Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stability-based topology control in wireless multihop networks with reservation-based distributed-scheduling policies

The topology of wireless multihop networks can be controlled by means of transmission power control, and this control can be performed with the objective of adapting the network topology to the data flows established by the end users. By adapting the network topology, the set of flow data rates that the network supports can be increased, or, if the flow data rates are fixed, the end-to-end delays experienced by the flows can be decreased. The research problem studied in this dissertation is the design of topology-control algorithms that maximize the size of the set of supported flow data rates. The design of the algorithms is approached in three steps. In the first step, the supported set of flow data rates is characterized mathematically for fixed network topologies by means of a queueing-system stability analysis. Two main contributions are achieved in this step. These are (1) a novel stability-analysis technique for reservation-based distributed scheduling (RBDS) policies and (2) the greedy-maximal RBDS (GM-RBDS) policy that outperforms, in terms of throughput, the current policies available in the literature. In the second step, the mathematical characterization of the set of flow data rates supported by GM-RBDS networks is used for the design of a heuristic and centralized topology-control algorithm which outperforms the classic approach based on spatial reuse. The third step consists of the design of distributed topology-control algorithms that also use the mathematical characterization of the set of flow data rates. These algorithms are designed using game theory and compared with the centralized topology control of the second step. The network scenarios in which each of these two approaches (i.e., centralized and distributed) outperforms the other are identified. Finally, this dissertation also includes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a simulation framework for Institute-of-Electrical-and-Electronics-Engineers (IEEE) 802.16 wireless mesh networks using optimized network engineering tools (OPNET). The GM-RBDS policy and the topology-control algorithms are evaluated in this framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first OPNET simulation framework for this type of networks.
ANALYSIS, DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN EMBEDDED REALTIME SOUND SOURCE LOCALIZATION SYSTEM BASED ON BEAMFORMING THEORY

This project is intended to analyze, design and implement a realtime sound source localization system by using a mobile robot as the media. The implementated system uses 2 microphones as the sensors, Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller system with ATMega328p as the microprocessor, two permanent magnet DC motors as the actuators for the mobile robot and a servo motor as the actuator to rotate the webcam directing to the location of the sound source, and a laptop/PC as the simulation and display media. In order to achieve the objective of finding the position of a specific sound source, beamforming theory is applied to the system. Once the location of the sound source is detected and determined, the choice is either the mobile robot will adjust its position according to the direction of the sound source or only webcam will rotate in the direction of the incoming sound simulating the use of this system in a video conference. The integrated system has been tested and the results show the system could localize in realtime a sound source placed randomly on a half circle area (0 - 180 0 ) with a radius of 0.3m - 3m, assuming the system is the center point of the circle. Due to low ADC and processor speed, achievable best angular resolution is still limited to 25 o .
Evaluation of IR User interface – Implications for User Interface Design

In this paper, we discuss the methodological framework used in an experimental evaluation study and present the implications drawn from the analysis of the information retrieval (IR) interaction for a user interface redesign of an on-line WWW-based IR system. The goal was to investigate if the current user interface to an on-line WWW-based IR system with real users with real information needs provided sufficient support in order to conduct an information-seeking task. For our study purpose, we used a set of data collection and analysis methods from the area of information science and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). We collected and analysed cognitive and statistical data using a combination of both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods such as questionnaires, open-ended questions and system log statistics. Variables and correlation between the variables were measured and requirement lists were elicited. Finally, the framework used, identified and recognised several important factors that need to be supported in the design of an user interface design. The framework also proves that an on-line based evaluation setting with real users and with real information seeking tasks is feasible.
iCAP: Rapid Prototyping of Context-Aware Applications

Although numerous context-aware applications, those that implicitly take their context of use into account, have been developed, and advances have been made in technology to acquire contextual information, it is still difficult to develop and prototype interesting context-aware applications. This is largely due to the lack of programming support available to both programmers and end users. In this paper we focus on providing support to end users to open up the space of context-aware application design to a larger group of users. We present iCAP, the interactive Context-Aware Prototyper, a system that allows end users to visually design a wide variety of context-aware applications, including those based on if-then rules, temporal and spatial relationships and environment personalization. iCAP allows users to quickly prototype and test their applications without writing any code. We describe the system design and several applications that demonstrate iCAP’s richness and ease of use. We also describe results from a user study performed with 15 end users and 5 programmers that illustrates iCAP’s expressiveness and usability. Author
The Use of Empirical Studies in the Development of High End Computing Applications

