Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Linkage-Based Prosthetic Fingertips: Stability Analysis

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this study is to analyze linkagebased prosthetic fingertips. The novel design consists of small four-bar mechanisms attached to each section of the opposing fingers replacing what would be the pulp of normal anatomical fingers. The four-bar mechanisms allow the prosthetic hand to conform to the shape of objects during grasp The goal of these prosthetic fingertips is to maximize the functionality of the hand while minimizing the number of inputs that the user has to control. This is crucial in prosthetics where the user may have limited input options, but it may also be useful in robotics. A prosthetic hand has two functions: controlling the orientation of the artificial finger pulps and controlling their position relative to the object. We consider these two functions independently. First, we describe the small fourbar mechanisms which control the orientation of simulated pulps. The stability of the four-bar mechanisms is described as well as their advantages in contrast to a stiffhinged single link. We then propose concepts for positioning the fingertips in twoand three-finger configurations. The focus of this paper is in the function of the four-bar fingertip mechanism; future research will address the optimal configuration of the fingertips on the hand. The principle method used in this paper is a stability analysis via the principle of virtual work for a crossed four-bar mechanism, and, for comparison purposes, a stiff-hinged dyad. From this analysis we are able to show that four-bar fingertip mechanisms are self-stabilizing for a large range of rotation of the link on which the force is applied and a large range of directions that the force is applied. Stability is indifferent to the magnitude of the force applied to it (assuming that the force does not damage/deform the mechanism).
System performance analysis and fixed-point architecture of a gradient-based optical flow algorithm

Optical flow algorithms present a way for computers to estimate motion from the real world. Applications like cloud motion, surveillance and robot eyesight are examples of this. The focus of existing research is mainly on either fast, but poor solutions, or slow but good solutions. In this thesis an approach to improve performance through reducing computational effort of the Lucas \& Kanade optical flow algorithm is presented. An architecture of this optimised complex algorithm on an FPGA is given. After an introduction into optical flow algorithms, a high-level system design optimisation process of the large complex computing blocks will be described, in which each part of the algorithm is analysed for quality, speed and computational effort. A new smoothing filter, StackBlur, will be introduced for the first time in an optical flow algorithm. All large complex blocks are integrated into a modular high-level pipelined hardware architecture, using manually generated flow graphs and the two-process design methodology, while keeping flexibilty in mind. Complex mathematical operations including a least squares filter and an eigenvalue computation are presented. Functional correctness of the design is verified through functional and post-synthesis simulation using realistic examples. The obtained results show that performance has been improved in terms of quality and computational effort, but that especially the eigenvalue computation block still needs further improvement.
Energy Analysis for Air Conditioning System Using Fuzzy Logic Controller

Reducing energy consumption and to ensure thermal comfort are two important considerations for the designing an air conditioning system. An alternative approach to reduce energy consumption proposed in this study is to use a variable speed compressor. The control strategy will be proposed using the fuzzy logic controller (FLC). FLC was developed to imitate the performance of human expert operators by encoding their knowledge in the form of linguistic rules. The system is installed on a thermal environmental room with a data acquisition system to monitor the temperature of the room, coefficient of performance (COP), energy consumption and energy saving. The measurements taken during the two hour experimental periods at 5-minutes interval times for temperature setpoints of 20 o C, 22 o C and 24 o C with internal heat loads 0, 500, 700 and 1000 W. The experimental results indicate that the proposed technique can save energy in comparison with On/Off and proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control.
WORKING PARENTS' CONVERSATIONAL RESPONSES TO THEIR TWO-YEAR-OLD SONS (LINGUISTIC INPUT, LANGUAGE ACQUISITION).

Despite claims by some theorists to the contrary, investigators have shown that information about grammatical errors is available to young children learning language via the conversational responses of their parents. The present study described five categories of responses in the conversations of working mothers and fathers to their normally developing two-year-old sons, and investigated whether any of these responses were differentially related to well-formed vs. ill-formed child utterances. Subjects were six middle-class, monolingual (English) parent-child dyads. Parents worked full-time jobs and the children were enrolled in full-time daycare. Within a two week period, four 20-minute conversational samples were audio and video recorded for each dyad in the subjects' homes during freeplay activities of the subjects' choice. Results indicated that the pattern of responses for these six parents was very similar to that reported for other parent-child dyads. The most frequent type of response for all parents was one that continued the conversation without either repeating or clarifying the child's previous utterance. The least frequent type of response was one that explicitly corrected portions of the child's utterance. Of all responses, repetitions – both clarifying and nonclarifying – appeared to be the type of response most differentially related to well-formed and ill-formed child utterances. Exact repetitions were more likely to follow well-formed utterances, while the remaining repetitions were more likely to follow ill-formed utterances. This pattern of differential responses was similar for all six dyads. Very few differences regarding the style or pattern of interaction were noted for fathers and mothers. Implications were drawn regarding the nature of linguistic input that is available to two-year-old children learning language.
Linux NFS and Automounter Administration

