Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MATERA2-AlfTester: An Exhaustive Simulation and Test Generation Tool for fUML Models

The Foundational Subset for Executable UML Models (fUML) and the Action language for fUML (Alf) can be used for creating executable models in the Eclipse-based UML editing tool called Papyrus. An fUML execution engine in Papyrus, such as Moka, allows to simulate or execute fUML models along with their associated Alf code. However, for exhaustive simulation of such models, one must provide input data required to reach and cover all important elements not only in the graphical fUML models, but also in the textual Alf code. In this paper, we present MATERA2-AlfTester, an Eclipse-plugin for exhaustive simulation and test generation for fUML models. MATERA2-AlfTester integrates with Papyrus and Moka tools and extends their functionally by allowing one to automatically generate test data, test suite with test oracle, and partial Java code at design time. We also present the simulation and testing process of MATERA2-AlfTester with the help of an example and demonstrate how exhaustive simulation and test generation with MATERA2-AlfTester can help designers in assessing and improving the quality of fUML models.
Computer Vision Algorithms for Mobile Camera Applications

W EARABLE and mobile sensors have found widespread use in recent years due to their ever-decreasing cost, ease of deployment and use, and ability to provide continuous monitoring as opposed to sensors installed at fixed locations. Since many smart phones are now equipped with a variety of sensors, including accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, microphone and camera, it has become more feasible to develop algorithms for activity monitoring, guidance and navigation of unmanned vehicles, autonomous driving and driver assistance, by using data from one or more of these sensors. In this thesis, we focus on multiple mobile camera applications, and present lightweight algorithms suitable for embedded mobile platforms. The mobile camera scenarios presented in the thesis are: (i) activity detection and step counting from wearable cameras, (ii) door detection for indoor navigation of unmanned vehicles, and (iii) traffic sign detection from vehicle-mounted cameras. First, we present a fall detection and activity classification system developed for embedded smart camera platform CITRIC. In our system, the camera platform is worn by the subject, as opposed to static sensors installed at fixed locations in certain rooms, and, therefore, monitoring is not limited to confined areas, and extends to wherever the subject may travel including indoors and outdoors. Next, we present a real-time smart phone-based fall detection system, wherein we implement camera and accelerometer based fall-detection on Samsung Galaxy STM 4. We fuse these two sensor modalities to have a more robust fall detection system. Then, we introduce a fall detection algorithm with autonomous thresholding using relative-entropy within the class of Ali-Silvey distance measures. As another wearable camera application, we present a footstep counting algorithm using a smart phone camera. This algorithm provides more accurate step-count compared to using only accelerometer data in smart phones and smart watches at various body locations. As a second mobile camera scenario, we study autonomous indoor navigation of unmanned vehicles. A novel approach is proposed to autonomously detect and verify doorway openings by using the Google Project TangoTM platform. The third mobile camera scenario involves vehicle-mounted cameras. More specifically, we focus on traffic sign detection from lower-resolution and noisy videos captured from vehicle-mounted cameras. We present a new method for accurate traffic sign detection, incorporating Aggregate Channel Features and Chain Code Histograms, with the goal of providing much faster training and testing, and comparable or better performance, with respect to deep neural network approaches, without requiring specialized processors. Proposed computer vision algorithms provide promising results for various useful applications despite the limited energy and processing capabilities of mobile devices. COMPUTER VISION ALGORITHMS FOR MOBILE
Factors Influencing Purchase Intention on Mobile Shopping Web Site in China and South Korea: An Empirical Study

