Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Border-Stable Approach to NURBS Surface Rendering for Ray Tracing

Ray tracing has become a popular method for generating high quality images. Most of the modern ray tracing based applications only deals with triangles as basic primitives. NURBS surface representation is common for most of 3D modelling tools because of its compactness and the useful geometric properties of NURBS surfaces. Using the direct ray tracing of NURBS surfaces, one can achieve better quality of rendered images [1]. There are many approaches to solving this problem.
An application of Alloy to static analysis for secure information flow and verification of software systems

Abstract : Within a multilevel secure (MLS) system, flaws in design and implementation can result in overt and covert channels, both of which may be exploited by malicious software to cause unauthorized information flows. To address this problem, the use of control dependency tracing has been explored to present a precise, formal definition for information flow. This work describes a security Domain Model (DM), designed in the Alloy formal specification language, for conducting static analysis of programs to identify illicit information flows, such as control dependency flaws and covert channel vulnerabilities. The model includes a formal definition for trusted subjects, which are granted extraordinary privileges to perform system operations that require relaxation of the mandatory access control (MAC) policy mechanisms imposed on normal subjects, but are trusted to behave benignly and not to degrade system security. The DM defines the concepts of program state, information flow and security policy rules, and specifies the behavior of a target program. The DM is compiled from a representation of the target program, written in a specialized Implementation Modeling Language (IML), and a specification of the security policy written in the Alloy language. The Alloy Analyzer tool is used to perform static analysis of the DM to detect potential security policy violations in the target program. This approach demonstrates that it is possible to establish a framework for formally representing a program implementation and for formalizing the security rules defined by a security policy, enabling the verification of that program representation for adherence to the security policy.
Delayed feedback control algorithms in high-speed networks

Asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) transport technology is generally considered as a basis for future integrated telecommunications service. A group of linear feedback control algorithms for handling and preventing congestion in high-speed networks is proposed and analyzed. The algorithms are asymptotically stable and the transient process is non-oscillatory. The dependence of the quality of service on the duration of the control intervals is analyzed and the performance of algorithm in a non-stationary environment is addressed. We also address the issues of sensitivity, transient processes, discretization effects, global boundedness and interaction with other traffic flows.
A Comparative Study of Two Whole Program Slicers for C

Recently, a few whole-program static slicers for the C programming language have been developed, permitting a variety of hypotheses about time--precision tradeoffs in program analysis for software engineering to be tested. This paper reports an initial investigation into these claims through GrammaTech''s CodeSurfer and UCSD''s Sprite research prototype, which represent two very different approaches in the program analysis tool design space. First, it was found that algorithmic superiority tended to provide large improvements in relative precision in select cases. Second, a number of non-algorithmic design choices had a substantial and sometimes unintuitive influence on slice results. Third, considerable expertise and time was required to discern the reasons why a particular statement appeared in a slice, diminishing the slice''s probable usefulness. These results provide recommendations for future tool design.
Feature selection in Mandarin large vocabulary continuous speech recognition

In this paper, three kinds of important features in speech recognition are introduced, including, LPCC, MFCC and PLP in order to compare the performances of these features, we design detailed experiments about the feature selection in a Mandarin large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system. In this system the semi-syllable based CHMM is applied to establish speech models and the all-syllables recognition accuracy is adopted to represent the performance. By employing different kinds of features, comparing diverse dimensions and selecting the computation methods of energy features, we utilize 45-dimension MF-PLP features in a Mandarin speech recognition system for the first time and obtain the best all-syllables recognition accuracy in published documents.
Optical inspection of wafers using large-area defect detection and sampling

In the absence of in-line electrical test monitors, semiconductor manufacturers must rely on data from optical inspections to identify and control defects. To be effective, optical inspection must be reduced to terms which have physical significance to the process engineer. The data must be able to show trends over time, distributions of defect types causing the most harm to the product, and net change after elimination of defects. Further, it must be able to predict the health of product with a high degree of consistency. This paper describes how optical defect inspection, using large-area detection and a consistent automatic sampling algorithm, can be used to monitor and control defect levels on product. This method has been a significant contributor to rapid defect learning on the 16-Mb DRAM manufacturing line at IBM. <<ETX>>
DEUM : a framework for an estimation of distribution algorithm based on Markov random fields

Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs) belong to the class of population based optimisation algorithms. They are motivated by the idea of discovering and exploiting the interaction between variables in the solution. They estimate a probability distribution from population of solutions, and sample it to generate the next population. Many EDAs use probabilistic graphical modelling techniques for this purpose. In particular, directed graphical models (Bayesian networks) have been widely used in EDA. This thesis proposes an undirected graphical model (Markov Random Field (MRF)) approach to estimate and sample the distribution in EDAs. The interaction between variables in the solution is modelled as an undirected graph and the joint probability of a solution is factorised as a Gibbs distribution. The thesis describes a model of fitness function that approximates the energy in the Gibbs distribution, and shows how this model can be fitted to a population of solutions to estimate the parameters of the MRF. The estimated MRF is then sampled to generate the next population. This approach is applied to estimation of distribution in a general framework of an EDA, called Distribution Estimation using Markov Random Fields (DEUM). The thesis then proposes several variants of DEUM using different sampling techniques and tests their performance on a range of optimisation problems. The results show that, for most of the tested problems, the DEUM algorithms significantly outperform other EDAs, both in terms of number of fitness evaluations and the quality of the solutions found by them. There are two main explanations for the success of DEUM algorithms. Firstly, DEUM builds a model of fitness function to approximate the MRF. This contrasts with other EDAs, which build a model of selected solutions. This allows DEUM to use fitness in variation part of the evolution. Secondly, DEUM exploits the temperature coefficient in the Gibbs distribution to regulate the behaviour of the algorithm. In particular, with higher temperature, the distribution is closer to being uniform and with lower temperature it concentrates near some global optima. This gives DEUM an explicit control over the convergence of the algorithm, resulting in better optimisation.
TECHNIQUE FOR EVALUATION OF SPEECH SYSTEMS.

Abstract : This report covers the progress made and the conclusions reached during the first six months of effort on the development of an automated speech intelligibility test. The literature in intelligibility testing has been surveyed and evaluated. Six of the most common intelligibility tests have been compared in terms of their materials, employment of speakers and listeners, validity and reliability of results, and potential for automation. On the basis of theoretical considerations and well-known empirical findings, it is concluded that the requirement for a highly efficient and reliable automated test procedure can best be satistifed with a multiple-choice test in which the set of possible messages is known to the listener. (Author)
Coordination in Large Scale Software Development

Abstract : Successful software development requires tight coordination among subgroups involved in the development process. Coordination is difficult because of the division of labor, interdependence and uncertainty inherent in large software projects. A survey in 65 software development projects reveals that informal communication is necessary for coordination under these circumstances. Results show that software professional got much of their information from other people. They perceived that interpersonal techniques for getting information from beyond their immediate work group were underused, while more formal procedures for tracking routine information were overused compared to their value. Technically uncertain projects and highly interdependent ones had staffs who were poorly informed and were poorly coordinated. When project members had a large network of personal contacts outside the project, information flow improved, especially when the project was uncertain. The paper concludes with organizational and technological suggestions for increasing the flow of relevant information across functional boundaries in projects.
Staffing implications of software productivity models

The attributes of software project staffing and productivity implied by equating the effects of two popular software models in a small neighborhood of a given effort-duration point are investigated. The first model presupposes that organizational productivity decreases as a function of the project staff size due to interfacing and intercommunication. The second, the so-called software equation, relates the product size to effort and duration through a power law tradeoff formula. The conclusions that may be reached by assuming that both of these describe project behavior, the former as a global phenomenon and the latter as a localized effect in a small neighborhood of a given effort duration point, are that (1) there is a calculable maximum effective staff level, which, if exceeded, reduces the project production rate, (2) there is a calculable maximum extent to which effort and time may be traded effectively, (3) it becomes ineffective in a practical sense to expend more than an additional 25 to 50% of resources in order to reduce delivery time, and (4) the team production efficiency can be computed directly from the staff level, the slope of the intercommunication loss function, and the ratio of exponents in the software equation.
Mobility-aware MPLS in IP-based wireless access networks