The Network File System (NFS) is the most popular distributed file system for Linux and Unix clients, enabling users to access files located on servers with the same ease as files located on the desktop. The Automounter Daemon (Amd) automatically mounts remote servers and local resources on an as-needed basic, improving a network's reliability and scalability. This text is aimed at professional Linux adminstrators showing how to effectively install and configure Amd and NFS for optimum speed and reliability.
Seeing, sensing, and selection: modeling visual perception in complex environments

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate human visual perception at the level of eye movements by describing the interaction between vision and action during natural, everyday tasks in a real-world environment. The results of the investigation provide motivation for the development of a biologically-based model of selective visual perception that relies on the relative perceptual conspicuity of certain regions within the field of view. Several experiments were designed and conducted that form the basis for the model. The experiments provide evidence that the visual system is not passive, nor is it general-purpose, but rather it is active and specific, tightly coupled to the requirements of planned behavior and action. The implication for an active and task-specific visual system is that an explicit representation of the environment can be eschewed in favor of a compact representation with large potential savings in computational efficiency. The compact representation is in the form of a topographic map of relative perceptual conspicuity values. Other recent attempts at compact scene representations have focused mainly on low-level maps that code certain salient features of the scene including color, edges, and luminance. This study has found that the low-level maps do not correlate well with subjects' fixation locations, therefore, a map of perceptual conspicuity is presented that incorporates high-level information. The high-level information is in the form of figure/ground segmentation, potential object detection, and task-specific location bias. The resulting model correlates well with the fixation densities of human viewers of natural scenes, and can be used as a pre-processing module for image understanding or intelligent surveillance applications.
Numerical calculations of optical structures using FEM

Complex surface structures in nature often have remarkable optical properties. By understanding the origin of these properties, such structures may be utilized in metamaterials, giving possibilities to create materials with new specific optical properties. To simplify the optical analysis of these naturally developed surface structures there is a need to assist data analysis and analytical calculations with numerical calculations.In this work an application tool for numerical calculations of optical properties of surface structures, such as reflectances and ellipsometric angles, has been developed based on finite element methods (FEM). The data obtained from the application tool has been verified by comparison to analytical expressions in a thorough way, starting with reflection from the simplest of interfaces stepwise increasing the complexity of the surfaces.The application tool were developed within the electromagnetic module of Comsol Multiphysics and used the script language to perform post-process calculations on the obtained electromagnetic fields. The data obtained from this application tool are given in such way that easily allows for comparison with data received from spectroscopic ellipsometry measurements.
Using evolutionary algorithms in the design of protein fingerprints

This paper shows how Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) are used as components in a system for design of protein fingerprints. The system is used for automated mining of data from protein sequence databases, with the purpose of deriving protein family fingerprints. The fingerprints are expressed as patterns, which can be used for recognition of sequences belonging to specific protein families. The system constructs candidate patterns by analyzing multiple sequence alignments, and selecting pattern elements corresponding to evolutionary conserved positions. Since most candidate patterns are too specific, we use stochastic search algorithms for generalization of the candidate patterns. In a previous version of the system a hill-climbing algorithm was used. In this paper we show how results can be substantially improved by using EAs for this task. We also compare a "standard" EA with a host-parasite EA, and show that it can significantly reduce the number of evaluations.
Evaluating the effectiveness of a seasonal spawning area closure

Fish that aggregate at predictable locations and times to spawn are often vulnerable to over-exploitation. Seasonal closures have often been implemented in an attempt to alleviate such impacts but the effectiveness of these measures is rarely tested. This study evaluates the effectiveness of a spawning closure for Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) in the Firth of Clyde off the Scottish West Coast (ICES Area VIa). This closurewas introduced in March 2001 as an emergency measure to allowas many cod as possible to spawn and avoid the build-up of displaced effort from another spawning closure. Genetic, tagging, and otolith microchemistry investigations indicate that cod inhabiting the Clyde are reproductively isolated from other resident groups in the central and northern part of the Scottish WestCoast stock. This study used a beyond-Before-After, Control-Impact approach to compare population trends of the Clyde spawning aggregation before and after the introduced area closure, using two other sub-population spawning grounds as control areas. There was no evidence of local recovery in terms of abundance, biomass, or reduced mortality in the Clyde more than a decade after establishing the closure. Mortality mayhave remained high because young cod are still caught as bycatch in the Nephrops fishery in the area and the predation rate may have increased due to an expanding whiting population. Considering the state of the already severely depleted Clyde sub-population when the closure was implemented the measure appears to have been too little and too late. The tendency to implement such spawning closures on nearly collapsed stocks may be why these measures often appear to have been ineffective.
Openness in the Orchestration of Ecosystems: A Resource-based Perspective