The research objective of this study is to analyze the factors that influence consumers' perceptions of using mobile commerce services for online shopping in China and South Korea using ordered logistic regression analysis. We constructed the research model using the three dimensions of individual characteristics, shopping motivations and the characteristics of mobile shopping. We discovered that shopping frequency, utilitarianism, instant connectivity, and personalized information push positively impact the customers’ intention to use mobile phones in China. The results of the marginal effects indicated that the behavioral intentions of Chinese consumers increased when shopping frequency and instant connectivity increased. In addition, when utilitarianism and the personalized information push reach certain values, the shopping intention of online customers in China will decrease. Likewise, shopping frequency, hedonism, utilitarianism, instant connectivity, and SNS (Social Networking Services) accessibility positively affect the intention to use the Internet for m-shopping of South Korean consumers. In addition, the results regarding the marginal effects suggested that the intention to use m-shopping services on m-shopping web site of South Korean consumers increased as shopping frequency, hedonism, and instant connectivity increased. However, South Korean consumers' adoption intention will decrease when utilitarianism and SNS accessibility reach certain values. These results provide important implications for mobile commerce literature and practice.
Co-Experience in a Cross-Cultural Notion : Unpacking the Effect of Culture on Users ’ Social Interaction

How people experience technology as a group has become an important subject in user experience design. Even though previous studies addressed the effect of culture on organization of user experience, few c ross-cultural st udies have focused on users’ soci al i nteraction. This paper aims at ex ploring rel ationship between cul ture an d user experience in social inte raction, i n a catchier term, “co-experience. ” By reviewing literature on cultural variations of interaction styles, we de rived a conce ptual framework of role-tak ing and facework to l ook at co-experience of interactive technology in different cultures. To test the framework in a real world, we designed a new techno logy, called “Visual-talk tab le,” displaying the degree of verbal participation of each member. Visual-talk table was tested with Finnish groups and Korean groups on the question of how t he t echnology i ntervenes i n s ocial dy namics. Fi nally t he im plications f or de sign were discussed.
Optimized parallel simulations of analytic bond-order potentials on hybrid shared/distributed memory with MPI and OpenMP

Analytic bond-order potentials (BOPs) allow to obtain a highly accurate description of interatomic interactions at a reasonable computational cost. However, for simulations with very large systems, the high memory demands require the use of a parallel implementation, which at the same time also optimizes the use of computational resources. The calculations of analytic BOPs are performed for a restricted volume around every atom and therefore have shown to be well suited for a message passing interface (MPI)-based parallelization based on a domain decomposition scheme, in which one process manages one big domain using the entire memory of a compute node. On the basis of this approach, the present work focuses on the analysis and enhancement of its performance on shared memory by using OpenMP threads on each MPI process, in order to use many cores per node to speed up computations and minimize memory bottlenecks. Different algorithms are described and their corresponding performance results are presented, showing significant performance gains for highly parallel systems with hybrid MPI/OpenMP simulations up to several thousands of threads.
Review on Seat Suspension System Technology Development

This review will focus on the necessity for developing seat vibration control systems as a part of manufacturers’ investigation into finding innovative methods to increase the comfort and safety of the vehicles’ drivers. Operators of either on-road or off-road vehicles are regularly subjected to an extended variety of various vibration levels, especially at low frequencies. Considering that exposure to such vibration in long term has some damaging effects on driver’s health, many comprehensive investigations have been carried out and researchers have proposed several measures for estimating discomfort and the suitability of various vehicles’ seats such as those of trucks, cars and agricultural vehicles in operating condition. Active, passive and semi-active suspension systems are employed in vehicle seats to alleviate the harmful and damaging effects due to the transmitted vibration to the human body. In order to improve riding comfort, the operator’s body displacement and acceleration must be reduced. According to the research, active suspension control systems are the best choice to reduce the transmitted vibration to the drivers’ body and provide the best ride comfort in comparison with passive and semi-active systems.
Final Report Empirical Studies to Discover Vulnerability Analysis Patterns

