation. There are a wide variety of techniques for simulating integrated circuit designs. but the most accurate and reliable is to construct the System of nonlinear ordinary di1ferential equations that describe a given circuit. and solve the system with a numerical integration method. This approach, referred to as circuit simulation, is computationally expensive, particularly when applied to large circuits. To reduce the computation time required to simulate large MOS circuits, new numerical integration algorithms based on relaxation techniques have been developed. These techniques can reduce the simulation time as much as an order of magnitude over standard circuit simulation programs. In addition, they are particularly suited for parallel implementation. This thesis covers both the classical numerical techniques and the new relaxation-based algorithms. with particular emphasis on the Waveform Relaxation (WR) family of algorithms. Algorithms in this family are reviewed, convergence theorems are included, and their implementations on a parallel processor are presented.
Accurate SLAM With Application For Aerial Path Planning

Title of dissertation: ACCURATE SLAM WITH APPLICATION FOR AERIAL PATH PLANNING Chen Friedman , Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Dissertation directed by: Professor Inderjit Chopra Alfred Gessow Rotorcraft Center Department of Aerospace Engineering University of Maryland and: Professor Omri Rand Faculty of Aerospace Engineering Technion–Israel Institute of Technology This thesis focuses on operation of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), in previously unexplored, GPS-denied environments. For this purpose, a refined Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) algorithm using a laser range scanner is developed, capable of producing a map of the traversed environment, and estimating the position of the MAV within the evolving map. The algorithm’s accuracy is quantitatively assessed using several dedicated metrics, showing significant advantages over current methods. Repeatability and robustness are shown using a set of 12 repeated experiments in a benchmark scenario. The SLAM algorithm is primarily based on an innovative scan matching approach, dubbed Perimeter Based Polar Scan Matching (PB-PSM), which introduces a maximum overlap term to the cost function. This term, along with a tailored cost minimization technique, are found to yield highly accurate solutions for scan matching pairs of range scans. The algorithm is extensively tested on both ground and aerial platforms, in indoor as well as outdoor scenarios, using both in-house and previously published datasets, utilizing several different laser scanners. The SLAM algorithm is then coupled with a global A* path planner, and applied on a single rotor helicopter, performing targeted flight missions using a pilot-in-theloop implementation. Targeted flight is defined as navigating to a goal position, defined by relative distance from a known initial position. It differs from the more common task of mapping, as it may not rely on loop closure opportunities to smooth out errors and optimize the generated map. Therefore, the importance of position estimates accuracy increases dramatically. The complete algorithm is then used for targeted flight experiments with a pilot in the loop. The algorithm presents the pilot with nothing but heading information. In order to further prevent the pilot from interfering with the obstacle avoidance task, the evolving map and position are not shown to the human pilot. Furthermore, the scenario is introduced with artificial (invisible) obstacles, apparent only to the path planner. The pilot therefore has to adhere to the path planner directions in order to reach the goal while avoiding all obstacles. The resulting paths show the helicopter successfully avoid both real and artificial obstacles, while following the planned path
Russian-English Dictionary of Idioms

This is the most innovative, comprehensive, and scholarly bilingual dictionary of Russian idioms available today. It includes close to 14,000 idioms, set expressions, and sayings found in contemporary colloquial Russian and in literature from the nineteenth century to the present. The Russian idioms are provided with many English equivalents to render idioms in various contexts. Illustrative examples are cited to show how the idioms are used in context. Each entry also contains a grammatical description of the idiom, a definition--an innovative feature for a bilingual dictionary--and stylistic and usage information. A most notable part of the work is the alphanumeric index that makes finding the right expression very easy.
GPU accelerated volume rendering for use in 2D/3D registration

Ως μία προσπάθeια βeλτίωσης της χeιρουργικής μe τη βοήθeια ηλeκτρονικού υπολογιστή, αυτή η διπλωματική προτeίνeι μια μέθοδο eπιτάχυνσης της 2D/3D καταχώρισης eικόνας άκαμπτων σωμάτων, χρησιμοποιώντας τις δυνατότητeς μιας κάρτας γραφικών. Συγκeκριμένα υλοποιeίται σe CUDA μια μέθοδος ρίψης ακτινών, για το σχηματισμό eνός Ψηφιακά Ανακατασκeυασμένου Ραδιογραφήματος από ογκομeτρικά δeδομένα προeρχόμeνα από Αξονική Τομογραφία, πeτυχαίνοντας eπιδόσeις eκτέλeσης σe σχeδόν πραγματικό χρόνο, για δeδομένα υψηλής ανάλυσης. Ο αλγόριθμος συγκρίνeται μe μια πανομοιότυπη υλοποίηση για την CPU, πeτυχαίνοντας πάνω από 400x eπιτάχυνση, χωρίς eπιπτώσeις στην ακρίβeια, η οποία μeτράται μe τη χρήση ψηφιακά κατασκeυασμένων ραδιολογικών ομοιωμάτων. Η προτeινόμeνη λύση αποτeλeί ένα ακριβές και γρήγορο eργαλeίο που μπορeί να χρησιμοποιηθeί για την πιστοποίηση άκαμπτων σωμάτων υψηλής ποιότητας, παραδeίγματος χάρη δομές οστών.
Systems & control : an introduction to linear, sampled & non-linear systems

