Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Process modeling for projection based stereo lithography

PROCESS MODELING FOR PROJECTION BASED STEREO LITHOGRAPHY Zulfiqar Ali M.S. in Mechanical Engineering Advisor: Assist. Prof. Yiğit Karpat August, 2015 Stereo lithography is a widely used additive manufacturing process, where a three dimensional object is fabricated directly from a solid computer model. This thesis develops a projection type SLA (PSLA) test bed using a digital micro mirror device. The goal is to improve the dimensional accuracy and surface quality of the polymer parts through detailed process modeling and gain predictive ability about the duration of the printing process. For that purpose; (i) process parameters of the PSLA system have been analyzed, (ii) material properties of different polymers have been identified through experimental techniques, and a curing process model has been established, and (iii) some case studies have been conducted. The information deduced from the system is used to set the continuous movement speed of the vertical axis to obtain ”layerless printing” of parts where the surface quality is significantly improved compared to conventional layer-by-layer printing. The results show that the process planning approach used in this thesis can produce highly accurate parts. Experiments on more challenging part designs such as high aspect ratio and micro scale parts have also been conducted, and limits of the three dimensional printing system have been determined.
Professional role and identity of Icelandic preschool teachers: effects of stakeholders’ views

In this article, we explore the reality of Icelandic preschool teachers who are, as in most other countries, predominantly female. The gendered nature of the role and the current identity adopted by preschool teachers appear to impact on their perceived status and professionalism. In this process, stakeholders in early childhood education (ECE), as well as the preschool teachers themselves, play important parts. The question that underlies the paper is: ‘How do the views of preschool teachers and stakeholders in ECE affect the preschool teachers’ professional identity? ’ The data used to answer the question are from focus group research carried out with preschool teachers and stakeholders in ECE in one community in Iceland. These stakeholders, besides preschool teachers and staff within the preschools, were parents, professionals at the municipal preschool office and politicians. The theoretical perspective informing the methodology of the research was ‘symbolic interactionism’ and the concept of ‘democratic professionalism’ was used as an aspirational framework to analyse the data. The findings reveal connections between the ideology relating to the preschool teachers’ educational role, their limited leadership and the gendered views of stakeholders. At the end of the paper, implications and recommendations for preschool teachers are suggested.
An inter-comparison of the social costs of air quality from reduced-complexity models

Reliable estimates of externality costs—such as the costs arising from premature mortality due to exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5)—are critical for policy analysis. To facilitate broader analysis, several datasets of the social costs of air quality have been produced by a set of reduced-complexity models (RCMs). It is much easier to use the tabulated marginal costs derived from RCMs than it is to run ‘state-of-the-science’ chemical transport models (CTMs). However, the differences between these datasets have not been systematically examined, leaving analysts with no guidance on how and when these differences matter. Here, we compare per-tonne marginal costs from ground level and elevated emission sources for each county in the United States for sulfur dioxide (SO2), nitrogen oxides (NOx), ammonia (NH3) and inert primary PM2.5 from three RCMs: Air Pollution Emission Experiments and Policy (AP2), Estimating Air pollution Social Impacts Using Regression (EASIUR) and the Intervention Model for Air Pollution (InMAP). National emission-weighted average damages vary among models by approximately 21%, 31%, 28% and 12% for inert primary PM2.5, SO2, NOx and NH3 emissions, respectively, for ground-level sources. For elevated sources, emission-weighted damages vary by approximately 42%, 26%, 42% and 20% for inert primary PM2.5, SO2, NOx and NH3 emissions, respectively. Despite fundamental structural differences, the three models predict marginal costs that are within the same order of magnitude. That different and independent methods have converged on similar results bolsters confidence in the RCMs. Policy analyzes of national-level air quality policies that sum over pollutants and geographical locations are often robust to these differences, although the differences may matter for more source- or location-specific analyzes. Overall, the loss of fidelity caused by using RCMs and their social cost datasets in place of CTMs is modest.
Teaching Participatory Action Research: Fostering Impact

Abstract Participatory action research (PAR) investigates issues through collaboration and cooperation between academics and nonacademic community members. Recently, awareness of such approaches has increased as the need for transformative research and contribution to social goods has become clear. However, participatory methods have been deployed unevenly within the Humanities and Social Sciences, and opportunities for engagement have been explored unevenly. This article seeks to assist colleagues in teaching PAR methods by reflecting upon our practice of working with Early Career Researchers to identify, explore, and deploy participatory methods in ways that foster genuine social change and meaningful research trajectories.
Annual Report on U.S. Consumption Poverty: 2017

