Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fast Signal-subspace Decomposition Without Eigendecomposition

M a n y m o d e r n a lgo r i thms in various signal procrssirig areas, e.g. spec t r a l e s t ima t ion , a r r a y signal processing, sys t em identification, arid speccli processiiig, reqirire n signnl s u h p n c e dc? coiril)osit,ir,ii, wliicli is coiiveiitionally accoinplisl ied by an eigeiidecoriipositioii. Since the eigentiecoinpoPitioii is very coinputatioiially intensive ( 0 ( M 3 ) flops for an A f x M mat r ix ) aiid difficnlt t o irnplerrient, i t imposes a fundamen ta l ha r r i e r for real-tiiiie iniplernent,at . iom of these lrigli-performa~ice algorit,hrris. In this paper, we p resen t a fast aiid parallel approach for the sigii nl sli bspaw tlccom posi t ion iu i tho IL t an eigeiid eroiii posit,ioti. The new tecliriiqiie teri i ied FSD, exploits the i i iatrix st . r i ict i ire associated with signal subspace algori thins and requires only O ( M 2 d ) flops, w h e r e d(< M ) deno tes tIic Figrial subspace dinieiision. Our new approach can be easily irnplpirieirted in parallel to f u r t h e r r educe the coinpiitatioti t i m e to as sinal1 as O ( M d ) or O ( l o g A f d ) by usiiig O ( A f ) o r O ( A P ) niiiitipliers respectively.
The Design, Construction, and Experimental Characterization of Spatial Parallel Architectures of Elastofluidic Systems

Creating organic, life like motion has historically been extremely difficult and costly for general applications. Traditional structures and robots use rigid components with discrete joints to produce desired motions but are limited in freedom by the range of motion each additional component allows. In a traditionally rigid robot complex motion is obtained through the addition of joints and links. These additions add complexity to a rigid robot but improve its ability to create motion. Soft robotics aims to overcome the limitations of traditional robotics by creating integrated actuation and structure which more closely imitates organic movement. Often the most effective examples to learn from are natural phenomenon or organisms such as underwater and land based invertebrates. In pursuit of the goal of effective soft robotics researchers have explored the idea of a pneumatic elastofluidic actuator, one which expands and deforms in response to applied pressure. While these systems have demonstrated some limited success, they are often used either as a single entity or in series with one another to produce novel motions. In this thesis parallel structures made of these actuators are shown to have the potential to be extremely powerful and useful for soft robotic applications. These spatial arrangements of connected and dependent actuators exhibit behaviors impossible for a single actuator. This research concerns the effective design and construction of these complex parallel
Design of linear CMOS transconductance elements

Some novel circuit techniques for realizing linear CMOS tranconductance elements are proposed. The circuits discussed have superior linearity and input voltage range compared with the conventional source-coupled differential pair. Design tradeoffs are examined and computer simulation results are used to verify theoretical predictions. The results show close agreement between predicted behavior and simulated performance.
Contrast enhancement using multipeak histogram equalization with brightness preserving

Contrast enhancement of an image can efficiently be performed by histogram equalization. However, the global histogram equalization will cause an effect on brightness saturation in some almost homogeneous area. Therefore, multipeak histogram equalization has been proposed. Each detected peak of the histogram is independently equalized. The effect of brightness saturation can be eliminated and the perceptibility improved. By using the histogram equalization method, the output image can preserve the mean value brightness of the input image.
Exploring Cache Coherency Design for Chip Multiprocessor using Multi2Sim

—Memory hierarchy design plays an important role in improving the performance of chip multiprocessor (CMP). The reason is that the performance of a CMP is strongly affected by the latency of fetching data from the memory system. Several organizations of the memory hierarchy have been explored to optimize this latency. In the memory hierarchy, data traversing is based on a cache coherence protocol which is the skeleton of the CMP's memory system. In this paper, we concentrate on exploring MOESI, a well-defined and popular cache coherence protocol in CMP. Our experiment is based on Splash-2 benchmark which is widely used in every publication regarding CMP design. The experiment results show that by rearrange the address range of the memory banks, L2 hit ratio could be improved up to 13,5 %.
La carte à puce et les circuits asynchrones

Les circuits asynchrones reviennent sur le devant de la scene, notamment dans le domaine de la carte a puce, grâce a leurs proprietes de basse consommation et leur potentiel en matiere de securite. Dans cet article nous etudions comment les circuits asynchrones peuvent accroitre la securite des cartes a puce. Pour cela nous nous interesserons aux resultats obtenus lors de l'etude securitaire d'un circuit de test dont le processeur a ete implemente en technologie asynchrone.
Reconsidering the modern nation state in the Anthropocene: A Muslim's perspective

