Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
LQR / PID Controller Design of PLC-based Inverted Pendulum

This paper presents an LQR based PID controller to control the inverted pendulum system. The control design employs a control zoning approach whereby the entire pendulum system is divided into two regions: a normal pendulum region and the inverted pendulum region where the system is approximately linear close to the upright position. The LQR architecture is used to obtain optimal gains for the PID controller. An algebraic approach is also presented for selection of Q and R matrices. Experimental implementations with a PLC based system show that the computed gains yield the most stable controlled responses compared to the gains chosen through trial and errors.
Adaptation of speech recognition vocabularies for improved transcription of YouTube videos

This paper discusses the adaptation of speech recognition vocabularies for automatic speech transcription. The context is the transcription of YouTube videos in French, English and Arabic. Base-line automatic speech recognition systems have been developed using previously available data. However, the available text data, including the GigaWord corpora from LDC, are getting quite old with respect to recent YouTube videos that are to be transcribed. After a discussion on the performance of the ASR baseline systems, the paper presents the collection of recent textual data from internet for updating the speech recognition vocabularies and for training the language models, as well as the elaboration of development data sets necessary for the vocabulary selection process. The paper also compares the coverage of the training data collected from internet, and of the GigaWord data, with finite size vocabularies made of the most frequent words. Finally, the paper presents and discusses the amount of out-of-vocabulary word occurrences, before and after the update of the speech recognition vocabularies, for the three languages. Moreover, some speech recognition evaluation results are provided and analyzed.
HaptiStylus: A Novel Stylus Capable of Displaying Movement and Rotational Torque Effects

With the emergence of pen-enabled tablets and mobile devices, stylus-based interaction has been receiving increasing attention. Unfortunately, styluses available in the market today are all passive instruments that are primarily used for writing and pointing. In this paper, we describe a novel stylus capable of displaying certain vibro-tactile and inertial haptic effects to the user. Our stylus is equipped with two vibration actuators at the ends, which are used to create a tactile sensation of up and down movement along the stylus. The stylus is also embedded with a DC motor, which is used to create a sense of bidirectional rotational torque about the long axis of the pen. Through two psychophysical experiments, we show that, when driven with carefully selected timing and actuation patterns, our haptic stylus can convey movement and rotational torque information to the user. Results from a further psychophysical experiment provide insight on how the shape of the actuation patterns effects the perception of rotational torque effect. Finally, experimental results from our interactive pen-based game show that our haptic stylus is effective in practical settings.
FACTS: automated black-box testing of FinTech systems

FinTech, short for ``financial technology,'' has advanced the process of transforming financial business from a traditional manual-process-driven to an automation-driven model by providing various software platforms. However, the current FinTech-industry still heavily depends on manual testing, which becomes the bottleneck of FinTech industry development. To automate the testing process, we propose an approach of black-box testing for a FinTech system with effective tool support for both test generation and test oracles. For test generation, we first extract input categories from business-logic specifications, and then mutate real data collected from system logs with values randomly picked from each extracted input category. For test oracles, we propose a new technique of priority differential testing where we evaluate execution results of system-test inputs on the system's head (i.e., latest) version in the version repository (1) against the last legacy version in the version repository (only when the executed test inputs are on new, not-yet-deployed services) and (2) against both the currently-deployed version and the last legacy version (only when the test inputs are on existing, deployed services). When we rank the behavior-inconsistency results for developers to inspect, for the latter case, we give the currently-deployed version as a higher-priority source of behavior to check. We apply our approach to the CSTP subsystem, one of the largest data processing and forwarding modules of the China Foreign Exchange Trade System (CFETS) platform, whose annual total transaction volume reaches 150 trillion US dollars. Extensive experimental results show that our approach can substantially boost the branch coverage by approximately 40%, and is also efficient to identify common faults in the FinTech system.
Unexpected Item in the Bagging Area An Examination of Joint Recovery and Customer Satisfaction in Retail Self-Service Technologies

