Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The nesC language: a holistic approach to networked embedded systems

We present nesC, a programming language for networked embedded systems that represent a new design space for application developers. An example of a networked embedded system is a sensor network, which consists of (potentially) thousands of tiny, lowpower "motes," each of which execute concurrent, reactive programs that must operate with severe memory and power constraints. nesC's contribution is to support the special needs of this domain by exposing a programming model that incorporates event-driven execution, a flexible concurrency model, and component-oriented application design. Restrictions on the programming model allow the nesC compiler to perform whole-program analyses, including data-race detection (which improves reliability) and aggressive function inlining (which reduces resource consumption). nesC has been used to implement TinyOS, a small operating system for sensor networks, as well as several significant sensor applications. nesC and TinyOS have been adopted by a large number of sensor network research groups, and our experience and evaluation of the language shows that it is effective at supporting the complex, concurrent programming style demanded by this new class of deeply networked systems.
Fas Signaling in Dendritic Cells Mediates Th2 Polarization in HDM-Induced Allergic Pulmonary Inflammation

Fas–Fas ligand (FasL) signaling plays an important role in the development of allergic inflammation, but the cellular and molecular mechanisms are still not well known. By using the bone marrow-derived dendritic cell (BMDC) transfer-induced pulmonary inflammation model, we found that house dust mite (HDM)-stimulated FAS-deficient BMDCs induced higher Th2-mediated allergic inflammation, associated with increased mucus production and eosinophilic inflammation. Moreover, FAS-deficient BMDCs promoted Th2 cell differentiation upon HDM stimulation in vitro. Compared to wild-type BMDCs, the Fas-deficient BMDCs had increased ERK activity and decreased IL-12 production upon HDM stimulation. Inhibition of ERK activity could largely increase IL-12 production, consequently restored the increased Th2 cytokine expression of OT-II CD4+ T cells activated by Fas-deficient BMDCs. Thus, our results uncover an important role of DC-specific Fas signaling in Th2 differentiation and allergic inflammation, and modulation of Fas signaling in DCs may offer a useful strategy for the treatment of allergic inflammatory diseases.
Relevant Feature Extraction by Combining Independent Components Analysis and Common Spatial Patterns for EEG Based Motor Imagery Classification

Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) use brain’s signal such as electro-encephalogram (EEG), reflecting the user’s intention. Event related desynchronisation or synchronisation correspond to attenuation or enhancement of power in certain frequency bands over the sensorimotor cortex of the brain, due to actual or imagined movement of body parts. Such aspects of the signal can be better represented in terms of relevant features to achieve accurate mental task classification for higher performance of BCI. The existence of inflicted noise and other artifacts in EEG signals and high dimensionality of the dataset hinder the classifier’s performance in BCI. In order to overcome these obstructions, it is impertinent to derive independent noise free components from raw signal and diminish the length of the extracted feature vector. For optimising the classification task, the amalgamation of ICA technique and CSP is explored to obtain the most relevant and discriminative subset of features. The effectiveness of this methodology, in comparison to other methods found in literature, is demonstrated through experimental results on BCI Competition datasets. KeywordsBrain Computer Interfaces, Mental tasks, Feature Extraction, Feature Selection, Common Spatial Patterns, BandPower, Independent Component Analysis.
Fostering Micro-Entrepreneurship as Panacea to Poverty Eradication in the Malaysian Economy: A Conceptual Perception

Entrepreneurs not only create benefits through the expansion and the development of economic and business industry, it also creates challenges for emerging micro-entrepreneurs to effectively compete in an environment characterised by multitude of challenges. The question is whether the development of micro-entrepreneurship industry is a progressive approach that can motivate the small and medium entrepreneurs to eradicate poverty. This paper is a deliberate attempt to revisit the essential concept and practice of micro-entrepreneurship in small and medium industry as well as its role in eradicating poverty in Malaysian. The Malaysian government has launched the New Economic Policy to eradicate hardcore poverty, restructuring employment and developing the rural area of Malaysia. It has been determined that the development of micro-entrepreneurship significantly contributed to small and medium industry and poverty eradication. Furthermore, the success of poverty eradication has significantly created awareness among micro-entrepreneurs in small and medium industry. In this paper, a comprehensive model of micro-entrepreneurship strategy in small and medium industry in eradicating poverty has been constructed with the aim of assisting the Malaysia government in developing their socio-economic policies.
Age as a Contextual Cue in Problem-Based Learning.

