Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Local optical-flow estimation for forward looking imaging sonar data

In the underwater environment the use of optical camera technology is limited by the light attenuation and distortions due to turbidity the water column. High frame rate forward looking sonars have been developed as an alternative, however, when compared to optical systems the image is of a lower resolution and suffers from sound imaging related artefacts. This means that there is a need for registration algorithms that are better able to address these specific difficulties. The registration algorithm presented in this paper, uses local phase information to estimate movement within the image for each pixel. A coarse estimate is achieved by using sparse recovery techniques to select from a dictionary of modelled movements. This estimate is then refined using an adaptive filter. The resultant displacement map can then be used to enhance the image quality, or, as the basis for estimating the sensor movement. The method is used to register an example sonar image and the results shown against full image phase based registration.
On the synthesis of unidirectional combinational circuits detecting all single faults

In this paper authors consider the problem of concurrent error detection (CED) system of combinational circuit with unidirectionally independent outputs design using modulo codes with the summation. Considering of error detection features of modulo codes with the summation allows designing CED systems with reduced complexity comparing with the ones based on the classic Berger code. Authors determine conditions of application of modulo codes with the summation for CED system of combinational circuit with unidirectionally independent outputs design.
Peak Current Mode Bifrequency Control Technique for Switching DC–DC Converters in DCM With Fast Transient Response and Low EMI

Peak current mode bifrequency (PCM-BF) control, a novel control technique for switching dc-dc converters in the discontinuous conduction mode (DCM), is proposed in this paper. It realizes output voltage regulation by employing high- and low-frequency control pulses with preset switching frequencies. At the beginning of each control pulse cycle, the output voltage is sampled and compared with reference voltage to determine whether high- or low-frequency control pulse should be generated as control pulse. Compared with conventional pulse-width-modulation-based PCM control (hereafter called PCM-PWM), which realizes output voltage regulation by adjusting the duty ratio of the control pulse cycle by cycle, the PCM-BF control is simple, cost effective, and enjoys fast transient response. Moreover, more low-frequency control pulses are generated for light load, which improve the power conversion efficiency at light load. Besides, high- and low-frequency control pulses with different switching frequencies spread the spectrum over discrete frequencies, resulting in low electromagnetic interference. A buck converter operating in the DCM is taken as an example to illustrate the applications and benefits of the PCM-BF control technique. Simulation and experimental results are presented to verify the analytical results.
Construction and Testing of a Simple and Economical Soil Greenhouse Gas Automatic Sampler

ABSTRACT Quantification of soil greenhouse gas emissions requires considerable sampling to account for spatial and/or temporal variation. With manual sampling, additional personnel are often not available to sample multiple sites within a narrow time interval. The objectives were to construct an automatic gas sampler and to compare the accuracy and precision of automatic versus manual sampling. The automatic sampler was tested with carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes that mimicked the range of CO2 fluxes during a typical corn-growing season in eastern Nebraska. Gas samples were drawn from the chamber at 0, 5, and 10 min manually and with the automatic sampler. The three samples drawn with the automatic sampler were transferred to pre-vacuumed vials after 1 h; thus the samples in syringe barrels stayed connected with the increasing CO2 concentration in the chamber. The automatic sampler sustains accuracy and precision in greenhouse gas sampling while improving time efficiency and reducing labor stress.
Gradient Energy Matching for Distributed Asynchronous Gradient Descent

Distributed asynchronous SGD has become widely used for deep learning in large-scale systems, but remains notorious for its instability when increasing the number of workers. In this work, we study the dynamics of distributed asynchronous SGD under the lens of Lagrangian mechanics. Using this description, we introduce the concept of energy to describe the optimization process and derive a sufficient condition ensuring its stability as long as the collective energy induced by the active workers remains below the energy of a target synchronous process. Making use of this criterion, we derive a stable distributed asynchronous optimization procedure, GEM, that estimates and maintains the energy of the asynchronous system below or equal to the energy of sequential SGD with momentum. Experimental results highlight the stability and speedup of GEM compared to existing schemes, even when scaling to one hundred asynchronous workers. Results also indicate better generalization compared to the targeted SGD with momentum.
Effects of Clinacanthus nutans (Burm.f) Lindau leaf extracts on protection of plasmid DNA from riboflavin photoreaction

Clinacanthus nutans (Burm.f) (CN) Lindau is widely grown in tropical Asia and is an important herbal medicine in China, Malaysia and Thailand. This study inspects the antioxidant activity and protective effects of Clinacanthus nutans extracts on plasmid DNA integrity in E. coli. The antioxidant activities of Clinacanthus nutans are lower compared with green tea. The superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity and total phenolic contents of green tea are almost 30- and 10-fold higher than that of Clinacanthus nutans leaves, respectively. However, Clinacanthus nutans leaf extract's retention of the integrity of super-coiled plasmid DNA under riboflavin photochemical treatment was shown to be better in comparison with extracts of green tea.
DIGITAL IMAGING FOR ROCK MASS CHARACTERIZATION