Mainstream software development is increasingly relying on reuse of open source software components and libraries as well as third party APIs. Although this approach helps shorten the time to market for software vendors, it comes with security implications. Software vendors need to have an insight into the security of the components, libraries and APIs that they are importing into their products. Furthermore, they need to keep track of versions of these reused libraries so they can avoid reusing an outdated or vulnerable version. Given the pressure onto protecting users privacy as well as ensuring data integrity, confidentiality and services availability, software vendors and security researchers need to have a mechanism that facilitates the management and communication of vulnerabilities. In this scenario, organizations leverage on existing sources of vulnerabilities information (such as security bulletins, advisories and vulnerability databases) to identify potential exposures in their products, quantify potential impacts and adopt mitigations mechanisms for minimizing the consequences of the breach. Similarly, researchers rely on these sources to develop new techniques and to conduct empirical studies for advancing the field of cybersecurity. The main problem is that organizations and researchers have to manually browse a variety of data sources to find a set of vulnerabilities of their interest and to characterize the impacts of them. Such manual process is time-consuming and error prone. Moreover, these sources of vulnerability information are often inaccurate or incomplete [4], such as the software releases that are affected by a given vulnerability [7]. Therefore, it is important to fix these inconsistencies as well as to deploy a mechanism that allows automatic reasoning of vulnerabilities and that minimizes the burden of manually exploring a large amount of security problems. To overcome these challenges, we had proposed an automated framework for characterizing vulnerabilities. In this project, we had the following goals:
Comparison of isotopic niches of four sea cucumbers species (Holothuroidea: Echinodermata) inhabiting two seagrass meadows in the southwestern Mediterranean Sea (Mostaganem, Algeria)

Among the fauna inhabiting the Posidonia oceanica seagrass meadow, holothurians are particularly abundant and provide essential ecological roles, including organic matter recycling within seagrass sediments. This study aimed to investigate the trophic niche of four holothurians of the order Holothuriida [Holothuria poli (Delle Chiaje, 1824), Holothuria tubulosa (Gmelin, 1791), Holothuria sanctori (Delle Chiaje, 1823) and Holothuria forskali (Delle Chiaje, 1823)] inhabiting P. oceanica meadows, through the measurement of nitrogen and carbon stable isotope ratios. Two shallow and contrasting sites of the littoral region of Mostaganem (North West Algeria) were chosen. The first site, located in Stidia, is weakly impacted by human activities. The second site, located in Salamandre, is highly impacted by human activities (industries, harbor facilities). High values of δ15N in holothurians and their food sources were observed at both sites. The δ13C values showed a lower contribution from detritic Posidonia than in other areas. This could be a consequence of P. oceanica bed degradation in the studied area. The stable isotope approach did not reveal dietary differences between species, and the four holothurians species exhibited significant isotopic niche overlap. However, niche sizes differed between species showing more variable individual trophic diversity in some species (H. tubulosa and H. sanctori in Salamandre; H. forskali in Stidia). If niche segregation does occur, it is not in terms of general resource use. More likely, it would be the abundance of food sources, the different life habits and their micro-habitats that may explain their co-existence in the P. oceanica seagrass meadow.
Investigating the Formation of Nano-Hydroxyapatite on a Biocompatible and Antibacterial Cu/Mg-Substituted Bioglass