Currently, many organizations open parts of their information systems (IS) via the Internet to the public in order to co-create value with from end-consumer contributions. Yet, these practices of openness are still to be integrated into the existing strategic management theories (Chesbrough and Appleyard, 2007). We use a resource-based perspective to develop a framework for the analysis configurations of different types of "openness" in order to move towards such integration. We consider two dimensions of openness of resources (access and control) as well as different types of relations between resources (complementarity and specifity). Furthermore, we analyze two mobile ecosystems on multiple levels to show the applicability of the framework. The paper contributes to the further development of the resource-based theory and it provides a tool for the analysis of cases of openness of resources. Additionally, the paper provides a novel perspective and of the structure of mobile ecosystems.
Ada code generation support for Google Protocol Buffers

We now live in an information society where increasingly large volumes of data are exchanged between networked nodes in distributed systems. Recent years have seen a multitude of dierent serialization frameworks released to efficiently handle all this information while minimizing developer effort. One such format is Google Protocol Buers, which has gained additional code generation support for a wide variety of programming languages from third-party developers.Ada is a widely used programming language in safety-critical systems today. However, it lacks support for Protocol Buffers. This limits the use of Protocol Buffers at companies like Saab, where Ada is the language of choice for many systems. To amend this situation Ada code generation support for Protocol Buffers has been developed. The developed solution supports a majority of Protocol Buffers' language constructs, extensions being a notable exception.To evaluate the developed solution, an artificial benchmark was constructed and a comparison was made with GNATColl.JSON. Although the benchmark was artificial, data used by the benchmark followed the same format as an existing radar system. The benchmark showed that if serialization performance is a limiting factor for the radar system, it could potentially receive a significant speed boost from a substitution of serialization framework. Results from the benchmark reveal that Protocol Buffers is about 6 to 8 times faster in a combined serialization/deserialization performance comparison. In addition, the change of serialization format has the added benefit of reducing size of serialized objects by approximately 45%.
Part-of-Speech Tagging Guidelines for the Penn Treebank Project (3rd Revision)

This manual addresses the linguistic issues that arise in connection with annotating texts by part of speech ("tagging"). Section 2 is an alphabetical list of the parts of speech encoded in the annotation systems of the Penn Treebank Project, along with their corresponding abbreviations ("tags") and some information concerning their definition. This section allows you to find an unfamiliar tag by looking up a familiar part of speech. Section 3 recapitulates the information in Section 2, but this time the information is alphabetically ordered by tags. This is the section to consult in order to find out what an unfamiliar tag means. Since the parts of speech are probably familiar to you from high school English, you should have little difficulty in assimilating the tags themselves. However, it is often quite difficult to decide which tag is appropriate in a particular context. The two sections 4 and 5 therefore include examples and guidelines on how to tag problematic cases. If you are uncertain about whether a given tag is correct or not, refer to these sections in order to ensure a consistently annotated text. Section 4 discusses parts of speech that are easily confused and gives guidelines on how to tag such cases, while Section 5 contains an alphabetical list of specific problematic words and collocations. Finally, Section 6 discusses some general tagging conventions. One general rule, however, is so important that we state it here. Many texts are not models of good prose, and some contain outright errors and slips of the pen. Do not be tempted to correct a tag to what it would be if the text were correct; rather, it is the incorrect word that should be tagged correctly. Disciplines Computer Sciences Comments University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science Technical Report No. MSCIS-90-47. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn. edu/cis_reports/570 Part-of-S peech Tagging Guidelines For The Penn Treebank Project (3rd Revision) MS-CIS-90-47 LINC LAB 178
"This has been quite some chaos." : integrating information systems after a merger - a case study