T his article presents the nature of conflicts in postcolonial societies as the consequence of being under external control and economic exploitation. Drawing on empirical cases from Indonesia and a comparative literature review of African states, this article reveals a huge dilemma within the desire to build a solid nation state in a deeply pluralistic society. The nature of the modern nation state, which from the start requires the forcible subjugation of the population, has become one of the greatest paradoxes. That is to say, the very idea of unity for the pursuance of equity contradicts the premise of democracy, because forcing unity onto diversity implies denouncing differences and thus violating universal individual rights to be different. On that account, Indonesia’s struggle with diversity has falsified Huntington’s thesis, according to which cultural differences necessarily tend to lead to conflict. On the contrary, Indonesia demonstrates that conflicts have stemmed from nationalism and political-economic ideologies rather than cultural differences. This article highlights two issues of global relevance. Firstly, the inherent problems of coexistence that arise from the legacy of the Christian missionary tradition advocating the separation of the state and religion in the colonies, whereas Islam is a religion of politics and of law. Secondly, the concept of al-din is hardly compatible with the Western concept of religion. In contemporary globalization, the modern nation state and nationalism are increasingly contrasted with the ‘cosmic’ nature of religion, which claims allegiances transcending differences of race and nationality. On the bright side, a case study of a Muslim ‘intentional community’ offers a pragmatic solution whereby an implementation of Islamic jurisprudence as a response to ecological issues by an individual Muslim group is doable within the constraints of a nation state. Thus the thesis moves beyond the rigidity of state system and promotes a ‘people to people’ approach.
Video object tracking using improved chamfer matching and condensation particle filter

Object tracking is an essential problem in the field of video and image processing. Although tracking algorithms working on gray video are convenient in actual applications, they are more difficult to be developed than those using color features, since less information is taken into account. Few researches have been dedicated to tracking object using edge information. In this paper, we proposed a novel video tracking algorithm based on edge information for gray videos. This method adopts the combination of a condensation particle filter and an improved chamfer matching. The improved chamfer matching is rotation invariant and capable of estimating the shift between an observed image patch and a template by an orientation distance transform. A modified discriminative likelihood measurement method that focuses on the difference is adopted. These values are normalized and used as the weights of particles which predict and track the object. Experiment results show that our modifications to chamfer matching improve its performance in video tracking problem. And the algorithm is stable, robust, and can effectively handle rotation distortion. Further work can be done on updating the template to adapt to significant viewpoint and scale changes of the appearance of the object during the tracking process.
A Multi-Agent Modeling Approach to Simulate Dynamic Activity-Travel Patterns

Contributing to the recent interest in the dynamics of activity-travel patterns, this chapter discusses a framework of an agent-based modeling approach focusing on the dynamic formation of (location) choice sets. Individual travelers are represented as agents, each with their cognition of the environment, habits, and activity-travel patterns. Agents learn through their experiences with the transport sysfems, changes in the environments and from their social network. Conceptually, agents are assumed to have an aspiration level associated with choice sets that in combination with evaluation results determine whether the agent will start exploring or persist in habitual behavior; an activation level of each (location) alternative that determines whether or not the alternative is included in the choice set in the next time step. and an expected (utility) function to evaluate each (location) alternative given current beliefs. Each of these elements is dynamic. Based on principles of reiriforcement learning, Bayesian learning, and social comparison theories, the framework specifies functions for experience-based learning, extended and integrated with social learning.
Application of a genetic algorithm to multi-stage detection in CDMA systems

In this study a hybrid approach that employs a genetic algorithm (GA) and a multi-stage detector (MSD) for multi-user detection problems in code division multiple access (CDMA) communications system is proposed. Using this approach, a genetic algorithm is used as the first stage of MSD to provide a good initial point for successive stages of MSD. Simulation results for the synchronous case are provided to show that the approach is promising.
GA/SA-based hybrid techniques for the scheduling of generator maintenance in power systems

Proposes the application of a genetic algorithm (GA) and simulated annealing (SA) based hybrid approach for the scheduling of generator maintenance in power systems using an integer representation. The adapted approach uses the probabilistic acceptance criterion of simulated annealing within the genetic algorithm framework. A case study is formulated in this paper as an integer programming problem using a reliability-based objective function and typical problem constraints. The implementation and performance of the solution technique are discussed. The results in this paper demonstrate that the technique is more effective than approaches based solely on genetic algorithms or solely on simulated annealing. It therefore proves to be a valid approach for the solution of generator maintenance scheduling problems.
Ten years of computer forensic tool testing