 Three factors explain why consumption poverty shows a long-term decline but the official poverty measure does not. First, the official federal poverty line is adjusted over time using a price index with well-documented flaws. The official poverty line for a family of four in 1980 was $8,351. Today it is $25,465. If one corrects for the flaws in how the poverty line is adjusted for inflation, based on the 1980 standard, the threshold today would be about $18,000. Second, the official poverty measure is based on cash income only, which fails to capture all the resources available to a family including tax credits and in-kind transfers. Finally, the official measure of family resources is biased due to under-reporting of certain types of income that are commonly received by those with low reported income.
Outcome assessment of the online English learning and management system: A project on educational technology application to English learning in Taiwanese polytechnic higher education

This paper presents the result of a three-year action research plan involving the innovative application of “LiveDVD”, a web-based English learning system loaded with VODs and embedded into the English learning program of a polytechnic university in Taiwan. Over the implementation period, the LiveDVD action plan essentially involves use requirement on students along with creation of learning and assessment materials for the target VODs and outcome management. Outcome assessment indicators include (1) the association between use activeness of LiveDVD and pass status of English proficiency certificates and (2) the causal relations between LiveDVD-related variables and English learning outcome. A survey questionnaire on LiveDVD and the management platform were employed to collect relevant data. The chi-squared test of group independence and an SEM-based path analysis were performed to address the outcome indicators respectively. The findings of the project include: (1) use of LiveDVD is positively and significantly associated with the pass status of English proficiency certificates and, (2) use motivation has direct effect on English proficiency and create the significant mediation effect on English proficiency certificates. This project yields significant implications especially for vocational higher education in Taiwan in the innovative application of educational technology to English education coupled with an effective outcome management model.
Inequality in a global perspective

The basic story of global inequality in the last three decades has been an overall decline, but one which is composed of quite intricate patterns. There has been a decline in between-country inequality as China and India have grown relative to the US and other rich countries. This has been accompanied by an increase in within-country inequality, but this is itself composed of rising inequality in some countries such as China, India, and the US, and declining inequality in other countries, including large economies in Latin America. Section II of the paper reviews these patterns, highlighting country diversity to make the central point that policy matters. Section III addresses a normative question—what relative weight should be given to within-country and between-country inequality in making an overall global assessment? This section brings on board recent philosophical discourse, including on inequality of opportunity in a global frame. Section IV returns to the ‘policy matters’ theme and takes up global constraints on national redistribution policy in a globalized world: for example, a race to the bottom on taxation to attract and keep capital and talent, and possible global institutional responses to alleviate these constraints.
Investigations of a Cognitive Skill.

Research was conducted investigating properties of skill in learning, in the domain of elementary algebra. Thinking-aloud protocols indicate that early knowledge of the subjects studied was fragmentary, rather than involving systematically flawed procedures. Computational models, developed to simulate observed errors, focused on the role of structural representations in facilitating reliable performance. Connectionist models for recognizing structural features were investigated, leading to the conclusion that the cognitive system probably requires knowledge functionally equivalent to grammatical rules. Data from information-processing experiments indicated that (a) judgments about the application of an algebraic operator are influenced by low-level features recognized before a completely parsed representation is formed; and (b) recognition of individual characters in expressions is not facilicated by syntactically correct contexts, as it is by lexical contexts in letter recognition, but information about the algebraic categories of characters is obtained early in processing from the syntactic context. The authors conclude that training in basic symbolic skill might be more effective if more attention were given to teaching the structure of information of the domain, including general features of the information presented in problems as well as general constraints and goals of the procedures to be acquired.
Automatic Text Clustering for Audio Attribute Elicitation Experiment Responses

Collection of text data is an integral part of descriptive analysis, a method commonly used in audio quality evaluation experiments. Where large text data sets will be presented to a panel of human assessors (e.g., to group responses that have the same meaning), it is desirable to reduce redundancy as much as possible in advance. Text clustering algorithms have been used to achieve such a reduction. A text clustering algorithm was tested on a dataset for which manual annotation by two experts was also collected. The comparison between the manual annotations and automatically-generated clusters enabled evaluation of the algorithm. While the algorithm could not match human performance, it could produce a similar grouping with a significant redundancy reduction (approximately 48%).
Talkographics: Measuring TV and Brand Audience Demographics and Interests from User-Generated Content

