Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Toward Brain-Inspired Learning With the Neuromorphic Snake-Like Robot and the Neurorobotic Platform

Neurorobotic mimics the structural and functional principles of living creature systems. Modeling a single system by robotic hardware and software has existed for decades. However, an integrated toolset studying the interaction of all systems has not been demonstrated yet. We present a hybrid neuromorphic computing paradigm to bridge this gap by combining the neurorobotics platform (NRP) with the neuromorphic snake-like robot (NeuroSnake). This paradigm encompasses the virtual models, neuromorphic sensing and computing capabilities, and physical bio-inspired bodies, with which an experimenter can design and execute both in-silico and in-vivo robotic experimentation easily. The NRP is a public Web-based platform for easily testing brain models with virtual bodies and environments. The NeuroSnake is a bio-inspired robot equipped with a silico-retina sensor and neuromorphic computer for power-efficiency applications. We illustrate the efficiencies of our paradigm with an easy designing of a visual pursuit experiment in the NRP. We study two automatic behavior learning tasks which are further integrated into a complex task of semi-autonomous pole climbing. The result shows that robots could build new learning rules in a less explicit manner inspired by living creatures. Our method gives an alternative way to efficiently develop complex behavior control of the ro As spiking neural network is a bio-inspired neural network and the NeuroSnake robot is equipped with a spike-based silicon retina camera, the control system can be easily implemented via spiking neurons simulated on neuromorphic hardware, such as SpiNNaker.bot.
Why Do(n’t) People Move When They Get Older? Estimating the Willingness to Relocate in Diverse Ageing Cities

Two of the dominant processes shaping today’s European cities are the ageing and diversification of the population. Given that the range of action usually decreases in later life, the living environment around the place of residence plays an important role in the social integration of the older generation. Hence, spatial patterns of residence indicate the extent of opportunities for the older population to engage in urban life and, therefore, need to be addressed by urban planning and policy. The aim of this article is to study the interrelation between diversity in later life—in terms of migrant history, gender, social class, and age—as well as planned and actual (past) movements of elders. We have chosen Berlin as a case study and draw from a quantitative survey with elders (age 60+) from diverse backgrounds (N = 427). Our results from descriptive analysis and statistical hypothesis tests show that age impacts people’s past and planned movement; we observe a peak in the decisions to move at the age of 65–75 and a drop in the inclination to move among people over 80. None of the other factors is similarly influential, but we observe appreciable tendencies regarding the impact of gender and social class on planned movements. Our study suggests that variables other than classic socio-demographic data, such as apartment size, rent, social networks, and health, and their interrelations may offer a promising starting point for achieving a full picture of older people’s movement behaviour.
Fault diagnosis of power transformer based on fault-tree analysis (FTA)

Power transformers is an important equipment in power plants and substations, power distribution transmission link is made an important hub of power systems. Its performance directly affects the quality and health of the power system reliability and stability. This paper summarizes the five parts according to the fault type power transformers, then from the time dimension divided into three stages of power transformer fault, use DGA routine analysis and infrared diagnostics criterion set power transformer running state, finally, according to the needs of power transformer fault diagnosis, by the general to the section by stepwise refinement of dendritic tree constructed power transformer fault
Relative Importance of Professional Building Construction Team on Housing Delivery in Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria

Housing is very important for man’s physical survival since it creates a living abode for rest, sleep, comfort and other domestic activities. Housing provision and delivery to meet the teeming population of Nigerians, with particular reference to Imo State is of paramount importance. Therefore, this research sought the relative importance of the professionals in the construction industry to stimulate housing delivery in Imo State. Data for the study were collected through well-structured questionnaire directed to construction professionals in the private and public sectors. Data collected were presented using frequency distribution table and analyzed using Relative Importance Index (RII). The research reveals that the project manager had the highest Relative Importance attribute of (0.937), followed by land surveyors with Relative Importance attribute of (0.812), the third ranked was the engineer, with Relative importance attribute of (0.799). Though facility management ranked the least with Relative Importance attribute of (0.430), it can clearly be observed that the difference between the Relative Importance of each profession in building construction is not very large and the inclusion of facility manager as a member of the construction team is gradually gaining grounds. The research recommends that qualified and professional designers should always be involved in building designs for maximal achievement in housing construction and delivery. Only professionals and qualified engineers, builders and architects should take control of the supervision of housing for ultimate delivery. Building contractors should be monitored in order to avoid the use of sub-standard building materials. All professionals in the construction industry should be made to adhere strictly to the code of conduct of their profession to check excesses and to enhance harmony between professions. Adequate communication should be encouraged among the professionals of a building construction team to achieve appropriate continuity in the construction work as well as to achieve timely success in building construction which will ultimately advance housing delivery.
User experience modeling on consumer-to-consumer (c2c) e-commerce website