Altering the age of a patient in a problem-based curriculum should encourage students to explore ethical issues related to human development. To assess the influence of a patient's age on problem-based tutorial discussion, the relevant discussion categories and the numbers of age-related discussions were compared. Subjects were four groups of six students in the undergraduate problem-based learning medical curriculum of a Canadian university. Groups, led by experienced clinical tutors, studied one of three versions of a problem, with the major difference being the patient's age. Less than 37. of the total tutorial time was devoted to age-related discussion and very few age-related objectives were achieved. Discussions were similar regardless of the patient's age, in that all emphasized the biological nature of the disease. Explanations are offered for why these results differ from previous research. (Contains nine references and two tables.) (SLD) *********************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) (3/Ti[fie document haS been reproduced as received from the person or organization originating it 0 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduchon dustily Ponta of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI posibon of pokcy -PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY Pgykl-IS ,e3C.u/t46 6/6 TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC1:' AGE AS A CONTEXTUAL CUE IN PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING Phyllis Blumberg, Ph.D., McMaster University Patricia Solomon, M.Sc., M:Master University Akram Shehata, B.Sc., McMaster University Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, April, 1994, New Orleans, LA.
SIFT implementation based on GPU

Abstract—Image matching is the core research topics of digital photogrammetry and computer vision. SIFT(Scale-Invariant Feature Transform) algorithm is a feature matching algorithm based on local invariant features which is proposed by Lowe at 1999, SIFT features are invariant to image rotation and scaling, even partially invariant to change in 3D camera viewpoint and illumination. They are well localized in both the spatial and frequency domains, reducing the probability of disruption by occlusion, clutter, or noise. So the algorithm has a widely used in image matching and 3D reconstruction based on stereo image. Traditional SIFT algorithm's implementation and optimization are generally for CPU. Due to the large numbers of extracted features(even if only several objects can also extract large numbers of SIFT feature), high-dimensional of the feature vector(usually a 128-dimensional SIFT feature vector), and the complexity for the SIFT algorithm, therefore the SIFT algorithm on the CPU processing speed is slow, hard to fulfil the real-time requirements. Programmable Graphic Process United(PGPU) is commonly used by the current computer graphics as a dedicated device for image processing. The development experience of recent years shows that a high-performance GPU, which can be achieved 10 times single-precision floating-point processing performanceone compared with the same time of a high-performance desktop CPU, simultaneity the GPU's memory bandwidth is up to five times compared with the same period desktop platform. Provide the same computing power, the GPU's cost and power consumption should be less than the CPU-based system. At the same time, due to the parallel nature of graphics rendering and image processing, so GPU-accelerated image processing become to an efficient solution for some algorithm which have requirements for real-time. In this paper, we realized the algorithm by OpenGL shader language and compare to the results which realized by CPU. Experiments demonstrate that the efficiency of GPU-based SIFT algorithm are significantly improved.
“Bad enough governance”: state capacity and quality of institutions in post-Soviet autocracies

This article contributes to current discussions on state capacity, quality of institutions, and political regimes. Our analysis demonstrates that the J-curve argument (“good institutions” in autocracies as compared to hybrid and transitional regimes) may not be generic and is not well supported by empirical evidence from the sample of post-Soviet countries. An explanatory model of the “King of the Mountain” is instead provided. Its focus is on the monopoly of political rent as a precondition for extraction of economic rent. It demonstrates an inverse correlation between the quality of institutions and the extraction of political and economic rent, and explains why an autocrat may not have an incentive to improve institutions that may make his/her monopoly vulnerable, and rather would prefer to preserve a low quality of institutions and “bad enough governance. ” An analysis of a variety of external and domestic factors that may endanger this monopoly is provided. Finally, the autocrat's alternative strategic choices are analyzed. It is argued that better payoffs for the autocrat – paradoxically – may result from partial reforms and improvement of the quality of institutions. However, for various reasons, this is not occurring in post-Soviet autocracies.
SURFACE MODIFICATION OF POLYHIPES USING SOLUTION PLASMA PROCESS FOR CO 2 ADSORPTION