Traditional methods for rock mass characterization in civil engineering applications include scanline surveying, cell mapping and geologic structure mapping. In spite of their importance, characterizing rock masses using these field methods is time-consuming, hazardous and prone to errors. This paper describes two new technologies for field fracture characterization. : digital image processing of fracture traces, and laser-based imaging. These technologies offer the potential for gathering fracture and associated information in a semi-automatic or automatic fashion at a distance from the face. The automated procedures can reduce the errors associated with gathering field fracture data by eliminating human bias and by standardizing the sampling procedure. These automated procedures can also be used to increase the amount of fracture information that is routinely collected in a field survey. Also by imaging rock faces from a distance, both safety and access problems are reduced or eliminated. Details of the two technologies are described in this paper. The two technologies offer synergies that may allow accurate fracture characterization to be carried out in a wide variety of field conditions. To investigate these two technologies, case studies have been carried out in Arizona and Colorado. These results of these studies indicate that both the image processing and laser-scanning methods are able to determine the 3D fracture orientations with a reasonable degree of accuracy. The laser-scanning technique is more accurate when imaging single faces but at the expense of more rime in the field and additional hours to process the results. The digital imaging technique has the potential for being used in real time applications.
Difficulties on Tree Volume Measurement from a Ground Laser Scanner

The optimization of most pesticide and fertilizer applications is based on overall grove conditions. To this end, a ground laser scanner can be used to estimate the volume of the trees and then extrapolate their foliage surface to control the application dose. In this work we summarize the difficulties involved in this volume measurement. Tests with pear trees demonstrated that volume estimated with a ground laser scanner is very sensitive to errors in the angle of orientation and in the estimated distance to the center of the trees.
Factors affecting employees' perceptions of the performance appraisal process (Available on Internet)

This thesis adapts the process perspective on HRM (Bowen & Ostroff, 2004), which explains how by motivating employees to collectively assume desired attitudes and behaviors HRM systems can contribute to organizational performance, to the context of performance appraisal (PA) practice. Thus, by applying this logic to PA practice, this thesis aims at developing a theory of PA implementation by exploring the factors potentially influencing employees’ perceptions of the PA process features. The study starts by reviewing the literature in fields of SHRM and PA research, so as to indicate the developments in these areas leading to a focus on individual employee perceptions, and the scarceness of research on Bowen and Ostroff’s framework, which is considered by many commentators (e.g. Nishii, Lepak, & Snell, 2007; Guest, 2011) as one of the most comprehensive to date approaches to studying the multilevel relationships among HRM, individual, and organizational performance. This thesis has been designed as a majorly exploratory multiple-case study, comprising the semi-structured interviewee data from 11 middleand lower-level managers, and specialists with no direct subordinates. The respondents have been sampled from two subsidiaries of different organizations representing industrial services and logistics industries, located in Dubai and Shanghai respectively. The interviews followed a predefined guide, and consisted of both purely exploratory inquiry into interviewees’ thinking behind the possible influences on their perceptions, and more explanatory assessment of employees’ agreement with a list of predefined factors. The analysis of interview data revealed a number of patterns concerning the roles of the design characteristics of the PA process, supervisor, HR manager, and general manager of a unit, and associated factors, in influencing employees’ perceptions of the PA process features. This set of findings thus provides practical implications for the design and implementation of PAs in organizations. Moreover, the findings suggest that structure of the relationships among factors and employees’ perceptions is more complex than has been initially suggested by Bowen and Ostroff (2004), as some PA process features seemed likely to explain the others, and thus further investigation in this direction is needed.
A FAST AND EXACT SIMULATION FOR CIR PROCESS By ANQI SHAO A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy A FAST AND EXACT SIMULATION FOR CIR PROCESS By Anqi Shao May 2012 Chair: Liqing Yan Major: Mathematics We present a fast and exact simulation method for the CIR process. Traditional simulation method relies on an algorithm to generate a non-central chi square random variable, which is quite slow when the degrees of freedom is less than 1, and the non-centrality parameter is large. Thus it’s only applicable when people are just interested in simulating the process along a few time points, for example, European options prices. But for some exotic options which depends on the process on a lot of time points, for example Asian option prices, this method is very slow and inefficient. In this paper we analyze the algorithm to see its limitation, and propose a new algorithm which is much faster. This method enables fast and exact simulation of the CIR process on a large number of time grids. Numerical results on option pricing based on Heston model is rather encouraging, compared with other simulation schemes.
ESTIMATION OF VECTOR ERROR CORRECTION MODEL WITH GARCH ERRORS: MONTE CARLO SIMULATION AND APPLICATIONS