With the growth of self-service technologies in retail stores and services, service failure of the technology is seemingly inevitable. This has lead to the question of how these failures influence customers, specifically their satisfaction and loyalty. Customer satisfaction and loyalty drives businesses forward and gives them the competitive advantage. The aim of this bachelor thesis is to explore if joint recovery has outcomes in customer satsifaction and loyalty in retail self service technologies. Service recovery is an important factor when discussing self-service technology use in buisnesses and therefore this research aims to help further the knowledge and insights on this. The research questions therefore revolve around different aspects that affect customer satifaction and loyalty during service failure with SSTs (self-service technology). In order to fulfil the purpose and aim of this study, there has been a specific methodology chosen and explained that has been taken from the different theories chosen and prior peer-reviewed literature. The methodology revolves around the survey methodology and involves different research approaches and methods. The results of the study demonstrate that joint recovery has benefits in customer satisfaction and loyalty. Additionally, the study shows that organizations use of procedural justice will have an impact on customer satisfaction after service failure in retail self service technologies. Results also show that influencing factors for customers to participate in recovery are money and to improve the situation. New findings show that normal attribution behavior switches in retail selfservice due to reccuring failure. These are the basis of the conclusions drawn from the research.
Vitamin D Receptor FokI Gene Polymorphism Predicted Poor Response to Treatment in Chronic HCV Genotype 4

The aim of this study was to investigate the association between a genetic polymorphism of the vitamin D receptor (VDR) and antiviral responses in Egyptian patients with chronic hepatitis C virus genotype 4 (HCV-4). Methods: Our study enrolled 100 HCV-4 patients who received pegylated interferon alpha-2a (pegIFNα-2a) and ribavirin for 48 weeks. Patients were divided into 2 groups according to their response to therapy: 50 were responders, and 50 were nonresponders. All HCV-4 patients were further subjected to the following laboratory tests: HCV-RNA using quantitative PCR, vitamin D level using ELISA and VDR genotype using PCR-RFLP assays, and abdominal ultrasonography. Results: There was a statistically significant difference in the frequency of the VDR polymorphism (FokI rs10735810) between responders (FF:60%, Ff:16%, ff:24%) and non-responders (FF:10%, Ff:26%, ff:64%) (P<0.001). There was a statistically significant association between VDR polymorphism with higher ALT levels (ff: 63.2±30.8 U/L, Ff: 48.5±19.5 U/L, FF: 54.4±10.8 U/L, P=0.04) and higher alkaline phosphatase levels (ff: 102.6±53.2 U/L, Ff: 100.3±66.4 U/L, FF:68.3±29.4 U/L, P=0.007). VDR polymorphism showed no association with baseline vitamin D levels (P=0.21). Conclusion: VDR polymorphism plays a role in the treatment response of HCV and the modification of disease progression in Egyptians infected with chronic HCV-4. (Int J Biomed. 2016; 6(4):265-270. )
Numerical Simulation of Star Formation by the Bow Shock of the Centaurus A Jet

Recent Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observations of the extragalactic radio source Centaurus A (Cen A) display a young stellar population around the southwest tip of the inner filament 8.5 kpc from the galactic center of Cen A, with ages in the range 1–3 Myr. Crockett et al. have argued that the transverse bow shock of the Cen A jet triggered this star formation as it impacted dense molecular cores of clouds in the filament. To test this hypothesis, we perform three-dimensional numerical simulations of star formation induced by the jet bow shock in the inner filament of Cen A, using a positivity-preserving, weighted, essentially non-oscillatory method to solve the equations of gas dynamics with radiative cooling. We find that star clusters form inside a bow-shocked molecular cloud when the maximum initial density of the cloud is ≥ 40 H2 molecules cm−3. In a typical molecular cloud of mass 10 6 M ⊙ and diameter 200 pc, approximately 20 star clusters of mass 10 4 M ⊙ are formed, matching the HST images.
Approximating Steiner Trees in the Semi-Streaming Model