ABSTRACT A wide variety of consumer data are available, including data that consumers make available online to the public for free. Because online users talk a lot about TV shows and brands online, these messages can be used to measure TV and brand audiences and help marketers answer questions about who is talking, what they are saying, and where to find them. However, the demographics of online users typically need to be inferred. We propose the use of “Talkographics,” which consists of combining publicly available text data from Twitter and data from the Facebook ads platform and the IMDb database in a novel way that enables group-level prediction of the demographics and interests of a large number of audiences. In addition, we demonstrate that group-level predictions can be used reliably in the context of building affinity networks and propose a recommender system using these Talkographic profiles.
Integration and Competition for Innovation in Science-Based Industries

We develop a model to understand how competition for innovation affects the organization of research activity and property-rights allocation in science-based industries. We consider a vertical production process with a division of labour between research and commercialization. We analyze firms’ incentive for integration in the presence of upstream competition for innovation. Integration adversely affects an integrated firm’s R&D investment and creates positive externality for the independent firms. For a sufficiently strong externality, a semiintegrated structure appears in equilibrium. The model can thus explain the coexistence of integrated and independent research firms and conforms to the evidence of R&D competition in science-based industries. Interestingly, a non-integrated arrangement can sometime appear in equilibrium even though a semi-integrated arrangement has higher innovation probability and aggregate industry payoff. This is because those who gain from integration cannot commit to compensate the losing parties at the contracting stage. We analyze the effects of resource constraints and inter-customer licensing on the industry structure and their implications for the competition for innovation.
Programming and managing distributed software-defined environments

OF THE DISSERTATION Programming and Managing Distributed Software-Defined Environments By MOUSTAFA H. ABDELBAKY Dissertation Director: Manish Parashar The amount of data generated by applications and digital sources is rising to unprecedented scales. To keep pace, applications and workflows tasked with transforming the data to insight are becoming increasingly dynamic and inherently data-driven. Furthermore, the computational services, i.e., compute, data, and communication, required to run this emerging class of applications are often just as dynamic and heterogeneous. As data sizes continue to grow, one must find new ways of harnessing these services to meet the needs of emerging data-driven workloads. Building a computational environment capable of supporting these applications presents many complex challenges. For example, there are requirements and dynamic behaviors set forth by multiple components of the environment, i.e., users, service providers, applications, and computational services. Accordingly, an environment must be capable of (1) providing a way for these components to express their requirements at any time in the application lifecycle and (2) reacting in real-time to changes set forth by any of these components by adjusting the service composition. While cloud computing provides the flexibility and diversity of services required by such an environment, determining which services to compose to meet application needs and when to compose them is not supported by current service models and infrastructure.
Social Impact Evaluation in Culture-led Regeneration Processes: Reflections on the “Social Return On Investment” Perspective

Considering that a relevant challenge for social enterprises is to assess their social impacts, this paper approaches this issue by investigating cases that exemplify engagement in cultureled regeneration processes. Assuming the paradigm of ‘Complex Urban Landscape’ (CUL) as a holistic approach focused on the role of relationships, and conceiving the social enterprise as a hybrid organisation potentially affecting the urban context, the author presents a reflection on one of the most-used and much-debated social impact evaluation methods, the Social Return On Investment (SROI). The research deals with three main challenges: the difficulties in integrating cultural heritage as commons within urban planning and practices; the potential role of social enterprises to transmit cultural value through experiences of culture-led regeneration processes; and the exigencies of planning and developing social impact evaluation capable of critically observing and narrating the theory of change proposed by social enterprises.
Are group control associated with excess leverage? Empirical evidence

ABSTRACT This study investigates the effect of group control on the excess leverage of Chinese listed firms during 2003–2016. We find that the extent and probability of excess leverage in group-affiliated firms are significantly higher than stand-alone firms. After considering the firm ownership, we find that the excess leverage is more pronounced among private group-affiliations than the state-owned ones. Moreover, the empirical evidence indicates that better corporate governance and efficient institutional environment can effectively decrease the degree of excess leverage in group-affiliated firms. This paper provides a new perspective for understanding the over-leverage problem of Chinese firms and offers practical implications for the implementation of de-leverage policy.
Exploring the attention mechanism in LSTM-based Hong Kong stock price movement prediction