Multifunctional bioactive glasses (BGs) are designed with a focus on the provision of bactericidal and biological properties desired for angiogenesis, osteogenesis, and ultimately potential applications in bone tissue engineering. To achieve these, six sol-gel copper/magnesium substituted derivatives of 58S-BG, i.e. a mol% series of 60SiO2-4P2O5-5CuO-(31-x) CaO/xMgO (where x=0, 1, 3, 5, 8, and 10), were synthesized. Afterwards, the effect of MgO/CaO substitution on the in vitro formation of nano-hydroxyapatite (HA), osteoblast-like cell responses and BGs antibacterial performance were studied. During the BGs synthesis, the elimination of nitrates was achieved at 700 °C that prevented the BGs crystallization and stabilized the obtained dried gels. The structural and morphological evaluations were performed with X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). These characterizations revealed that Cusubstituted 58S-BG consisting of 5 mol% MgO (BG-5/5) slightly had retarded the formation of HA. In addition, Cu-substituted 58S-BGs consisting 8 mol% and 10 mol% MgO (BG-5/8 and BG-5/10) displayed lower bioactivity probably due to the lower ion release rate of Ca–Si into the simulated body fluid (SBF). The determination of 3-(4, 5 dimethylthiazol-2-yl)-2, 5-diphenyltetrazolium bromide (MTT) and alkaline phosphate (ALP) activities proved that the highest values of both differentiation and proliferation of MC3T3-E1 cells can be obtained from a 5 mol% MgO substituted BG, while the over addition of MgO (8 mol% and 10 mol%) decreased the bioactivity. Furthermore, these novel Cu/Mg-substituted 58S-BGs displayed antibacterial effect against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. Taken together, the results suggest the equally-substituted BG-5/5 (i.e. the one consists of 5 mol% of both CuO and MgO) as a promising candidate for bone tissue engineering, among all newly designed BGs in this work, owing to its desirable cell proliferation, ALP activity and antibacterial properties. Keywords—Apatite, bioactivity, biomedical applications sol-gel processes.
Computational Ethnomusicology for Exploring Trends in Trinidad Steelband Music Through History

In this paper, we present an interdisciplinary case study combining traditional and computational methodologies to study a selection of Trinidad steelband musical trends over a period of 50 years. In particular, a number of facts and/or trends have been clearly identified in the ethnomusicology literature, while some other hypotheses have been regarded as not immediately addressable with traditional methodologies. Here, we employ Music Information Retrieval (MIR) methods to investigate some of these questions. Our results show that the tempo range measured on our corpus is consistent with values reported in ethnomusicological literature, but reveals no clear change trend over time. On the other hand, our results suggest a change of the use of dynamics in the winning performances of the national Panorama competition. Finally, a tendency for homogenization of the tuning frequency and sound of the steelpans also became apparent, most probably due to the standardization of the manufacture of the instruments.
In-situ Fabrication of Topological-Superconducting Hybrids

Majorana platforms comprised of networks of quasi one-dimensional (1D) topological insulator (TI) nanostructures in proximity to s-wave superconductors might open the door towards topological quantum computation. To assure a high quality of such platforms, fabrication under UHV conditions is mandatory. In this work, we introduce two in-situ techniques, which when combined form the key to scalable Majorana platform fabrication. 1D TI nanostructures can be realized by “selective area growth”. Therefore, a thin layer stack of Si3N4 and SiO2 on top of a Si (111) surface was patterned by electron beam lithography and reactive ion etching. Topological insulator (TI) thin films grew selectively in as defined trenches on top of the exposed Si (111) surfaces via molecular beam epitaxy. Thereby, later fabrication processes for mesa definition under ambient conditions have been avoided. “Stencil lithography” on the other hand assures clean and highly transparent interfaces in between TI and superconductive thin films. We established a process, which allows the fabrication of Josephson junctions via stencil lithography under UHV conditions, again by means of molecular beam epitaxy. Our junctions show large ICRN products and signatures, which indicate transport mediated by gapless Andreev bound states, so called Majorana bound states. Keywords—Topological Insulators; Majorana Zero Modes; Stencil Lithography; Selective Area Growth
A Taxonomy of Lean Six Sigma and Agile Methodologies used in Software Development

Six Sigma is a business reasoning that highlight ongoing change, in light of a factual measure of instability. Lean is a persistent system to enhance execution, concentrating on waste disposal. Agile is methodology for extend administration, which can be utilized to control programming and item improvement utilizing redundant practices. This methodology can fundamentally build efficiency and decrease time to market. For the most part, lean and Six Sigma concentrate on taking out waste and giving the most elevated quality items and administrations with minimal cost, while encouraging an effortless, quick improvement approach. In this study, we will survey the existing literature in Six Sigma, Lean, Lean Six Sigma and Agile strategy over the past ten years. We analyze published research in the ranges of programming improvement. The audit is construct just with respect to the forty six (review) articles published between 2003-2017 academic literature KeywordsSix Sigma, Lean, Lean Six Sigma, Agile, Software Development
Capacity Estimation of IEEE 802.15.4 Chains of Sensor Nodes