High internal phase emulsion polymers (polyHIPEs) are highly porous polymers prepared by high internal phase emulsion (HIPE) technique. Because of their characteristics, i.e. high surface area and, high porosity with interconnecting pores, polyHIPEs have been widely used in such applications as adsorbents, membranes, scaffolds in tissue engineering and, sensing materials. In this work, polyHIPE derived from divinylbenzene was prepared and the polyHIPE was modified with polyethyleneimine (PEI) by using solution plasma process. These modified polyHIPE will be then used as an adsorbent for CO2 adsorption study. The existence of amine groups on the surface of samples was confirmed by fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy and water contact angle measurement, which showed that contact angle of polyHIPEs decreases after surface modification. The use of scanning electron spectroscopy (SEM) to investigate the morphology of samples revealed that unmodified and PEI-modified polyHIPEs showed an open porous structure with interconnecting pores. email: manit.n@chula.ac. th
A Modular Verification Methodology for Caching and Lock-Based Concurrency in File Systems

The Flashix project is a team effort to develop a functionally correct, crash-safe and concurrent file system for flash memory. The approach is based on encapsulated, modular components and their incremental refinement towards a realistic and executable implementation. Scala and C code is derived from the models. The file system provides strong guarantees in the presence of hardware failures and can tolerate crashes. It also performs internal operations in a concurrent thread of execution. This thesis emerged from this large-scale verification effort and reports on the verification methodology and its practical application to the file system. The first contribution is a modular approach for the specification and verification of crash-aware components. A component is crash-aware if it provides guarantees in the event of a power failure and subsequent recovery. A refinement theory is presented that facilitates increasing the atomicity of a component with respect to power failures incrementally. The semantics of the components capture the effect on a power failure of order-preserving write-back caches succinctly. This type of cache is common in journaling file systems. The semantics thereby ease the burden of specification significantly and the effect of a power failure propagates upwards a component hierarchy over every refinement step implicitly. The second contribution is an extension of this theory to concurrent, crash-aware components. This allows clients of a component to call interface operations concurrently as well as the component itself to perform internal operations in another thread of execution in the background. Lipton reduction is used to merge several steps into one block that is executed atomically. The approach ensures that not only atomicity with respect to concurrent threads is achieved, but also atomicity with respect to the crash behavior of the component. Opportunities for Lipton reductions are applied automatically based on annotations of ownership. The ownership discipline ensures that access to a data structure is possible only if the possession of sufficient permissions is proven. Permissions to a data structure are acquired by locking the mutex or reader-writer lock that synchronizes access to the data structure and relinquished by unlocking. The third contribution consists of the specification and verification of several components of the Flashix file system. The models include an erase block manager, a journal with transactions and garbage collection, a persistence layer with serialization and write-back caching for the journal and a component responsible for the atomicity of commits. The erase block manager hides the specific write characteristics of flash hardware and its error-prone nature from the rest of the file system. It performs wear-leveling concurrently in a background thread. For all components strong guarantees in the event of a power failure are proven. All proofs are mechanized in the tool KIV. Together the components comprise a coherent and working file system.
IMPLEMENTATION OF EVENT EXTRACTION FROM TWITTER USING LDA

It is a simple approach for extracting events from twitter (tweets). Examples of events are national conferences, competitive exams, jobs opening, meditation camps etc. Tweets are the up-to-date and comprehensive collection of information about the current topic. It identifies the specific events in unstructured or semi-structured tweets. It transforms unstructured information in a collection of tweets into a structured database or in the form of retrieval calendar entries that contains information about specific event, time and location. The main goal of this paper is to explore different approaches for extracting the events. This paper focuses on usefulness of accurately extracting Major events.
Intelligent Collectives: Theory, Applications, and Research Challenges

ABSTRACT Nowadays, along with the rapid development of information technologies, very often solving a common problem is entrusted to many autonomous units (people, systems). With such an approach, one can tap into the so-called collective intelligence (CI)—emerging from the collaboration and competition of many individuals. In this paper, we present recent research on CI related to the effectiveness of using the wisdom of crowds to perform a wide range of problems. For this aim, we first introduce a general framework of CI involving key characteristics of intelligent collectives. Next, we focus on the problem of how diversity and collective cardinality influence collective performance. Then, its applications, which are widely used such as prediction markets and Delphi method, will be presented. Furthermore, some research challenges on the capacity of combining CI with other research fields such as machine learning and social networks are also discussed.
Title : Corporate Entrepreneurship for Internationalising Learning & Teaching Strategy in UK Higher Education : A Combination of Literature

The literature review combines uniquely writing from three academic domains: strategic management of HE (particularly internationalisation), entrepreneurship in HE and corporate entrepreneurship. This combination is applied to the internationalisation of UK universities to establish areas of overlap and to propose that an emergent strategic approach, resulting in an ‘umbrella strategy’ for internationalisation, is most appropriate and can be effectively executed in HE through corporate entrepreneurship. The review uses research and concepts from both private and public sectors. It recommends the adoption in HE of a broader definition of entrepreneurship and an ethical approach to internationalisation in order to appeal to the values of academics. Entrepreneurship can be conceptualised as part of university culture, and, as such, central to the execution of internationalisation.
Using Erlang in Research and Education in a Technical University