Many domain-based micro-mobility schemes have been proposed to improve deficiencies of Mobile IP. The micro-mobility schemes provide efficient and fast handoff by localizing mobility impacts when the movement is within a domain. However they lack QoS support. This paper proposes mobility-aware MPLS as a micro-mobility scheme. The proposed scheme provides an efficient micro-mobility with continuous QoS support by combining the advantages of MPLS, such as IP QoS support, with the advantage of host-based micro-mobility schemes, such as low-latency handoffs.
The Classical Liberals Were Half Right (or Half Wrong): New Tests of the ‘Liberal Peace’, 1960-88

Classical liberals such as Kant argued that expanding political participation and increasing economic interdependence would promote peace among states. Recent empirical support for both propositions has led to a growing consensus on the power of the ‘liberal peace’. This article challenges one pillar of the liberal peace. Using a dataset of international disputes from 1960 to 1988, the authors find that there is no statistical evidence of the pacifying effect of economic interdependence. Findings in the existing literature appear to be due to the improper use of the classic logit (or probit) method despite the existence of the ‘simultaneity problem’ between the use of force and interdependence (i.e. reciprocal causation). In this study, the authors employ a two-stage probit least squares method to control this problem. Although Kant’s prediction with respect to regime type is supported by the analysis, the claim that economic interdependence will decrease conflict is not. The two-stage results reveal that international conflict reduces economic interdependence (rather than interdependence reducing conflict). The findings are robust using five alternative operationalizations of the economic interdependence variable. Finally, a re-analysis of the Russett & Oneal dataset using a two-stage probit model also indicates that the impact of economic interdependence evaporates after correcting for the simultaneity problem.
Paraconsistent logic program based safety verification for air traffic control

It has become a crucial issue to assure the safety for air traffic control. We consider how some air traffic accidents can be avoided by verifying the safety for air traffic control logically. We propose a theoretical framework for a logical safety verification for air traffic control based on a paraconsistent logic program called an Extended Vector Annotated Logic Program with Strong Negation (EVALPSN for short). Compared to other kinds of safety verification such as safety verification for railway interlocking, the safety verification for air traffic control contains more uncertainty and sometimes has to deal with probabilistic datum. Therefore, we extend EVALPSN to probabilistic EVALPSN (P-EVALPSN for short) for dealing with the safety verification containing probability. We introduce the ideas of the safety verification based on both EVALPSN and P-EVALPSN, taking a simple example for landing clearance by air traffic controllers.
Assured service evaluation

This article focuses on the differentiated services model as a basis for the provision of QoS in the Internet. The objective is to evaluate the performance of TCP traffic flows crossing domains where nodes implement the assured forwarding per hop behaviour (PHB). The results obtained show the adequacy of this service in the supply of QoS guarantees and disclose to the problems of fairness in the bandwidth sharing.
A computational study of sparse matrix storage schemes

The efficiency of linear algebra operations for sparse matrices on modern high performance computing system is often constrained by the available memory bandwidth. We are interested in sparse matrices whose sparsity pattern is unknown. In this thesis, we study the efficiency of major storage schemes of sparse matrices during multiplication with dense vector. A proper reordering of columns or rows usually results in reduced memory traffic due to the improved data reuse. This thesis also proposes an efficient column ordering algorithm based on binary reflected gray code. Computational experiments show that this ordering results in increased performance in computing the product of a sparse matrix with a dense vector.
Language and dialect identification in social media analysis

Historically-unwritten Arabic dialects are increasingly appearing online in social media texts and are often intermixed with other languages, including Modern Standard Arabic, English, and French. The next generation analyst will need new capabilities to quickly distinguish among the languages appearing in a given text and to identify informative patterns of language switching that occur within a user’s social network—patterns that may correspond to socio-cultural aspects such as participants’ perceived and projected group identity. This paper presents work to (i) collect texts written in Moroccan Darija, a low-resource Arabic dialect from North Africa, and (ii) build an annotation tool that (iii) supports development of automatic language and dialect identification and (iv) provides social and information network visualizations of languages identified in tweet conversations.
Monitoring mit scannenden bildgebenden Tachymetern