Some basic techniques - the Laplace transform, matrix concepts, system descriptions, transfer function and state space applying the techniques - system modelling, model manipulation, design aims sampled data systems - contrasting continuous and sampled data systems, the z-transform state variables - state variables revisited - modelling, transformations, amplitude scaling nonlinear systems - nonlinear problems, system modelling, exact (phase plane) methods MATLAB-4 - MATLAB-4, SIMULINK tutorial work - worked examples with solutions, standardized data sheets.
Factorial invariance of the South African culture instrument

The purpose of the study is to confirm the validity of the South African Culture Questionnaire (SACI) and to assess the questionnaire’s degree of factorial invariance across race groups. The questionnaire has been used for a number of years for organizational culture assessments, but no factorial invariance has been tested. It is essential for the cultural applicability of the measuring instrument (e.g. whether the measurements represent identical constructs on identical scales) and equivalence to be determined. A quantitative research study was conducted in a South African information communications and technology (ICT) company. A total of 455 employees completed the SACI. Structural equation modelling was used to determine if there was any invariance between the various race groups. The results confirmed the validity and reliability of the SACI and the fact that no factorial invariance existes between the measured groups. The original eight-factor structure of the SACI fits the data well – as evidenced by the overall goodness-of-fit statistics. The reliability associated with organizational culture for both the pathways and dimensions is acceptable across the various groups, as indicated by the overall and race goodness-of-fit statistics. No significant differences are found in the factorial patterns for the SACI for the four race groups. The conclusion drawn is that the questionnaire can thus be used with confidence for organizational assessments across race groups.
Encyclopedia of education research

Preface The Importance of Effective Reading Strategies for Science Teachers & Learners Early Literacy Development: The Role of Storytelling, Joint Reading, & Symbolic Play Assessing the Importance of Feedback to Teacher & Student Improvement in an Innovative Caribbean Reading Project Biological Literacy as an imperative of Present Time Challenges in Dyslexia Research Developmental Dyslexia: A Conceptual & Measurement Quandary Teaching Cantonese Opera Script: Story Schema Approach The Effects of Text, Graphic Images & Audio on Learning Examining Ways to Improve Visual Teaching Materials: The Role of Visual Literacy & Predominate Learning Modality Quality Metrics for Multimedia Reading: Assessment, Comprehension & Teaching Do Illustrated Instructional Books Promote Multimedia Learning? Index.
Smart Environments and Activity Recognition: A Logic-based Approach

This paper introduces a framework for enabling context-aware behaviors in smart environment applications, with a special emphasis on smart homes and similar scenarios. In particular, an ontology-based architecture is described that allows system designers to specify non trivial situations the system must be able to detect on the basis of available sensory data. Relevant situations may include activities and events that could be prolonged over long periods of time. Therefore, the ontology encodes temporal operators that, once applied to sensory information, allow to efficiently recognize and correlate different human activities and other events whose temporal relationships are contextually important. Special emphasis is devoted to actual representation and recognition of temporally distributed situations. The proof of concept is validated through a thoroughly described example of system usage.
Learning to read : should we keep things simple?

The simple view of reading describes reading comprehension as the product of decoding and listening comprehension and the relative contribution of each to reading comprehension across development. We present a cross-sectional analysis of first, second, and third graders (N = 123–125 in each grade) to assess the adequacy of the basic model. Participants completed multiple measures to inform latent constructs of word reading accuracy, word reading fluency, listening comprehension, reading comprehension, and vocabulary. In line with previous research, structural equation models confirmed that the influence of decoding skill decreased with increasing grade and that the influence of listening comprehension increased. However, several additional findings indicate that reading development is not that simple and support an elaboration of the basic model: A strong influence of listening comprehension on reading comprehension was apparent by grade 2, decoding skill was best measured by word and nonword reading accuracy in the early grades and word reading fluency in grade 3, and vocabulary skills indirectly affected reading comprehension through both decoding skill and listening comprehension. This new elaborated model, which provides a more comprehensive view of critical influences on reading in the early grades, has diagnostic and instructional ramifications for improving reading pedagogy.
Using Scrutable Learning Models to Support Personal learning Objectives on Mobile Devices