This paper addresses the problem of using functional programming (FP) languages for research and education purposes. In order to identify problems associated with usage of FP languages, such as Erlang, an experiment consisting of two surveys was performed. The rst survey was anonymous, and aimed at establishing whether the participants prefer object-oriented or functional coding. The second one was a survey after students have nished an Erlang course. The results of these two surveys demonstrate that functional programming is underrated without apparent reasons. Possible steps to address this problem are suggested.
Formation of secure wireless ad-hoc sensor networks

Looking into the wireless world today, the most of data/information is transmitted in plaintext over the ether. These sensitive data/information possibly route through several intermediate nodes to a destination. To secure the sensitive data/information, the various ad-hoc technologies like Bluetooth, WLAN and ZigBee have implemented different security mechanisms and routing protocols. But since most wireless ad-hoc networks demand battery driven devices they will have limit resources to provide feasible security. The different technologies will be outlined regarding a set case scenario. We have a parking lot and want to secure cars against thievery. For this we conducted a research over suitable technologies and routing protocols. We concluded that using ZigBee would fill that role better than the other technologies examined. We also decided to use the build in routing mechanisms from ZigBee. We developed a solution outcast for the application level of our case and gave a foundation to build a test model on. Magne Arild Haglund both employed at Agder University College. We would like to thank them for their guidance and critics during the project period. We also want to thank them for their help defining this thesis. We would also like to thank Stein Bergsmark and Sissel Andreassen for their guidance during the writing of the thesis.
Benefits of curriculum renewal : the Stellenbosch University physiotherapy experience : supplement 1 - research

Background. Driven by a changing healthcare environment, the Division of Physiotherapy (Stellenbosch University) reduced core content and adopted a multimodal approach to teaching and learning. The benefits of curriculum renewal, however, are seldom investigated despite ongoing internal appraisal. Evaluation of the BSc Physiotherapy programme was considered incomplete without determining the worth of the programme. Objectives. To determine whether there was a change in students' perception of the impact of the programme on personal development; and whether the programme prepared them for community service. Methods. A descriptive comparative desktop analysis was conducted in which the data from the Faculty's Programme Evaluation process were compared between students enrolled in the old curriculum (2006) and students enrolled in the new curriculum (2011) using pooled data and t-tests to compare responses between the two groups. A level of significance was set at p<0.05. Results. A significant increase in scores was noted for various graduate attributes developed as a result of the programme, such as critical thinking, clinical reasoning, communication and sourcing information (p<0.01). Similarly, students scored their perceptions related to programme structure significantly higher (p<0.01). No change was reported regarding students' ability to maintain a balance between studies and other activities. Scores pertaining to their perception of readiness for community service or professional practice remained the same with both cohorts believing they were well prepared. Conclusion. The renewed format seemed to benefit students greatly in assisting the development of graduate attributes. Students were significantly more satisfied with the structure of the renewed curriculum and - despite extensive changes - the principles-based multimodal approach to teaching and learning was perceived as effective for preparing students for community service. Programmes undertaking curriculum renewal should not only focus on the curriculum content but also develop a variety of learning opportunities to facilitate the development of graduate attributes. The next cycle of evaluation should however reflect on clinical practice.
Position analysis, singularity loci and workspace of a novel 2PRPU Schoenflies-motion generator

SUMMARY Pick-and-place applications need to perform rigid body displacements that combine translations along three independent directions and rotations around one fixed direction (Schoenflies motions). Such displacements constitute a four-dimensional (4-D) subgroup (Schoenflies subgroup) of the 6-D displacement group. The four-degrees of freedom (dof) manipulators whose end effector performs only Schoenflies motions are named Schoenflies-motion generators (SMGs). The most known SMGs are the serial robots named SCARA. In the literature, parallel manipulators (PMs) have also been proposed as SMGs. Here, a novel single-loop SMG of type 2PRPU is studied. Its position analysis, singularity loci and workspace are addressed to provide simple analytic and geometric tools that are useful for the design. The proposed single-loop SMG is not overconstrained, its actuators are on or near the base and its end effector can perform a complete rotation. These features solve the main drawbacks that parallel SMG architectures have in general and make the proposed SMG a valid design alternative.