Rapid technology and communication developments have brought us to the digital age, where its media, such as the internet become one famous media that is widely used for various purposes around the world. Many organizations view this situation as a space or new media to do business expansion as an innovative way of doing activities that meet the communities’ expectations of economy-related aspects of convenience, known by the term of e-commerce as one alternative options for the organizations as a medium of information to facilitate the presence of interaction between sellers and buyers without limited time and space, where their progress was supported by the use of the website. How the user experience in interacting with the website become an important key in the advancement of the e-commerce. This research provides user experience modeling on e-commerce website in order to be able to increase the success of e-commerce business performance through the use of the website. This research focuses on e-commerce type of C2C in Indonesia with the aim to model the relationships of each user experience factors using structural equation modeling.
Polar Codes

1.2 Easy Channels There are two classes of channels that are “easy” to communicate over.  Firstly, completely noisy channels with zero Shannon capacity are “easy” to communicate at capacity. Such channels are characterized by the property that observed probabilities are independent of their inputs, i.e., W (y|0) = W (y|1), ∀ y ∈ Y. (2) By Shannon’s channel coding theorem, the capacity C is 0 bits per channel use.  Secondly, completely clean channels are also “easy” to communicate over. Such channels are characterized by W (y|0) ·W (y|1) = 0, ∀ y ∈ Y. (3) So, observing the output determines the input. (This is, in fact, not strictly true. If Y = R and the admissible outputs y for x = 0 is the set of rationals Q while the admissible outputs y for x = 1 is the set R \Q, deciding whether a number is rational may be difficult.)
Using Blockchain to Protect Personal Privacy in the Scenario of Online Taxi-hailing

Personal privacy protection issues has gradually caused widespread concern in society which will lead to economic and reputation losses, hinder network and E-commerce innovation or some other consequences if not handled properly. In this paper, we make use of the de-centralization, permanent and audibility of the blockchain to propose a blockchain-based personal privacy protection mechanism, which uses Online taxi-hailing as the application scenario. We not only provide the details of the blockchain custom transaction domain used by the scene, but also expound the information exchanging and blockchain auditing between passengers, Online taxi-hailing platform and drivers in Online taxi-hailing scene, providing a case model for the blockchain solution to personal privacy protection and a technical mechanism solution for further study of personal privacy protection issues.
Grayscale inhomogeneity correction method for multiple mosaicked electron microscope images

Electron microscope image stitching is highly desired to acquire microscopic resolution images of large target scenes in neuroscience. However, the result of multiple Mosaicked electron microscope images may exist severe gray scale inhomogeneity due to the instability of the electron microscope system and registration errors, which degrade the visual effect of the mosaicked EM images and aggravate the difficulty of follow-up treatment, such as automatic object recognition. Consequently, the grayscale correction method for multiple mosaicked electron microscope images is indispensable in these areas. Different from most previous grayscale correction methods, this paper designs a grayscale correction process for multiple EM images which tackles the difficulty of the multiple images monochrome correction and achieves the consistency of grayscale in the overlap regions. We adjust overall grayscale of the mosaicked images with the location and grayscale information of manual selected seed images, and then fuse local overlap regions between adjacent images using Poisson image editing. Experimental result demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.
The Size Effect Is Alive and Well, and Hiding behind Calendar Anomalies

Empirical evidence from the literature documents that the size effect has gradually diminished since the early 1980s. In this article, the authors examine the stability of this anomaly between 1926 and 2014. The evidence they document indicates a substantial presence of the size effect across various calendar anomalies. The anomalies considered are the January effect, the Halloween effect, the Mark Twain effect, the other January effect, the seasonal affective disorder effect, and the turn-of-the-month, day-of-the-week, and week-of-the-year effects. Their findings hold true for different sample periods, various modeling specifications, and types of returns and may provide investment professionals such as portfolio managers, investment officers, analysts, and other market participants with a practical tool for their daily decision-making. TOPICS: Factor-based models, factors, risk premia
Smart devices information extraction in home Wi‐Fi networks

With the rapid development of smart homes, there will be more smart devices connected to home Wi‐Fi for Internet access. Knowing the exact information of smart devices can further improve network quality‐of‐service from network operators as well as security from service providers. In this paper, we propose a scheme based on Hadoop platform and user‐defined function for smart device information extraction in home Wi‐Fi networks. The user‐defined function is developed in the proposed scheme to deal with massive amount of data that are not formatted according to published standards. The core of the proposed information extraction scheme is based on string matching a processed input data to a prebuilt smart device rule database. Testing has been conducted based on a massive dataset that was collected from real‐life home networks. The testing results demonstrate that our proposed method can accurately extract device information from home Wi‐Fi networks.
The Idiosyncratic Volatility Anomaly and the Resale Option in Chinese Stock Markets