Barbara Guttman, James R. Lyle and Richard Ayers give an overview of the Computer Forensic Tool Testing project at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, setting out the test procedures, criteria and test data sets for computer forensic software tools, together with a brief illustration of some of the failures that they encounter that can affect digital evidence.
Identification of Volterra systems with a polynomial neural network

The Volterra series finds wide application in the general representation of nonlinear systems. A method of identifying linear and second-order time-invariant nonlinear systems is proposed using a variation of the group method of data handling (GMDH) algorithm, a polynomial network, employing a combination of quadratic polynomial and linear layers. The principal advantage of this method is that the degree of nonlinearity and the memory of the system do not have to be known a priori and are determined recursively. The GMDH method allows a Volterra series to be modeled solely from a set of input-output data. System identification using GMDH consists of applying a set of input-output data to train the network by computing the necessary coefficient sets and to select the optimum combination of these coefficient sets to obtain the model parameters. <<ETX>>
Laser time-of-flight measurement based on multi-channel time delay estimation

In this paper, a novel method based on multichannel time delay estimation with linear fitting correction for laser time-of-flight (TOF) measurement is described. The laser TOF measurement system is constructed with a laser source, a stop receiver channel, a reference receiver multichannel, an ADC sampling unit and a digital signal processing unit. Limited by the sampling rate, the precision of laser TOF measurement is restricted no more than the ADC sampling period in conventional methods. As this problem is considered, multi-channel correlation time delay estimation with linear fitting correction is devised. It is shown that the measuring precision is better than 2ns with multi-channel time delay estimation and not influenced by SNR. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and stable.
Energy-Efficient Chain Topology in Ubiquitous Sensor Network

Many routing topologies have been proposed to extend lifetime of ubiquitous sensor network (USN) consisting of sensor nodes with limited energy. If measurement data is collected periodically for every nodes and perfect fusion during data aggregation, minimum spanning tree (MST) and chains have been two major topologies. MST minimizes total transmission energy and chain consumes energy very evenly throughout the nodes. Various publications such as LEACH, PEGASIS and PEDAP announced many good USN topologies, there still is little study about the topology itself especially in terms of energy consumption excluding USN system-related factors. This paper includes the following study. We proposed a new chain topology and solved minimum spanning chain (MSC) by linear programming (LP). Then we calculated and analysed topology length and standard deviation/coefficient of variation of link lengths through simulation. As results of simulation analysis we confirmed that the proposed chain solution is very useful routing topology in USNs.
Improvement of phase and coherence map quality using azimuth prefiltering: examples from ERS-1 and X-SAR

Interferometric processing of SAR data is possible only if the two observations were made under nearly the same aspect angles. However, even slightly different antenna squint angles lead to a misalignment of the data spectra in the azimuth dimension. This possible relative azimuth frequency band shift causes an additional phase noise contribution in SAR interferograms as well as a reduction of the coherence. In the paper, the authors propose a suitable azimuth bandpass filtering method to improve the quality of interferograms and coherence maps. It is demonstrated that this kind of filtering is especially valuable when processing data acquired by unstable platforms like the Space Shuttle. An example from the X-SAR sensor illustrates the achievable coherence improvement.
An incremental approach to unit testing during maintenance

An incremental testing system to aid in unit testing during the maintenance stage is described. Based on data-flow testing, the system is designed for use in a programming environment; it shares common information and techniques with tools typically found in programming environments. In response to a change in a module, the incremental tester reuses the analysis and test cases from the previous testing session. The analysis is incrementally updated to determine areas of the program that must be retested. From the updates, the tester determines which test cases must be rerun, which may be eliminated, and whether the test cases are sufficient for the changed program. <<ETX>>
Simulation of pneumatic motor used in pneumobile

One of the alternative powertrain systems of cars, commercial vehicles and mobile machines are hybrid drives with pneumatic motors for compressed air. This paper presents a mathematical model and the results of simulation calculations of piston pneumatic motor. Mathematical model was based on the fundamental principles of mechanics, thermodynamics and rights of airflow. For simulation model parameterization, prototype of such engine was built and installed on dedicated test stand. Performed experimental research allowed achieving values of coefficients and components characteristics used for model estimation. One of the important tasks of this study was to create the control system of the compressed-air supplied engine. For this purpose an appropriate pneumatic and electronic component were selected and also an algorithm was created which would facilitate changing of the engine settings in order to obtain the best performance. Using elaborated simulation model, series of calculation were performed for different parameters of pneumatic motor, like cylinders diameter and stroke, length of the crank, compressed air pressure and valves size. A lot of attention was devoted to determine the influence of control system settings, such as valves opening and closing in reaction to crankshaft position, on motor properties. When discussing the results of calculations considerable attention was paid to the power, torque and efficiency values. To illustrate performance of designed engine, simplified model of light vehicle was used to calculate possible to achieve acceleration, velocity and travel distance.
A numerical method for computing optimal controls in feedback and digital forms and its application to the blowing‐venting control system of manned submarines