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs) refer to systems that allow individual learners to manage and control their own learning in their own space and at their own pace. In previous work we have proposed a 4D model of informal learning to analyse the informal aspects of a learning experience. The model includes dimensions for learning objectives, the learning environment, learning activities and learning tools, and reveals how much of the experience is really under the control of the learner. In an analysis of mobile tools we showed that many emerging m-learning systems focused on informality in the environment dimension but not in the others. In this paper we propose a scrutable learning model approach that allows personal learners to take control of their learning objectives while still allowing the system to intelligently support them with appropriate learning activities and resources.
Curriculum visualization based on subject competences

This paper proposes a novel visualization of an academic degree curriculum based on the information about its competences and subjects. The proposed visualization places the subjects closer or further from each other, depending on their shared or non-shared competences. In addition, the resulting graphic shows different clusters, formed by groups of subjects with more common competences. We have applied this visualization to the Multimedia degree and to the Computing Engineering degree of the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, known in English as Open University of Catalonia).
Long-Term Performance Degradation of c-Si Photovoltaic Modules and Strings

We present recent data relevant to both 55 Arco-Solar modules of the array in field exposure since 1980 in a devoted area at the ENEA Casaccia research center and 26 module-strings of the 100 kW-plant installed in 1990 at the ENEA-Casaccia parking. Analyzing the new data together with data gathered in previous measurement campaigns allows detecting that, in both the array and plant, the amount of failed modules is likely to increase exponentially with time and efficiency degrades non-linearly with time.
Web session security: formal verification, client-side enforcement and experimental analysis

Web applications are the dominant means to provide access to millions of on-line services and applications such as banking and e-commerce. To personalize users’ web experience, servers need to authenticate the users and then maintain their authentication state throughout a set of related HTTP requests and responses called a web session. As HTTP is a stateless protocol, the common approach, used by most of the web applications to maintain web session, is to use HTTP cookies. Each request belonging to a web session is authenticated by having the web browser to provide to the server a unique long random string, known as session identifier stored as cookie called session cookie. Taking over the session identifier gives full control over to the attacker and hence is an attractive target of the attacker to attack on the confidentiality and integrity of web sessions. The browser should take care of the web session security : a session cookie belonging to one source should not be corrupted or stolen or forced, to be sent with the requests, by any other source. This dissertation demonstrates that security policies can in fact be written down for both, confidentiality and integrity, of web sessions and enforced at the client side without getting any support from the servers and without breaking too many web applications. Moreover, the enforcement mechanisms designed can be proved correct within mathematical models of the web browsers. These claims are supported in this dissertation by 1) defining both, end-to-end and access control, security policies to protect web sessions; 2) introducing a new and using exiting mathematical models of the web browser extended with confidentiality and integrity security policies for web sessions; 3) offering mathematical proofs that the security mechanisms do enforce the security policies; and 4) designing and developing prototype browser extensions to test that real-life web applications are supported.
Analysis and enhancements of adaptive random testing

Random testing is a standard software testing method. It is a popular method for reliability assessment, but its use for debug testing has been opposed by some authorities. Random testing does not use any information to guide test case selection, and so, it is argued, testing is less likely to be effective than other methods. Based on the observation that failures often cluster in contiguous regions, Adaptive Random Testing (ART) is a more effective random testing method. While retaining random selection of test cases, selection is guided by the idea that tests should be widely spread throughout the input domain. A simple way to implement this concept, FSCSART, involves randomly generating a number of candidates, and choosing the candidate most widely spread from any already-executed test. This method has already shown to be up to 50% more effective than random testing. This thesis examines a number of theoretical and practical issues related to ART. Firstly, an theoretical examination of the scope of adaptive methods to improve testing effectiveness is conducted. Our results show that the maximum improvement in failure detection effectiveness possible is only 50% so ART performs close to this limit on many occasions. Secondly, the statistical validity of the previous empirical results is examined. A mathematical analysis of the sampling distribution of the various failuredetection effectiveness methods shows that the measure preferred in previous studies has a slightly unusual distribution known as the geometric distribution, and that that it and other measures are likely to show high variance, requiring very large sample sizes for accurate comparisons. A potential limitation of current ART methods is the relatively high selection overhead. A number of methods to obtain lower overheads are proposed and evaluated, involving a less-strict randomness or wide-spreading criterion. Two methods use dynamic, as-needed partitioning to divide the input domain, spreading test cases throughout the partitions as required. Another involves using a class of numeric sequences called quasi-random sequences. Finally, a more efficient implementation of the existing FSCS-ART method is proposed using the mathematical structure known as the Voronoi diagram. Finally, the use of ART on programs whose input is non-numeric is examined. While existing techniques can be used to generate random non-numeric candidates, a criterion for “wide spread” is required to perform ART effectively. It is proposed to use the notion of category-partition as such a criterion.
Responsive web design with HTML5 and CSS3 : learn responsive design using HTML5 and CSS3 to adapt websites to any browser or screen size