101 APPENDIX I – EXAMPLES OF THE INTERVIEW QUESTIONS 103 APPENDIX II – END-USER SURVEY 104 APPENDIX III – EXAMPLES OF THE END-USER SURVEY RESPONSES 107 REFERENCES 109 PAPER 1: SHAPING THE POST-M&A INFORMATION SYSTEMS INTEGRATION STRATEGY 121 PAPER 2: MANAGING THE CHANGE PROCESS OF THE POSTMERGER ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS INTEGRATION: A CASE STUDY 133 PAPER 3: A FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING POSTACQUISITION IS INTEGRATION 155 PAPER 4: EVALUATING SUCCESS IN POST-MERGER IS INTEGRATION – A CASE STUDY 191 I warmly thank IEEE, Inderscience, TUCS and Academic Conferences International for granting permission to reprint the four thesis papers in this book. Copyright information on Paper 1: Copyright© 2007 IEEE. Reprinted from the Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference On System Sciences HICSS-40, Shaping The Post-Merger Information Systems Integration Strategy, Alaranta Henningsson. Further information is given on
Meso Lighthill-Whitham and Richards Model Designed for Network Applications

The aim of this paper is to propose a new event-based mesoscopic model, fully consistent at a macroscopic scale with the LWR model. This model is parsimonious, has a low computational cost while keeping an individual tracking of vehicles. It is ready for dynamic traffic assignment applications. It can also be easily hybrided with any microscopic models to propose a bi-level traffic flow representation on networks. This model revisits the link traffic flow model early proposed by Mahut (2003) by integrating heterogeneous vehicle characteristics and moving bottlenecks treatment. It also introduces a simple node model that (i) generalizes the supply allocation scheme at merges proposed by Daganzo (ii) naturally respects the FIFO rules at diverges and (iii) accounts for traffic signals timing. This model adapts to a vehicular description the global behavior reproduced by classical macroscopic nodes models and notably merge ratios.
Visualizing Spatio-Temporal data

The amount of spatio-temporal data produced everyday has sky rocketed in the recent years due to the commercial GPS systems and smart devices. Together with this, the need for tools and techniques to analyze this kind of data have also increased. A major task of spatio-temporal data analysis is to discover relationships and patterns among spatially and temporally scattered events. However, most of the existing visualization techniques implement a top-down approach i.e, they require prior knowledge of existing patterns. In this dissertation, I present my novel visualization technique called Storygraph which supports bottom-up discovery of patterns. Since Storygraph presents and integrated view, analysis of events can be done with losing either of time or spatial contexts. In addition, Storygraph can handle spatio-temporal uncertainty making it ideal for data being extracted from text. In the subsequent chapters, I demonstrate the versatility and the effectiveness of the Storygraph along with case studies from my published works. Finally, I also talk about edge bundling in Storygraph to enhance the aesthetics and improve the readability of Storygraph. INDEX WORDS: Spatio-temporal data visualizations, Uncertainty visualization, Information visualization VISUALIZING SPATIO-TEMPORAL DATA
SPADE: A Grammar Based Editor for Planning and Debugging Programs. AI Memo 386.

Abstract : A grammar of plans is developed from a taxonomy of basic planning techniques. This grammar serves as the basis for the design of a new kind of interactive programming environment (SPADE), in which programs are generated by explicitly articulating planning decisions. The utility of this approach to program definition is that a record of these decisions, called the plan derivation, provides guidance for subsequent modification or debugging of the program. Moreover, this grammatical approach to planning allows the development of a taxonomy of bugs, as particular kinds of errors in applying the planning grammar. Following a linguistic analogy, five types of planning bugs are characterized: syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, circumlocutions, and slips of the tongue. The plan derivation can be accessed during subsequent debugging, to aid in diagnosing the underlying cause of the erroneous code. Repair is accomplished via replanning, in which a substructure of the derivation is replaced. A debugging assistant for the SPADE environment (RAID) is designed based on this theory. The enterprise embodies Dijkstra's philosophy of programming in a structured fashion, but represents a more detailed study of planning and debugging techniques than has previously been attempted. (Author)
Specification-based software sizing: An empirical investigation of function metrics

For some time the software industry has espoused the need for improved specification-based software size metrics. This paper reports on a study of nineteen recently developed systems in a variety of application domains. The systems were developed by a single software services corporation using a variety of languages. The study investigated several metric characteristics. It shows that: earlier research into inter-item correlation within the overall function count is partially supported; a priori function counts, in themself, do not explain the majority of the effort variation in software development in the organization studied; documentation quality is critical to accurate function identification; and rater error is substantial in manual function counting. The implication of these findings for organizations using function based metrics are explored.
Sorting and searching

This algorithm is appropriately named linear search and has worst-case O(N ) time complexity where N is the length of the input array corresponding to checking every element in the array. While linear search takes advantage of the sequential nature of an array (and in general, any sequential data structure), it does not take full advantage of this property. In particular, if the array is ordered, then we can employ binary search to avoid searching every element of the array.