The well-documented negative association between idiosyncratic volatility (IV) and stock returns is puzzling if investors are risk-averse. We show that this anomaly is also prominent in the Chinese stock market. We attempt to explain the IV anomaly by using the key theories suggested by the literature, such as the lottery effect, arbitrage asymmetry, prospect theory, return reversals and more. None of these competing theories is able to justify the IV anomaly in China. Given that the Chinese stock market possesses both short selling constraints and heterogeneous beliefs, we employ resale option theory as a way to explain the IV puzzle. We find that the resale option value is consistently related to the IV effect in China, and that the explanatory power of the resale option value for the IV anomaly survives a range of robustness tests.
Random nematic structures in the absence of inherent frustrations

We study the impact of anisotropic nanoparticles (NPs) on the nematic liquid crystal (LC) order. Within a mesoscopic Flory–Huggins-type approach we have estimated regimes where LC–NP mixtures are essentially homogenous. Using a lattice Lebwohl–Lasher type approach we have also studied the impact of anisotropic NPs on LC ordering. We analysed the cases where the orientations of NPs are either frozen-in or could be varied, to which we refer as random field mixtures and annealed mixtures, respectively. In the latter case we have demonstrated the existence of qualitatively different regimes. In particular, we determined the concentration regime, where LC configurations resembling a transparent nematic phase could be observed. Such domain patterns are stabilised by NPs hindering the annihilation of topological defects in LC order.
Industrial Light & Magic: Into the Digital Realm

A new decade at Industrial Light and Magic has brought us such movies as Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, The Mask, and Forrest Gump. Lavishly illustrated in full color throughout, this successor and companion to the bestselling ILM: The Art of Special Effects re-creates all the magic and technology of ILM's second groundbreaking decade.
Design of N-Way DBN Classifier and Auto Encoder for Facial Similarity

Recognizing a face is a routine task for human perception system, whereas building a similar computational model for Face recognition with 100% accuracy is quite challenging. This work is rich in terms of theory, literature, and experimentation with a novel approach towards face similarity technology. The paper concentrates on the design of an N-Way DBN Classifier and Similarity Metric DBN Auto-encoder for recognizing facial similarity (or Face Verification). PCA feature extraction process is combined with DBN to enhance the performance of the two proposed models. The models work under both Image Unrestricted and Image Restricted settings on the small LFW dataset. Many improvements and refinements needed to improve the models. With advancement in feature extraction stage, the proposed approaches might achieve competitive verification performance.
Markovian Model of an Edge Node in All-Optical Synchronous Double Bus Networks

This paper presents the performance analysis of a passive optical metro ring network functioning on a synchronous basis. The access protocol is based on Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) technique, and the electronic packets are transported by fixed length optical packets. Our study is carried out by analytical means, based on Discrete Time Markov Chain (DTMC), and simulation techniques. The feature of IP packet lengths distribution is captured by dividing electronic packets into three classes according to their sizes. A buffer with FIFO scheduling for variable length packets in an edge node, between the electronic and optical sides, implies important problems in modeling of the admission of IP packets and the creation of an optical packet. The performance results presented in this paper highlight that the Markov chains can act as an effective tool for performance evaluation of optical networks.
Integration Application Technologies and Performance Analysis of Very High Throughput Wi-Fi in Dense Deployment Networks

The paper proposes network architecture based on software-defined networking (SDN), wireless network virtualization, the enhanced authentication and the fast handoff to achieve scalability, interference immunity and security, aiming to reduce adverse effects of the dense deployment on the performance of very high throughput (VHT) Wi-Fi. The experimental results show that the combination of SDN, network function virtualization, Galois/counter mode protocol and VHT Wi-Fi can improve throughput by 10%, which is able to maintain security while reducing the handoff delay to 40ms. The techniques mentioned above can guarantee the role of the VHT Wi-Fi in future dense deployment wireless networks.
Detecting Driver Drowsiness Using Eye State

Various studies have suggested that 20%-50% road accidents are fatigue-related. Nevertheless, on certain roads, the maximum value is out of scope. This paper aims at developing a vision-based drowsiness detecting system which is noninvasive and accurate to help alert drowsy driver in advance. Eye state is used to evaluate drowsiness. First, face region is detected through AdaBoost with Haar feature. Then instead of applying old fashioned eye location methods which many drowsiness detect systems still possess, our system obtain eye region through a customized state of art face alignment algorithm based on Regressing Local Feature. Finally, an SVM is trained to distinguish eye states. Results demonstrate that our system can achieve a high detection rate in various lighting circumstances.
New findings on the middle paleolithic of the eastern adriatic: The earliest settlement at Bioče, Montenegro

