Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
BULLETPROOF WIRELESS SECURITY: GSM, UMTS, 802.11, and Ad Hoc Security (Communications Engineering)

CH 1: Security and Cryptography CH 2: Network Security Protocols CH 3: Security and the Layered Architecture CH 4: Voice-Oriented Wireless Networks CH 5: Data-Oriented Wireless Networks CH 6: Security in Traditional Wireless Networks CH 7: Security in Wireless Local Area Networks CH 8: Security in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks
Developing and Implementing an Online Nursing Course

Many basic nursing education programs prepare their graduates to care for a limited number of patients in hospital settings. However, the current trend is to deliver more health care to various community settings (Hunt, 1998). Though computer training is often not provided in nursing programs, nurses practicing in these alternate community settings are feeling an increasing demand for computer skills. Today, even the nursing licensure examination is administered by computers. In addition, with the tremendous expansion of health information and knowledge, much of the content presented in nursing programs becomes outdated quickly. Staying current is vital for the nursing professional. This may be accomplished through continuing education and pursuing advanced degrees. Since full-time practitioners have little time and often-inflexible schedules, the demand for continued education is hard for them to meet. Instructional uses of the computer are important and may help to address these issues. Many programs have been developed worldwide offering courses partially or completely via computer mediated communications (CMC) (Harasim, Hiltz, Teles & Turoff, 1995). Others have taken CMC a step further, offering classes online that can be taken at a distance. Nursing education is beginning to move in the direction of distance education. This article describes development and results of utilizing WebCT's online delivery software, to manage a virtual classroom for a nursing course. Introduction More than ever, nursing education programs need to introduce or expand basic computer skills. Providing computer education increases access to information and advanced degrees, facilitates the teaching/learning process, decreases anxiety associated with computer use, and enhances job skills. Two significant difficulties face our nursing students at the State University of West Georgia: time and distance. This is especially true of the non-traditional student. Most have full-time positions in health care facilities (with varied work schedules) along with family responsibilities. These students are highly motivated adult learners; they want to attain the best education possible but have little time to spend driving to classes and clinical. Among the different strategies that were examined to help minimize the time and distance factors, online course delivery was determined to be the optimal choice.
Tools and technologies in mathematical didactics

This short paper provides an overview of recent European research about the use and impact of tools and technologies in mathematical didactics. Such research is categorised as focusing on theoretical ideas, on algebraic knowledge when using spreadsheet and computer algebra (CAS), and on dynamic geometry software (DGS). The paper reveals the variety of software technologies, education levels, and methodologies ulitised in European research.
Handling inconsistency in databases and data integration systems

For several reasons a database may not satisfy certain integrity constraints (ICs), for example, when it is the result of integrating several independent data sources. However, most likely, information in it is still consistent with the ICs; and could be retrieved when queries are answered. Consistent answers with respect to a set of ICs have been characterized as answers that can be obtained from every possible minimal repair of the database. The goal of this research is to develop methods to retrieve consistent answers for a wide and practical class of constraints and queries from relational databases and from data integration systems. We will put special interest on databases with null values. We will give a semantics of satisfaction of constraints in the presence of null that generalizes the one used in commercial DBMS. Since there are interesting connections between the area of consistently querying virtual data integration systems and other areas, like querying incomplete databases, merging inconsistent theories, semantic reconciliation of data, schema mapping, data exchange, and query answering in peer data management systems, the results of this research could also be applied to them. In our research, we explore in more depth the connection with virtual data integration systems and peer data management systems.
Robust content-based image retrieval of multi-example queries