Abstract : This report provides a description of the research and development activities towards learning much about the development and measurement of productivity in high performance computing environments. Many objectives were accomplished including the development of a methodology for measuring productivity in the parallel programming domain. This methodology was tested over 25 times at 8 universities across the United States and can be used to aid other researchers studying similar environments. The productivity measurement methodology incorporates both development time and performance into a single productivity number. An Experiment Manager tool for collecting data on the development of parallel programs, as well as a suite of tools to aid in the capture and analysis of such data was also developed. Lastly, several large scale development environments were studied in order to better understand the environment used to build large parallel programming applications. That work also included several surveys and interviews with many professional programmers in these environments.
Usages contributifs sur Internet : le podcasting indépendant et le sens de son style

Ce memoire porte sur le podcasting independant. La pratique du podcasting est ici prise dans le contexte general des usages contributifs du Web participatif qui formeraient une culture participative. Nous repondons a la question suivante: dans le contexte des usages contributifs, quelles sont les caracteristiques specifiques du podcasting independant et quel est le sens de son style? Pour repondre a cette question en deux volets, nous mobilisons un cadre theorique constitue de quatre approches: la sociologie des usages, la declinaison des media studies et l'approche stylistique des sous-cultures des cultural studies, de meme que le modele expressiviste. Le terrain est approche par une posture en grounded theory a laquelle nous avons jointe une recherche une observation participante aupres des acteurs sur une periode de trois ans. Nos resultats montrent la specificite de la pratique du podcasting independant et exposent comment se constitue le sens de son style qui s'inscrit en reaction au modele mediatique traditionnel. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLES DE L’AUTEUR : Internet, Usage, Usage contributif, Culture participative, Style, Sous-culture, Podcasting, Podcasting independant.
Inference on Logistic Regression Models

John T. Chen, Advisor The logistic regression model is one of the popular mathematical models for the analysis of binary data with applications in physical, biomedical, and behavioral sciences, among others. The feature of this model is to quantify the effects of several explanatory variables on one dichotomous outcome variable. Normally, the asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood estimates in the model parameters are used for statistical inference. However, logistic regression models have serious numerical problems if zero cells occur in the contingency table. For this scenario, this dissertation proposed a new approach to investigate the asymptotic properties of maximum likelihood estimators for the logistic regression models. In this dissertation, a generalization of the hybrid logistic regression model was introduced, which was originally proposed by Chen et al. (2003). These models deal with situations in which risk factors associated with the outcome are exceedingly rare in the control group. In principle, a two-stage hybrid procedure models the risks due to the rare factors in the first stage and models the residual risks due to the other factors in the second stage using the standard logistic regression model. Another highlight of this dissertation is on the multinomial logistic regression model, which handles the categorical dependent outcome variable with more than two levels. It extended the hybrid logistic regression model to the multinomial hybrid logistic regression model when the case group of the outcome variable has mutually exclusive and exhaustive subgroups. In the last part of the dissertation, we studied the bootstrap method to estimate the variances for the parameter estimates in the logistic regression model.
Evaluation of the "reconceptualising early mathematics learning" project

The Pattern and Structure Mathematics Awareness Project (PASMAP) has investigated the development of patterning and early algebraic reasoning among 4 to 8 year olds over a series of related studies. We assert that an awareness of mathematical pattern and structure enables mathematical thinking and simple forms of generalisation from an early age. The project aims to promote a strong foundation for mathematical development by focusing on critical, underlying features of mathematics learning. This paper provides an overview of key aspects of the assessment and intervention, and analyses of the impact of PASMAP on students’ representation, abstraction and generalisation of mathematical ideas. A purposive sample of four large primary schools, two in Sydney and two in Brisbane, representing 316 students from diverse socio-economic and cultural contexts, participated in the evaluation throughout the 2009 school year and a follow-up assessment in 2010. Two different mathematics programs were implemented: in each school, two Kindergarten teachers implemented the PASMAP and another two implemented their regular program. The study shows that both groups of students made substantial gains on the ‘I Can Do Maths’ assessment and a Pattern and Structure Assessment (PASA) interview, but highly significant differences were found on the latter with PASMAP students outperforming the regular group on PASA scores. Qualitative analysis of students’ responses for structural development showed increased levels for the PASMAP students; those categorised as low ability developed improved structural responses over a relatively short period of time.
Ensembles of diverse clustering-based discriminative dependency parsers