Bei einer geodatischen Uberwachungsmessung wird in der Regel zunachst eine raumliche und zeitliche Diskretisierung des Messobjekts vorgenommen; d. h. das zu untersuchende (kunstliche oder naturliche) Objekt wird durch einzelne reprasentative Punkte ersetzt, die in unterschiedlichen zeitlichen Abstanden (Epochen) beobachtet werden. Als Ergebnis der mehrmaligen Messungen und Deformationsanalysen ergeben sich fur die diskreten Objektpunkte Verschiebungsvektoren, die wiederum in eine Deformation (Starrkorper-bewegung oder Verformung) des Korpers ruckzurechnen sind. Seit einigen Jahren zeichnet sich ein Trend zu flachenhaften Messverfahren ab, bei denen die oben genannte Problematik der Diskretisierung und spateren Generalisierung umgangen wird. Die zumeist eingesetzten Methoden des Laserscannings und der (Stereo-)Photogrammetrie erfassen in kurzer Zeit hochauflosende genaue Punktwolken des Messgebietes und sind ideal zur Erfassung von Deformationen geeignet. Auch an der Entwicklung elektronischer Tachymeter ist dieser Trend nicht spurlos vorubergegangen. Moderne Gerate verfugen uber Scanfunktionalitaten und eine oder mehrere eingebaute Kameras und ermoglichen damit heutzutage auch eine flachenhafte Messdatenerfassung. Im folgenden Beitrag werden die Entwicklung und der technische Stand scannender bildgebender Tachymeter beschrieben (Kap. 2) und die besonderen Anforderungen an die Kalibrierung dieser Instrumente dargelegt (Kap. 3). Kapitel 4 zeigt eine neue Auswertemethode fur kombinierte Bild- und Scandaten im Sinne einer strengen Deformationsanalyse. Der Mehrwert der neuen Gerateklasse wird abschliesend diskutiert und ein Ausblick auf zukunftige Auswertemethoden gegeben (Kap. 5).
Teaching Critical Thinking: Using Seminars for 21st Century Literacy

Help students meet today's literacy demands with this new book from Terry Roberts and Laura Billings. The authors show how a seminar approach can lead students deeper into a text and improve their speaking, listening, and writing skills, as recommended by the Common Core State Standards. Roberts and Billings provide easy-to-follow information on implementing Paideia Seminars, in which students discuss a text and ask open-ended questions about it. When teachers use this lesson format, students are exposed to a wide range of increasingly complex texts. They also learn how to collaborate, talk ab
Speeding-up backpropagation-a comparison of orthogonal techniques

In recent years much effort has been spent trying to develop more efficient variations of the backpropagation learning algorithm. This has led to a combinatorial explosion of learning methods of which no detailed evaluation exists. We have analyzed the most important algorithms and extracted their minimal building blocks. By arranging these building blocks in different forms, and testing the resulting algorithms, we obtained new combinations which were benchmarked in a commercial workstation. Our results show which factors are responsible for the increased speed-up of the tested algorithms. These results could lead to better learning methods for neural networks.
A DSL Supporting Textual and Graphical Views

Domain Specific Languages(DSLs) are languages that are designed to be used in a particular development area. These languages aim to help developers solve the problems related to that domain and therefore contain information and jargons that are only relevant to a particular domain. Domain specific languages can be expressed in textual or graphical formats. Apart from personal preferences there are several advantages of using graphical format and also several advantages of using textual format. Therefore having a DSL that supports both of these notations will mean harvesting the advantages of all of them. However most of the tools available that enable the use of domain specific languages tend to focus on either textual or graphical editors for the DSL. The aim of this thesis is to investigate the possibility of having both notations for the same DSL in use. The thesis was conducted using action research method at Ericsson AB. Ericsson is currently having a DSL that has only a graphical notation. This DSL is using UML and UML Profiles. A prototype of the textual version of the existing DSL was created using Xtext and used to make an analysis and come up with findings on how a DSL with both graphical (which is in UML) and textual notations can be used. Transformations that enable switching from one view of the model to another have also been prototyped and used for analysis. The thesis also investigated two other solutions that are based on EMF using Xtext for text and GMF for the graphical notation. This thesis concludes that with all the alternatives investigated, it is possible to have a DSL that supports both graphical and textual views. Each solution however varies in the effort needed to implement and maintain the DSL.