This thesis investigates three major issues in the active field of content-based image retrieval (CBIR), which are feature aggregation for similarity measure, robust contentbased image retrieval and retrieval model by incorporating background knowledge. Feature aggregation computes image similarity by fusing multiple distances obtained using pairs of visual feature and distance measure. To explore the mechanism of various aggregation functions, a new feature aggregation framework is proposed to unify multiple existing methods. With multi-example query, each visual feature is of different importance to different query examples, which results in a localized feature aggregation method. A series paradigm is proposed for feature aggregation to exploit the discriminant power of individual visual features, in contrast to conventional parallel paradigm. The robustness of CBIR systems can affect system performance and user satisfaction. This thesis identifies and addresses two robustness problems in CBIR. Firstly, an unclean query can influence the retrieval accuracy since some noisy query examples are unable to describe user information need. To address this problem, a robust CBIR scheme is proposed by incorporating noise tolerant classification techniques. Secondly, in large image collections, some classes are predefined while some are hidden. The CBIR systems employing image classification can not effectively handle the queries associated with the hidden classes. To address this problem, a robust CBIR scheme is proposed. The retrieval performance can be improved effectively by incorporating background knowledge. For this purpose, a bag of images (BoI) model is proposed for CBIR. The BoI model can express background knowledge more effectively than conventional pairwise constraints, which are demonstrated by two applications. Based on the BoI model, a new clustering method is developed, which can learn a localized similarity measure for each image cluster. A number of experiments validate the effectiveness of the BoI model.
THE EFFECT OF REORDERING MULTI-DIMENSIONAL ARRAY DATA ON CPU CACHE UTILIZATION

Memory, as a shared resource, has always been a high latency and bandwidth limited bottleneck of the execution pipeline in multi-core systems. This project analyzes data reordering in multi-dimensional arrays for a more efficient memory allocation method to improve cache utilization and reduce memory access bandwidth. While single-threaded run-time improvements are limited, we demonstrate up to 30% improved run-time and energy consumption in multi-threaded applications when the processing cores are competing for cache space and memory bandwidth.
Users' perspective of software quality

In last decade, software engineering research increasingly focused on software quality enhancement and evaluation, whereas most of these researches concentrate on the internal/ development perspective. However, users mainly care in the quality of performs intended functions efficiently without knowing how the software product was developed, how it is work from inside, or it is internal quality. The success of software companies is completely depends on the users' satisfaction, which they decide to use a software product or not. Therefore, in software development, strong attention must be given to the user's satisfaction. This study aims to present the quality of the software products from user's perspective. From user's viewpoint, the characteristics of the software product are discussed. Finally, a user's perspective quality model is proposed.
Steps Toward a Formative Evaluation of NSDL

This report presents results of a preliminary assessment of the National Science Foundation's National Science Digital Library/Distributed Learning (NSDL) program based largely on existing data and makes recommendations for the design of a full formative evaluation. The authors explore the state of health of the STEM resource collections, the availability of web metrics to probe their use, and the potential usability and impact of NSDL-funded materials on STEM teaching and learning.
Propel: an approach supporting user guidance in developing precise and understandable property specifications

Property specifications are often used in requirements engineering to concisely describe a single aspect of system behavior. Although each property has a narrow focus, it can still be difficult to specify a property correctly. There are often subtle, but important, details in desired system behavior that can easily be overlooked, and there is little guidance available for how to avoid such mistakes. In addition to capturing these details correctly, property specifications should be (a) precise enough to support automated analyses that can be used to check that actual system behavior is consistent with the specifications, and (b) understandable enough to be readily comprehended by all system developers. Property specifications can be written in a mathematical formalism, which provides precision, but such formalisms are often difficult to understand. Thus, in practice, property specifications tend to be written in natural language. Property specifications written with such informality are often ambiguous, however, and usually cannot be used in many types of automated analyses. To address these challenges, our approach supports elicitation and specification of properties by providing templates that build on commonly-occurring property patterns. These templates offer guidance by explicitly indicating the variations that must be considered, thereby ensuring that important subtle details are not overlooked. To support the use of this approach, we developed PROPEL, for "PROPerty ELucidator. " PROPEL provides three alternative views that users can work with to specify properties: graphical finite-state automata, which offer precision; "disciplined" natural language, which offers understandability; and question trees, which offer guidance for selecting a template. To evaluate this approach, we used PROPEL to specify properties in five case studies in the medical domain. The case studies showed that our approach was effective at specifying the vast majority of the properties we encountered. We also undertook a small empirical study that showed that the disciplined natural language view of the properties was usually understood. These results indicate that our approach to property elicitation and specification is a promising one.
Navigation semi-autonome d'un fauteuil roulant : franchissement de porte

Dans ce rapport est abordee la navigation d'un vehicule non-holonome dans un environnement inconnu en utilisant l'asservissement visuel. L'environnement est analyse de maniere geometrique, en utilisant principalement le point de fuite et la detection des portes. L'etat de l'art portant sur la representation de l'environnement, la localisation et la navigation seront presentees. Les methodes decrites dans ce rapport permettent de contourner beaucoup de problemes lies a la creation de carte, et a la planification de trajectoire, aussi bien dans un environnement connu qu'inconnu. La navigation dans un couloir et le positionnement devant une porte sont decrits en detail. Enfin, les travaux restant a accomplir seront introduits.
Mobile-oriented scalable cooperative architecture