Syntactic parsing and dependency parsing in particular are a core component of many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks and applications. Improvements in dependency parsing can help improve machine translation and information extraction applications among many others. In this thesis, we extend the framework of (Koo, Carreras, and Collins, 2008) for dependency parsing which uses a single clustering method for semi-supervised learning. We make use of multiple diverse clustering methods to build multiple discriminative dependency parsing models in the Maximum Spanning Tree (MST) parsing framework (McDonald, Crammer, and Pereira, 2005). All of these diverse clustering-based parsers are then combined together using a novel ensemble model, which performs exact inference on the shared hypothesis space of all the parser models. We show that diverse clustering-based parser models and the ensemble method together significantly improves unlabeled dependency accuracy from 90.82% to 92.46% on Section 23 of the Penn Treebank. We also show significant improvements in domain adaptation to the Switchboard and Brown corpora.
Grounding event references in news

Events in the world around us are frequently discussed in natural language, and their accurate identification is central to tasks from intelligence analytics to question answering. They are nonetheless very diverse, both in ontology and in how they are referred to, and have complex but ill-defined structures. For these reasons, computationally identifying and characterising events by how they are referred to proves very challenging. We establish this argument through a broad survey of computational tasks that identify and characterise references to events. News and social media play an important role in informing the public of events as they occur, thus providing a shared foundation for communication. This work presents several studies into interpreting references to the breadth of events covered in news, before proposing and evaluating a new model for computationally grounding newsworthy event references. We perform two annotation studies over broad-coverage news text, the first applying a coarse-grained event typology to mark event-referring sentences. Its results concur with our analysis of inter-annotator agreement and type distribution in the ace05 corpus (Walker et al., 2006): both highlight the brittleness of such type schemas which leave a long, heavy tail of news events unmarked. The second annotation introduces a new approach to event typology, which employs a hierarchy of types that is extended over the course of annotation. This yields more complete coverage of newsworthy events, but suggests that there is no definitive means of structuring the space of events. The second annotation is also novel in characterising each news report in terms of its update event and topic event, focusing only on the notable event content of news. We find that topic is too ambiguously characterised as a single event, suggesting that we should instead consider the explicit references to related events that a journalist provides as background. Despite Wikipedia’s utility for processing entity references, an analysis of its event articles shows that they are unsuitable for informing news event detection and disambiguation: they are strongly biased towards those that are enumerable (e.g. sports series), or that are collections of newsworthy sub-events (e.g. Vietnam War); their distribution, granularity and referential forms are mismatched to news media’s event coverage. In this context, we propose the event linking task. By analogy with named entity linking or disambiguation (Bunescu and Pasca, 2006), event linking models the grounding of references to notable events. It treats a news archive as a proxy for the set of events it reports, and defines the disambiguation of a newsworthy event reference as a link to the article that first reports it. When two references are linked to the same article, they need not be references to the same event. We argue that precise event coreference is often too strict: it does not account for the intricate structure of events, nor the flexibility of referential language. By considering events at the granularity in which they are reported, we hope to provide a more intuitive
Fairness of congestion avoidance schemes in heterogeneous networks

Traditional congestion avoidance and control schemes used in wireline networks do not perform well in mixed wireless-wireline networks due to the high probability of random loss on the wireless links. In this paper, we study additive increase/multiplicative decrease schemes, specifically designed for such heterogeneous networks, which use some knowledge of the random loss probability to modify the rate at which a source sends packets into the network. We show that, unlike wireline networks, the choice of values for the increase/decrease parameters is crucial to provide fair treatment to all the users of the network. Specifically, we characterize the range of values for these parameters that leads to high utilization and fairness, i.e., an operating regime where the used capacity is close to the available capacity and the transmission rates for all the sources are equal.
Exploring Interactive Relevance Feedback With a Two-Pass Study Design

Abstract : Interactive query refinement is widely believed to improve the effectiveness of ranked retrieval but it can be difficult to leverage existing batch evaluation frameworks to quantify the relative benefits of alternative interaction designs. This paper uses the new two-pass interaction design of the Text Retrieval Conference's High Accuracy Retrieval from Documents (HARD) track to explore the design space for cluster-based interactive relevance feedback. Two sites contributed two techniques for cluster formation and three techniques for cluster labeling. The effectiveness of each technique was compared with lower bounds based on blind relevance feedback, and with upper bounds found with oracle-based techniques. The clustering techniques were found to yield potential benefits, but the automatically constructed cluster labels were found not to support sufficiently accurate cluster selection. Elicitation of a desired cluster descriptor was found to significantly improve the effectiveness of a subsequent retrieval pass. These results indicate that the affordable two-pass study design used in the HARD track can yield useful insights to guide future design decisions.
Imposed versus self-generated questions implications for reference practice