—In the context of an integrated water management project, we derive an analysis based on numerical modelling for throughput estimation in an IEEE 802.15. 4 wireless sensor network (WSN). It takes into account the number of nodes in a cluster network, as well as transmitted packet size. We focus on the IEEE 802.15. 4 compliant slotted Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) algorithm. Theoretical estimations are veriﬁed using the ns-2 network simulator. The conﬁguration examined is a chain network formed by wireless sensor nodes where the ﬁrst node is the source of data packets and the last is the trafﬁc sink. Simulation results show that there is a satisfactory approximation between the theoretically estimated and the simulated values.
What do people ask the community question ansWering services and hoW do they do it in russian?

In our study we surveyed different approaches to the study of questions in traditional linguistics, question answering (QA), and, recently, in community question answering (CQA). We adapted a functional-semantic classification scheme for CQA data and manually labeled 2,000 questions in Russian originating from Otvety@Mail.Ru CQA service. About half of them are purely conversational and do not aim at obtaining actual information. In the subset of meaningful questions the major classes are requests for recommendations, or how-questions, and fact-seeking questions. The data demonstrate a variety of interrogative sentences as well as a host of formally non-interrogative expressions with the meaning of questions and requests. The observations can be of interest both for linguistics and for practical applications.
Radio astronomy with the Lunar Lander: opening up the last unexplored frequency regime

The moon is a unique location in our solar system and provides important information regarding the exposure to free space that is essential for future human space exploration to mars and beyond. The active broadband (1 kHz−100 MHz) tripole antenna now envisaged to be placed on the European Lunar Lander located at the Lunar South Pole allows for sensitive measurements of the exosphere and ionosphere, and their interaction with the Earths magnetosphere, solar particles, wind and CMEs and studies of radio communication on the moon, that are essential for future lunar human and science exploration. In addition, the lunar South pole provides an excellent opportunity for radio astronomy. Placing a single radio antenna in an eternally dark crater or behind a mountain at the south (or north) pole would potentially provide perfect shielding from man-made radio interference (RFI), absence of ionospheric distortions, and high temperature and antenna gain stability that allows detection of the 21 cm wave emission from pristine hydrogen formed after the big bang and into the period where the first stars formed. A detection of the 21 cm line from the moon at these frequencies would allow for the first time a clue on the distribution and evolution on mass in the early universe between the Epoch of Recombination and Epoch of Reionization (EoR). Next to providing a cosmological breakthrough, a single lunar radio antenna would allow for studies of the effect of solar flares and Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) on the solar wind at distances close to earth (space weather) and would open up the study of low frequency radio events (flares and pulses) from planets such as Jupiter and Saturn, which are known to emit bright (kJy−MJy) radio emission below 30 MHz (Jester and Falcke, 2009). Finally, a single radio antenna on the lunar lander would pave the way for a future large lunar radio interferometer; not only will it demonstrate the possibilities for lunar radio science and open up the last unexplored radio regime, but it will also allow a determination of the limitations of lunar radio science by measuring the local radio background noise.
Effect of salinity on growth , chlorophyll , carbohydrate and protein contents of transgenic Nicotiana Plumbaginifolia over expressing P 5 CS gene

Transgenic tobacco plant (Nicotiana Plumbaginifolia) over expressing P5CS (∆-pyrroline-5-carboxylate synthetase) and non transgenic plant as control were grown on MS medium supplemented with 0, 100, 150, 200 and 250 mM NaCl for 28 days. The effect of NaCl concentrations on fresh and dry weight, the chlorophyll (chl. a and b and total), carbohydrate and protein content were measured. Results showed a significant increase of chlorophyll, fresh weight, dry weight and carbohydrate in transgenic compared to the non transgenic plants under salt treatments. The total protein was decreased with increasing of salt concentration.