This article deals with the concept of ideas about communication between particular mobile devices. For this purpose it was necessary to design a new architecture called M client M client server. Basic architectonic aspects of this concept (related to not only mobile but to wireless networks in general) are described in the text. There are also described similarities with already existing principles, especially multi-agent systems which seem to be suitable supplementation while developing this concept. Supposed applications of this architecture are also mentioned.
Using WordNet to Improve User Modelling in a Web Document Recommender System

There is disclosed a combined support and locator for underground fixtures intended to be buried, the support and locator being designed for use in conjunction with a metal detector which includes a support base formed of a moldable material, metallic means embedded within the support base and having an elliptical configuration, the support base and metallic means being formed as an integral unit, such that underground fixtures supported upon the support and locator may be re-located by the use of a metal detector, the metallic means reacting with the motive forces of the metal detector to effect locating of the underground fixture.
Word Sense Disambiguation for All Words without Hard Labor

While the most accurate word sense disambiguation systems are built using supervised learning from sense-tagged data, scaling them up to all words of a language has proved elusive, since preparing a sense-tagged corpus for all words of a language is time-consuming and human labor intensive. In this paper, we propose and implement a completely automatic approach to scale up word sense disambiguation to all words of English. Our approach relies on English-Chinese parallel corpora, English-Chinese bilingual dictionaries, and automatic methods of finding synonyms of Chinese words. No additional human sense annotations or word translations are needed. We conducted a large-scale empirical evaluation on more than 29,000 noun tokens in English texts annotated in OntoNotes 2.0, based on its coarsegrained sense inventory. The evaluation results show that our approach is able to achieve high accuracy, outperforming the first-sense baseline and coming close to a prior reported approach that requires manual human efforts to provide Chinese translations of English senses.
Comparing Best-First Search and Dynamic Programming for Optimal Multiple Sequence Alignment

Sequence alignment is an important problem in computational biology. We compare two different approaches to the problem of optimally aligning two or more character strings: bounded dynamic programming (BDP), and divide-and-conquer frontier search (DCFS). The approaches are compared in terms of time and space requirements in 2 through 5 dimensions with sequences of varying similarity and length. While BDP performs better in two and three dimensions, it consumes more time and memory than DCFS for higher-dimensional problems.
The Online Loop-free Stochastic Shortest-Path Problem.

We consider a stochastic extension of the loop-free shortest path problem with adversarial rewards. In this episodicMarkov decision problem an agent traverses through an acyclic graph with random transitions: at each step of an episode the agent chooses an action, receives some reward, and arrives at a random next state, where the reward and the distribution of the next state depend on the actual state and the chosen action. We consider the bandit situation when only the reward of the just visited state-action pair is revealed to the agent. For this problem we develop algorithms that perform asymptotically as well as the best stationary policy in hindsight. Assuming that all states are reachable with probability a>0 under all policies, we give an algorithm and prove that its regret is O(L^2 sqrt(T|A|)/a), where T is the number of episodes, A denotes the (finite) set of actions, and L is the length of the longest path in the graph. Variants of the algorithm are given that improve the dependence on the transition probabilities under specific conditions. The results are also extended to variations of the problem, including the case when the agent competes with time varying policies.
A painless Guide to CRC Error Detection Algorithms

In a kinetic sculpture apparatus, the lower end of a pendulum provides a scribe having a tapered tip that penetrates the surface of a bed of fine, particulate material to make an intricate pattern in the bed whose configuration is determined by the location of the pendulum's primary horizontal axis, the position from which the pendulum is released, and the depth of penetration of the tip of the scribe. The suspension system for the pendulum includes an arch which spans a pair of standards disposed on opposite sides of the receiver that contains the bed of material. The pendulum assembly is mounted above a baseplate by a ball and socket connection which permits the entire assembly to be tilted in any direction to move the at-rest point of contact of the scribe away from the center of the bed to any quadrant or region thereof where a subpattern is to be sculptured. Additionally, the receiver is independently rotatable about a vertical (or slightly inclined) axis through a selected angular displacement to permit the sculpturing of angularly spaced repeat patterns. A highly stable suspension is provided by a disc-shaped rocker element having a central slot therein through which the arch extends. Bed shaping is provided by a dish-shaped cover for the receiver having a convex lower surface.
Towards perceptual colour for virtual environments