Implications of the imposed query model that informs reference training and practice are explored and expand ed upon in order to incorporate them into the existing models of reference work. Items considered include the need to identify questions by type, the effect of stereotypes on reference work, the importance of context to questions, the probabilistic nature of right answers for imposed queries, and considerations for reference serv ice evaluation. A checklist for incorporating imposed queries into reference services is provided.
Configuration Analysis and Design by Using Optimization Tools in Mathematica

In engineering, economic, and scientific studies, decisions are frequently modeled by applying optimization concepts and techniques. This article discusses global optimization in multiextremal models and tools to handle such models in Mathematica. Since we assume that not all readers are familiar with optimization models and methods, a general modeling framework is presented. We also review several built-in Mathematica optimization functions and then introduce MathOptimizer, an application package for continuous nonlinear (convex and global) optimization. To illustrate the usage of MathOptimizer, several configuration analysis and design models are formulated and solved. We also provide some comparative notes related to current Mathematica optimization functionality (namely, the function NMinimize) and to the recently introduced MathOptimizer Professional package.
Semantic In-Network Complex Event Processing for an Energy Efficient Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of spatially distributed sensor nodes that perform monitoring tasks in a region and the gateway nodes that provide the acquired sensor data to the end user. With advances in the WSN technology, it has now become possible to have different types of sensor nodes within a region to monitor the environment. This provides the flexibility to monitor the environment in a more extensive manner than before. Sensor nodes are severely constrained devices with very limited battery sources and their resource scarcity remains a challenge. In traditional WSNs, the sensor nodes are used only for capturing data that is analysed later in more powerful gateway nodes. This continuous communication of data between sensor nodes and gateway nodes wastes energy at the sensor nodes, and consequently, the overall network lifetime is greatly reduced. Existing approaches to reduce energy consumption by processing at the sensor node level only work for homogeneous networks. This thesis presents a sensor node architecture for heterogeneous WSNs, called SEPSen, where data is processed locally at the sensor node level to reduce energy consumption. We use ontology fragments at the sensor nodes to enable data exchange between heterogeneous sensor nodes within the WSN. We employ a rule engine based on a pattern matching algorithm for filtering events at the sensor node level. The event routing towards the gateway nodes is performed using a context-aware routing scheme that takes both the energy consumption and the heterogeneity of the sensor nodes into account.
Varieties of Concurrency Control in IMS/VS Fast Path.

Fast Path supports a variety of methods of concurrency control for a vanety 0/ different uses of data. This arose naturally out of efforts to meet the typical ner~ds of large on-line transaction processing businesses. The elements of "optimistic loeking" apply to one type of data, and "group commit" appLies to all types of data. Fast Path development ex.perience supports the idea that the use of a variety of methods of concurrency control by a single transaction is reasonable and is not as difficult as might be expected, at least when there is fast access to shared memory. * This article is intended to be published in the June 1985 issue of the IEEE bulletin on Da.ta. base Engeneering.
Data warehousing model for integrating fragmented electronic health records from disparate and heterogeneous clinical data stores

This research was a step forward in developing a data integration framework for Electronic Health Records. The outcome of the research is a conceptual and logical Data Warehousing model for integrating Cardiac Surgery electronic data records. This thesis investigated the main obstacles for the healthcare data integration and proposes a data warehousing model suitable for integrating fragmented data in a Cardiac Surgery Unit.
Evaluation of New Audio Features and Their Utilization in Novel Music Retrieval Applications

Johann Straus Blue Danube Waltz Queens of the Stone Age Go With The Flow • Review of standard Audio Features for Music Information Retrieval • Study of the importance of Psycho-acoustics in Audio Feature Computation • Improvement of Rhythm Patterns Feature Extractor • Development of 2 new Feature Sets: RH and SSD • Evaluation, Comparison and Combination of Feature Sets • Participation in international scientific Benchmarking events for Comparison with State-of-the-Art Feature Sets • Contributions to novel applications for visualization of and interaction with music collections • Clustering of the complete works of Mozart on a Self-Organizing Music Map Contributions