The standard vector error correction (VEC) model assumes the iid normal distribution of disturbance term in the model. This paper extends this assumption to include GARCH process. We call this model as VEC-GARCH model. However as the number of parameters in a VEC-GARCH model is large, the maximum likelihood (ML) method is computationally demanding. To overcome these computational difficulties, the first part of this paper searches for alternative estimation methods and compares them by Monte Carlo simulation based on a relatively small scale VEC-GARCH model; an unrestricted VECM equation system with three variables and lag of 1. After rewriting VEC-GARCH model into Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR) model we apply a feasible generalized least square (FGLS) estimator. As a result FGLS estimator shows comparable performance to ML estimator. Furthermore a small scale of empirical study is presented to see the applicability of the FGLS. In our simulation we found that the performance of FGLS-GARCH estimator is as good as that of MLE and both estimators are better than OLS and the standard VECM that ignore the error structure.we apply a VEC-GARCH model to real international asset pricing data and test conditional CAPM by using FGLS-GARCH estimation strategy. Since our model is relatively large; it is involving 12 stock market indexes, computational problems arise in estimating the expected returns under VEC-GARCH model and in testing the conditional CAPM by using MLE. Considering the heteroscedasticity and cross-correlation in the error terms of international stock market returns, International Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is reinvestigated under SUR with GARCH (SUR-GARCH) errors. We modified FGLS estimator to take into account multivariate GARCH error structure in estimating the model. World market portfolio was constructed to ensure that the market portfolio is mean-variance efficient under no restriction on short selling and borrowing at riskless rate. CAPM fits well only on ex-post SUR test, but it is rejected on SUR-GARCH for both ex-ante and ex-post test. However, this paper found that CAPM could be applied for most stock market indexes when each equation was analyzed individually.
Highly dense microwave and millimeter-wave phased array T/R modules using CMOS and SiGe RFICs

We have used silicon technologies to build highly dense phased array for X to W-band applications. Typical designs include an 8-element 8–16 GHz SiGe phased array receiver, a 16-element 30–50 GHz SiGe transmit phased array, a miniature (&#60; 3mm2) and low power (&#60;100 mW) CMOS phased array receiver at 24 GHz, and a 4-element SiGe/CMOS Tx/Rx phased array at 34–38 GHz with 5-bit amplitude and phase control, a 2-antenna 4-simultaneous beam phased array chip at 15 GHz. Also, a miniature 8×8 Butler Matrix with &#60; 3 dB loss in 0.13 um CMOS has been developed for multibeam applications. It is shown that silicon chips can be used to lower the cost of phased arrays with a significant impact at Ku, K and W-band applications where there is so little available space behind each antenna element due to the very small element area.
A semi-automatic control method for myoelectric prosthetic hand based on image information of objects

In recent years, prosthetic hands for amputees have seen rapid progress while myoelectric prosthetic control is facing a big challenge. It is difficult to control a multi-DOF hand only with electromyographic (EMG) signals to achieve complicated motions and natural and effortless operations, especially in the scenario of practical applications. This study proposes a semi-automatic myoelectric control method combining EMG signals with a vision-based object classifier to control a prosthetic hand. Information of target objects, such as shape features, dimensions, and postures can be obtained from images and then utilized to generate control commands for motors, in conjunction with user's muscle activities via EMG signals. EMG patterns are recognized to represent user's intension of motions. In the meanwhile, EMG power levels are used to modulate motor speed in a proportional manner. Prosthetic hand control experiments have been conducted to verify the proposed method.
EXPERIENCES WITH USING SIFT FOR MULTIPLE IMAGE DOMAIN MATCHING

The paper reports about investigations into the utilization of the SIFT algorithm to support image matching between different image domains. The Scale-Invariant Feature Transformation, proposed by Lowe in 1999, is a highly robust technique that has been widely used in the computer vision community. Though, SIFT is known in mapping circles, so far its use is rather limited. The objective of our study is to assess the performance of SIFT when it is applied to imagery acquired by different sensors and on different platforms. For testing, four image datasets from different sensors were considered, including airborne and satellite imagery, and LiDAR intensity and elevation. The image co-registration was performed based on SIFT features. The preliminary results indicate mixed but encouraging performance, as the in-domain matching based registration generally works well, while the matching between images coming from different domains (such as airborne and LiDAR intensity) usually produces modest results. In all cases, we used RANSAC to remove outliers. The above behavior could be associated with two facts: first, the style of SIFT features extracted from the imagery is correlated to the image type, and second, the number of actually matched features is significantly lower than that of the in-domain imagery. In summary, our present level of research indicates that the SIFT algorithm has substantial capacity to support image matching between different domains, and thus appears to be an efficient technique for co-registering image data acquired by different sensors.
Using Multiple Imputation to Integrate and Disseminate Confidential Microdata