On the basis of the classical variational reformulation of optimal control problems, we introduce a numerical scheme for solving those problems where the goal is the computation of optimal controls in feedback and digital forms defined on a discrete time mesh. The algorithm reduces the computation of such controls to solving a suitable nonlinear mathematical programming problem where the unknowns are the controls and slope of the state variable of the original problem. The motivation for this study comes from the real‐world engineering problem which consists of maneuvering a manned submarine by using the blowing‐venting control system of the ballast tanks of the vehicle. After checking the proposed algorithm in an academic example, we apply it to the maneuvering problem of submarines whose mathematical model includes a state law which is composed of a system of twenty‐four nonlinear ordinary differential equations. Numerical results illustrate the performance of the numerical scheme. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Fixed Viewpoint Imaging and Correction Model of Liquid Column Manometer

Liquid column manometers are widely used in fluid mechanics experiments, so the design and implementation of a remote experimental setup for performing experiments on fluid mechanics, the on-line reading of liquid column manometer is necessary. Firstly, through comparing computer vision reading with manual reading, the former accuracy is much higher in the ideal case. Secondly, computer vision based reading scheme is confirmed according to the experimental progress. Then, the imaging geometric model of manometer is approximated by pin-hole imaging model. While the vertical relationship between camera viewpoint and liquid level is changed, for reducing the imaging error, view fixed reading with software algorithm is discussed to correct the identified water head. Lastly, according to the proportional relations between invariable inside diameter of manometer and water head image, the upper boundary line coordinate value is determined. The experimental results show that the method is effective and feasible.
Information Content of DQAF Indicators - Empirical Entropy Analysis

The study presents an analysis of the information content of IMF’s Data Quality Assessment Framework (DQAF) indicators. There are significant differences in the quantity of information between DQAF dimensions and sub-dimensions. The most informative DQAF dimension is accessibility, followed by the prerequisites of quality and accuracy and reliability. The least informative DQAF dimensions are serviceability and assurances of integrity. The implication of these findings is that the current DQAF indicators do not maximize the amount of information that could be obtained during data ROSC missions. An additional set of assessments that would refine the existing DQAF indicators would be beneficial in maximizing the information gathered during data ROSC mission. The entropy of DQAF indicators could also be used in the construction of a cardinal index of data quality.
Finding Groups in Data: An Introduction to Cluster Analysis

An electrical signal transmission system, applicable to the transmission of signals from trackside hot box detector equipment for railroad locomotives and rolling stock, wherein a basic pulse train is transmitted whereof the pulses are of a selected first amplitude and represent a train axle count, and a spike pulse of greater selected amplitude is transmitted, occurring immediately after the axle count pulse to which it relates, whenever an overheated axle box is detected. To enable the signal receiving equipment to determine on which side of a train the overheated box is located, the spike pulses are of two different amplitudes corresponding, respectively, to opposite sides of the train.
Leadership development: School principals’ portfolios as an instrument for change

Abstract This paper uses principals’ portfolios to examine how they learnt, sought to learn and can learn leadership. Leadership development has become a topical matter in education. However, there is still much debate about what constitutes effective leadership development. In South Africa, the Department of Education in conjunction with higher education institutions introduced the Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) (School Leadership) programme to capacitate school principals and other education managers in developing skills, knowledge and values needed to effectively lead and manage schools. As part of their course requirements, school principals were expected to develop a portfolio to demonstrate change on their part regarding school leadership and management competences. This paper explores the portfolio as an instrument for change in school principals’ leadership learning. Working within an interpretive research paradigm and employing a qualitative methodological approach, a sample of 18 portfo.
The National Gallery of Art

The Widener French 18th century prints and illustrated books were given to the National Gallery of Art in 1942 with the Widener paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts. The prints, numbering between three and four hundred, include a large group of color prints. The most striking shown in the exhibition is the goddess FLORA, done in the crayon manner to give the effect of pastel. The artist, Louis Bonnet, working after a painting by Franpois Boucher, used separate plates to print the different colors. Most of the other prints are aquatints. This process is a variation of etching, with which it is often combined. A grained plate is made with acid by laying a porous ground. This technique was intended to imitate the effect of watercolor.