Excavations of undisturbed Pleistocene deposits at the Bioce rockshelter layers 4 and 3 by the joint Russian-Montenegrian expedition yielded the fi rst evidence of Middle Paleolithic occupation. Primary reduction techniques are described and a typology of lithic industry is proposed. Techniques were quite simple, including parallel, orthogonal, and centripetal fl aking suggestive of the Levallois tradition. Flakes were mostly small, short, and robust with a straight profi le. Most tools are single and double sidescrapers. Atypical end-scrapers, becs, denticulate-notched tools, and fl akes with irregular retouch are few. The closest technological and typological parallels are with Crvena Stena layers XXII–XVIII, correlating with MIS 5c-b. This industry is based on Levallois and radial/discoid cores whereas elongate fl akes are few. The most frequent tools are side-scrapers and backed knives. Finds from Bioce span a long occupation period and testify to cultural evolution, suggesting, for the fi rst time, that this site may be key to understanding cultural processes during the Middle Paleolithic of the region.
Sub-National Credit Risk and Sovereign Bailouts: Who Pays the Premium?

Studies have shown that markets may underprice sub-national governments’ risk on the implicit assumption that these entities would be bailed out by their central government in case of financial difficulties. However, the question of whether sovereigns pay a premium on their own borrowing as a result of (implicitly or explicitly) guaranteeing sub-entities’ debt has been explored only little. We use an event study approach with separate equations for two levels of government to test for a simultaneous increase in sovereign risk premia and decrease in sub-national risk premia — or a de facto transfer of risk from the latter to the former — on the day a sovereign bailout is announced. Using daily financial market data for Spain and its autonomous regions from January 2010 to June 2013, we find support for our risk transfer hypothesis. We estimate that the Spanish sovereign’s spread may have increased by around 70 basis points as a result of the central government’s support for fiscally distressed comunidades autonomas.
Dynamic Modeling for Machine Tool Thermal Error Compensation

This paper presents a new thermal error modeling methodology called the Dynamic Thermal Error Modeling which improves the accuracy and robustness of the machine tool thermal error model. The characteristics of the thermoelastic system are investigated from the dynamic system viewpoint. The pseudo-hysteresis effect is revealed to be the major factor causing poor robustness of the conventional static thermal error model. System identification theory is applied to build the dynamic model for machine tool thermal error on-line estimation. The modeling procedure for the linear Output Error (OE) model is illustrated using simulation work for both one-dimensional spindle and two-dimensional machine structure thermal deformations. Model performance evaluation through spindle experiments shows that the thermal error dynamic model has advantages over the static model in terms of model accuracy and robustness.
Fostering Academic Resilience of Students at Risk of Failure at Secondary School Level

This study aimed at fostering academic resilience of non-resilient at-risk students through an intervention program using an activity based module aiming at fostering protective factors-creativity, internal locus of control, self-concept, self-esteem, self-efficacy, autonomy, sense of purpose in life, optimism, a good sense of humor and teacher student relationship. Sixty four (N=64) at risk of failure, 9 th and 10 th grade students from a public secondary school were identified which were later randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. A Resilience Assessment Scale developed by the researchers was administered to measure specific risk indicators like socio economic status, academic issues, homelessness, health issues and negative life events. One of the researchers played as a resilience teacher. The treatment continued for three months. The pre-test and post-test analysis revealed that the intervention was significantly effective in enhancing students‟ academic resilience in overall and by each selected protective factor.
Petrol Fiyat Değişimlerinin BİST Endeks Getirileri Üzerindeki Etkisinin Analizi

Petrol en onemli enerji kaynagi olmasindan dolayi dunyadaki butun ulkeler icin onem arz eder. Dunyada petrol rezervleri esit dagilmamistir, birkac ulke onemli petrol ihracatcisi iken diger kalan ulkeler petrolu ithal etmektedir. Dolayisiyla hem petrol ihrac eden hem de petrol ithal eden ulkeler petrol fiyatlari ile yakindan ilgilenmek zorundadirlar. Petrol ihtiyacinin yaklasik %90’dan fazlasini ithal eden Turkiye icin petrol fiyatlarindaki degisimin makroekonomik etkilerinin arastirilmasi son derece onemlidir. Petrol fiyatlari ve Turkiye’deki makroekonomik degiskenler arasindaki etkilesimi arastiran cok sayida calisma bulunmaktadir. Bu calismada petrol fiyatlarindaki degisimlerin BIST 100 ulusal endeksi ve petrol ile yakindan iliskisi bulunan 3 tane sektorel endeks (XULAS, XKMYA ve XUSIN) getirileri uzerindeki etkileri arastirilmistir. Calisma Mayis 2001 – Nisan 2017 donemine ait aylik verileri kapsamakta olup, soz konusu iliski VAR yontemine dayali etki tepki fonksiyonlari ve varyans ayristirmasi kapsaminda analiz edilmistir. Bulgulara gore petrol fiyat degisimlerinin etkisi sektorlere gore degismektedir.