Preface Chapter 1: Getting Started with HTML5, CSS3, and Responsive Web Design Chapter 2: Media Queries: Supporting Differing Viewports Chapter 3: Embracing Fluid Layouts Chapter 4: HTML5 for Responsive Designs Chapter 5: CSS3: Selectors, Typography, and Color Modes Chapter 6: Stunning Aesthetics with CSS3 Chapter 7: CSS3 Transitions, Transformations, and Animations Chapter 8: Conquer Forms with HTML5 and CSS3 Chapter 9: Solving Cross-browser Responsive Challenges Index
Defining Tags by Linking to Knowledge Bases

This thesis looks into the process of automatically expanding image searches based on tags and the definitions of terms from public knowledge bases. To this end, we will try to extract terms related to a query. The process of finding these terms is known as feature extraction. The text collection on which we perform this feature extraction is, in this thesis, based on text retrieved from public knowledge bases using the original query. The program will in other words, first retrieve related documents. It will then pick out related terms using either Chi-Squared, or an approach I've coined "Neighbouring Terms", or NT. The latter is an approach that is much quicker to process, and may prove to give good precision to term extraction, despite not having to perform such a demanding process beforehand. This thesis will also look into different variables in these kind of processes to find the best approach to both Chi-Squared and NT. Because this automatic term extraction is set to work on a limited size of articles, there is a question of how many articles would be needed to get the best results. There are also several similarity models to consider when building something like this. For that reason, this thesis also looks into the different results obtained when working with models like the Vector Space model, Okapi BM25 and the Language Model. Other variables that this thesis looks into is whether or not term pre-processing, like stop word removal and stemming, are beneficial or not. Also, what gives the best results between searching for abstracts based on their title or their contents, and with how many terms can a query be expanded without losing too much relatedness. To evaluate the terms suggested by these methods, this thesis looks into the P@n values for 20 queries, as well as using metrics such as MAP (Mean Average Precision) to evaluate the sum of the results for each approach. To avoid biased evaluation, we also perform a user survey. We present the results of a survey where 32 people have given their opinion on the different terms suggested by the system, and how related to a given query they are. The main conclusion in this thesis is that NT does run faster than Chi-Squared, but while results did vary, the precision values on an average fell in favour of Chi-Squared. That said, it did not perform better by much, and with future improvements it could prove a viable solution in automatically generating semantically related terms without having to perform heavy processing.
Investigating information processing within the brain using multi-electrode array (MEA) electrophysiology data

How a stimulus, such as an odour, is represented in the brain is one of the main questions in neuroscience. It is becoming clearer that information is encoded by a population of neurons, but, how the spiking activity of a population of neurons conveys this information is unknown. Several population coding hypotheses have formulated over the years, and therefore, to obtain a more definitive answer as to how a population of neurons represents stimulus information we need to test, i.e. support or falsify, each of the hypotheses. One way of addressing these hypotheses is to record and analyse the activity of multiple individual neurons from the brain of a test subject when a stimulus is, and is not, presented. With the advent of multi electrode arrays (MEA) we can now record such activity. However, before we can investigate/test the population coding hypotheses using such recordings, we need to determine the number of neurons recorded by the MEA and their spiking activity, after spike detection, using an automatic spike sorting algorithm (we refer to the spiking activity of the neurons extracted from the MEA recordings as MEA sorted data). While there are many automatic spike sorting methods available, they have limitations. In addition, we are lacking methods to test/investigate the population coding hypotheses in detail using the MEA sorted data. That is, methods that show whether neurons respond in a hypothesised way and, if they do, shows how the stimulus is represented within the recorded area. Thus, in this thesis, we were motivated to, firstly, develop a new automatic spike sorting method, which avoids the limitations of other methods. We validated our method using simulated and biological data. In addition, we found our method can perform better than other standard methods. We next focused on the population rate coding hypothesis (i.e. the hypothesis that information is conveyed in the number of spikes fired by a pop- ulation of neurons within a relevant time period). More specifically, we developed a method for testing/investigating the population rate coding hypothesis using the MEA sorted data. That is, a method that uses the multi variate analysis of variance (MANOVA) test, where we modified its output, to show the most responsive subar- eas within the recorded area. We validated this using simulated and biological data. Finally, we investigated whether noise correlation between neurons (i.e. correlations in the trial to trial variability of the response of neurons to the same stimulus) in a rat's olfactory bulb can affect the amount of information a population rate code conveys about a set of stimuli. We found that noise correlation between neurons was predominately positive, which, ultimately, reduced the amount of information a population containing >45 neurons could convey about the stimuli by ~30%.