In most computer graphics today, the goal is to make visualizations that “look good and natural” rather than to make correct simulations of reality. However, for using Virtual Reality (VR) as a colour design tool, one has to be able to trust that light and colour in VR appear as in reality. In our project, the aim is to simulate perceptual light and colour phenomena more correctly. Real rooms are compared to digital models. In digital models, some contrast phenomena did not show. To propose a solution to these problems, digital renderings are filtered with the ACE algorithm. By filtering rendered textures of each multicoloured wall, the virtual reality model improved in colour appearance.
Video Retrieval Using Search and Browsing with Key Frames

A fastener for coupling two relatively thin members having oversized openings therein such as road guard rails which are subject to severe shear loads. The fastener includes a stud having an enlarged head portion and a body portion extending therefrom. The body portion is adapted to pass through the oversized openings and the head is adapted to engage with the surface of the adjacent thin member and is larger than the opening therein. A receptacle is provided which is adapted to interengage and disengage with the stud body between a fastened and unfastened position. At least one spiral cam slot is on the stud body and a corresponding cam surfaces on the receptacle whereby relative rotation between the stud body and receptacle will cause the cam surface to follow the cam slot between the locked and unlocked positions. A spring is positioned to be biased as the cam surface follows the spiral cam slots thereby assisting in drawing the two members into tight interengagement and retaining the stud and receptacle in fastened condition. Finally, a retainer is provided for maintaining proper orientation of the fastener when the members are subjected to a shear load so that the primary load on the fastener is a shear load thereby increasing the load therein capacity of the fastener.
Fingerprint Authentication System

Fingerprint is one of the most widely used biometric modality for recognition due to its reliability, non-invasive characteristic, speed and performance. The patterns remain stable throughout the lifetime of an individual. Attributable to these advantages, the application of Fingerprint biometric is increasingly encouraged by various commercial as well as government organizations. Fingerprint feature detection is to automatically and reliably extract minutiae from the input Fingerprint images. However, the performance of a minutiae extraction algorithm relies heavily on the quality of the input Fingerprint images. In order to ensure that the performance of an Fingerprint authentication system to be robust, it is essential to preprocessing Fingerprint image. This thesis describes steps involved during Fingerprint preprocessing, which improves the clarity of ridge and bifurcation structures of input Fingerprint images. After preprocessing minutiae are extracted and stored in database. Further an online Fingerprint authentication system is implemented in which elementary indexing strat- egy is used. Indexing Fingerprint data is done to identify and retrieve a small subset of candidate data from the database of Fingerprint data of individuals. Experimental work show that incorporating the online system, preprocessing algorithm, matching algorithm improves the overall response time.
Value-driven redundancy elimination

Value-driven redundancy elimination is a combination of value numbering and code motion. Value numbering is an optimization that assigns numbers to values in such a way that two values are assigned the same number if the compiler can prove they are equal. When this optimization discovers two computations that produce the same value, it can (under certain circumstances) eliminate one of them. Code motion is an optimization that attempts to move instructions to less frequently executed locations. Traditional techniques must assume that every definition produces a distinct value. Therefore, an instruction cannot move past a definition of one of its subexpressions. This restriction can be relaxed when certain definitions are known to produce redundant values. By understanding how these two optimizations interact, we can simplify each of them, and the resulting combination will be more powerful than the sum of the two parts. Value numbering will be simpler because it need not be concerned with eliminating instructions, and code motion will be simpler because identifying subexpressions is not necessary. This research investigates this value-driven approach to redundancy elimination. We improve upon the known algorithms for both value numbering and code motion, and we show experimental evidence of their effectiveness.
Towards Faster String Matching for Intrusion Detection

Network Intrusion Detection Systems (NIDS) often rely on exact string matching techniques. Depending on the choice of algorithm, implementation, and the frequency with which it is applied, this pattern matching may become a performance bottleneck. To keep up with increasing network speeds and traffic, NIDS can take advantage of advanced string matching algorithms. In this paper we describe the effectiveness of a significantly faster approach to pattern matching in the open source NIDS Snort.