In data integration contexts, two statistical agencies seek to merge their separate databases into one file. The agencies also may seek to disseminate data to the public based on the integrated file. These goals may be complicated by the agencies' need to protect the confidentiality of database subjects, which could be at risk during the integration or dissemination stage. This article proposes several approaches based on multiple imputation for disclosure limitation, usually called synthetic data, that could be used to facilitate data integration and dissemination while protecting data confidentiality. It reviews existing methods for obtaining inferences from synthetic data and points out where new methods are needed to implement the data integration proposals.
Generalized Empirical Likelihood Estimators and Tests under Partial , Weak and Strong Identification 1

The principal purpose of this paper is to describe the performance of generalized empirical likelihood (GEL) methods for time series instrumental variable models specified by nonlinear moment restrictions when identification may be weak. The paper makes two main contributions. Firstly, we show that all GEL estimators are first-order equivalent under weak identification. The GEL estimator under weak identification is inconsistent and has a nonstandard asymptotic distribution. Secondly, the paper proposes new GEL test statistics, which have chi-square asymptotic null distributions independent of the strength or weakness of identification. Consequently, unlike those for Wald and likelihood ratio statistics, the size of tests formed from these statistics is not distorted by the strength or weakness of identification. Modified versions of the statistics are presented for tests of hypotheses on parameter subvectors when the parameters not under test are strongly identified. Monte Carlo results for the linear instrumental variable regression model suggest that tests based on these statistics have very good size properties even in the presence of conditional heteroskedasticity. The tests have competitive power properties, especially for thick tailed or asymmetric error distributions. JEL Classification: C12, C31
EFFECT OF HUMIC ACID AND SULFUR ON GROWTH , SOME BIOCHEMICAL CONSTITUENTS , YIELD AND YIELD ATTRIBUTES OF FLAX GROWN UNDER NEWLY RECLAIMED SANDY SOILS

A field experiment was carried out at the experimental Station of National Research Centre, Al Nubaria district, El-Behira Governorate-Egypt, in 2013/2014 and 2014/2015 winter seasons to investigate the influence of three sulfur fertilizer levels and/or foliar humic acid on some morphological and biochemical parameters as well as yield quantity and quality of flax plant grown under newly reclaimed sandy soil conditions. Results indicated that, humic acid foliar treatment with 20 (mg/l) in addition to sulfur fertilizer at rate of (250 and 500 kg/fed) gave significant increases in seed, straw and oil yield / fed. These increases due to the recorded increases in morphological criteria (plant height and root length, fresh and dry weight of shoot and root), photosynthetic pigments, (chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b and carotenoids), carbohydrate constituents (total carbohydrates, total soluble sugars and polysaccharides), IAA, phenol, free amino acids and proline contents. Meanwhile, lipid peroxidation decreased significantly in response to the above mentioned treatment as compared with control plants. Interaction between humic acid (20 cm/L) with sulfur at rate of (500 kg/fed) was the most effective treatment as it gave the highest increases in all morphological criteria, biochemical parameters, yield and yield attributes compared with the other treatments. Humic acid and sulfur fertilizer at all levels caused marked decreases in total saturated fatty acids accompanied by marked increases in total unsaturated fatty acids. The essential fatty acids (Linoleic acid C 18:2 + Linolenic acid C18:3) were increased by all applied treatments. It is worthy to mention that, the enhancement effects of humic acid (20 mg/l) and sulfur fertilizer (500 kg/fed) were the most pronounced treatment on flax plant.
Semi-systolic bit level arrays for high speed convolution

A bit-level array is presented for high-speed convolution. With much less hardware complexity, the proposed array provides speed which is equivalent to that of a fully pipelined systolic array for convolution. It is shown that enormous hardware savings can be obtained when the systolic convolution algorithm is reformulated in terms of the most basic vector reduction operation, namely multioperand addition. <<ETX>>
Preserving Light Field Photography Using Overcomplete

1 We present a computational framework and mask-based optical de2 sign for resolution-preserving light field reconstructions from a sin3 gle modulated sensor image. Compressive computational recon4 struction techniques are used in combination with learned overcom5 plete dictionaries that capture the essential building blocks of natu6 ral light fields. The mask patterns in the camera create incoherent 7 projections of the recorded light field on the sensor image. Unlike 8 traditional methods for light field super-resolution, our technique 9 can recover fine image details, occlusions, specularities, translucen10 cies, and other challenging illumination effects. With a prototype 11 camera, we demonstrate the practicality of the proposed framework 12 and show reconstructed light fields with applications in changing 13 viewpoint and focus after an image is captured. 14