State-of-the-art methods using attention mechanism in Recurrent Neural Networks have shown exceptional performance targeting sequential predictions and classifications. We explore the attention mechanism in Long–Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network based stock price movement prediction. Our proposed model significantly enhances the LSTM prediction performance in the Hong Kong stock market. The attention LSTM (AttLSTM) model is compared with the LSTM model in Hong Kong stock movement prediction. Further parameter tuning results also demonstrate the effectiveness of the attention mechanism in LSTM-based prediction method.
Understanding Indonesia’s gated communities and their relationship with inequality

Abstract Income inequality continues to increase worldwide and is highly visible in cities. This rising income inequality, along with the growing upper-middle class, has accelerated the development of gated communities (GC) as a desired housing for the ‘successful’ groups and a manifestation of how the city reproduces inequality. We analyze GC development in Jakarta and Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and offer a typology for this housing option in that country where income inequality has been growing and is now a serious government concern. Although the early 2000s saw isolated GC in only a few cities, now they are developing vigorously. This article contributes twofold. First, it provides evidence on the emergence and features of GC. Second, it shows a relationship between income inequality, social differences and GC development for upper-middle class residents in Indonesia. We argue that there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between inequality and GC: increasing income inequality leads to higher number of GC and this material artefact entrenches ‘emplaced inequality’.
Validation of a semi-automatic protocol for the assessment of the tear meniscus central area based on open-source software

Purpose: Different lower tear meniscus parameters can be clinical assessed on dry eye diagnosis. The aim of this study was to propose and analyse the variability of a semi-automatic method for measuring lower tear meniscus central area (TMCA) by using open source software. Material and methods: On a group of 105 subjects, one video of the lower tear meniscus after fluorescein instillation was generated by a digital camera attached to a slit-lamp. A short light beam (3x5 mm) with moderate illumination in the central portion of the meniscus (6 o’clock) was used. Images were extracted from each video by a masked observer. By using an open source software based on Java (NIH ImageJ), a further observer measured in a masked and randomized order the TMCA in the short light beam illuminated area by two methods: (1) manual method, where TMCA images was “manually” measured; (2) semi-automatic method, where TMCA images were transformed in an 8-bit-binary image, then holes inside this shape were filled and on the isolated shape, the area size was obtained. Finally, both measurements, manual and semi-automatic, were compared. Results: Paired t-test showed no statistical difference between both techniques results (p = 0.102). Pearson correlation between techniques show a significant positive near to perfect correlation (r = 0.99; p < 0.001). Conclusions: This study showed a useful tool to objectively measure the frontal central area of the meniscus in photography by free open source software.
Automated Analysis of Security in Networking Systems

It has long been a challenge to build secure networking systems. One way to improve the state of affairs is to provide developers of software applications for networking systems with easy-to-use tools that can check security properties before the applications ever reach the market. These tools will both raise the general level of awareness of the problems as well as prevent the most basic flaws from occurring. This thesis contributes to the development of such tools. Networking systems typically attain secure communication by applying standard cryptographic techniques. In this thesis such networking systems are modelled in the process calculus LySa. The next step is the development of an analysis of system behaviour that relies on techniques from data and control flow analysis. These are analysis techniques that can be fully automated and this feature makes them an ideal basis for tools targeted at non-experts users. The feasibility of the techniques is illustrated by a proof-of-concept implementation of a control flow analysis developed for LySa. From a technical point of view, this implementation is also interesting because it encodes infinite sets of algebraic terms, which denote encryption, as a finite number of tree grammar rules. The security of any software application relies crucially on the scenario in which the application is deployed. In contrast to many related analysis approaches, this thesis provides an explicit mechanism for specifying deployment scenarios. Even though these scenarios may be arbitrarily large, the analysis techniques can be extended to cope with this. The analysis techniques are furthermore capable of tackling security issues that arise because systems may be under attack: the analysis can deal with confidentiality and authentication properties, parallel session attacks, and attacks launched by insiders. Finally, the perspectives for the application of the analysis techniques are discussed, thereby, coming a small step closer to providing developers with easyto-use tools for validating the security of networking applications.