We present an algorithm for constructing approximate Steiner trees in the graph streaming context. Massive graphs arise in many modern settings. But traditional methods for analyzing such graphs are infeasible, due to resource limitations. However, recent work has dealt with many well-known problems on such graphs. Here, we consider the semistreaming setting, where an algorithm is limited to O(n polylog n) space while processing its stream. We emulate a well known 2-approximate algorithm for calculating Steiner trees in an offline setting, making use of existing semi-streaming algorithms for constructing spanners and minimum spanning trees. The result is a 2(1 + ) ( 2 logn log logn + 1 ) -approximation for the weighted metric Steiner tree problem, where is a user defined accuracy parameter.
Upwelling areas as climate change refugia for the distribution and genetic diversity of a marine macroalga

Global climate change has profound and diverse effects on biological diversity. Identifying present‐day climate refugia is an increasingly recognized strategy for the management of biodiversity loss. Such refugia are potential safe havens that enhance environmental diversity by buffering the effects of large scale change, facilitating species persistence at regional scales and conserving unique genetic diversity. Although their ecological effects are well studied, the potential of upwelling centres to act as refugia in a scenario of climate warming remains largely unexplored. Here, we investigate whether upwelled waters act as refugia in a region heavily affected by recent climatic changes.
Fault Tolerant Aggregation of Smart Meter Readings

A well studied privacy problem in the area of smart grids is the question of how to aggregate the sum of a set of smart meter readings in a privacy friendly manner, i.e., in such a way that individual meter readings are not revealed to the adversary. Much less well studied is how to deal with arbitrary meter crashes during such aggregation protocols: current privacy friendly aggregation protocols cannot deal with these type of failures. Such failures do happen in practice, though. We therefore propose two privacy friendly aggregation protocols that tolerate such crash failures, up to a predefined maximum number of smart meters. The basic protocol tolerates meter crashes at the start of each aggregation round only. The full, more complex, protocol tolerates meter crashes at arbitrary moments during an aggregation round. It runs in a constant number of phases, cleverly avoiding the otherwise applicable consensus protocol lower bound.
Double-block Hash-then-Sum: A Paradigm for Constructing BBB Secure PRF

SUM-ECBC (Yasuda, CT-RSA 2010) is the first beyond birthday bound (BBB) secure block cipher based deterministic MAC. After this work, some more BBB secure deterministic MACs have been proposed, namely PMAC_Plus (Yasuda, CRYPTO 2011), 3kf9 (Zhang et al., ASIACRYPT 2012) and LightMAC_Plus (Naito, ASIACRYPT 2017). In this paper, we have abstracted out the inherent design principle of all these BBB secure MACs and present a generic design paradigm to construct a BBB secure pseudo random function, namely Double-block Hash-then- Sum or in short (DbHtS). A DbHtS construction, as the name implies, computes a double block hash on the message and then sum the encrypted output of the two hash blocks. Our result renders that if the underlying hash function meets certain security requirements (namely cover-free and block-wise universal advantage is low), DbHtS construction provides 2n/3-bit security. We demonstrate the applicability of our result by instantiating all the existing beyond birthday secure deterministic MACs (e.g., SUM-ECBC, PMAC_Plus, 3kf9, LightMAC_Plus) as well as a simple two-keyed variant for each of them and some algebraic hash based constructions.
Mining Parallel Corpora from the Web

Statistical machine translation (SMT) is one of the most popular approaches to machine translation today. It uses statistical models whose parameters are derived from the analysis of a parallel corpus required for the training. The existence of a parallel corpus is the most important prerequisite for building an effective SMT system. Various properties of the corpus, such as its volume and quality, highly affect the results of the translation. The web can be considered as an ever-growing source of considerable amounts of parallel data to be mined and included in the training process, thus increasing the effectiveness of SMT systems. The first part of this thesis summarizes some of the popular methods for acquiring parallel corpora from the web. Most of these methods search for pairs of parallel web pages by looking for the similarity of their structures. However, we believe there still exists a non-negligible amount of parallel data spread across the web pages not sharing similar structure. In the next part, we propose a different approach to identifying parallel content on the web, not dependent on the page structure comparison at all. We begin by introducing a generic method for bilingual document alignment. The key step of our method is based on the combination of two recently popular ideas, namely the bilingual extension of the word2vec model and the locality-sensitive hashing. With the method applied to the task of mining parallel corpora from the web, we are able to effectively identify pairs of parallel segments (i.e. paragraphs) located anywhere on the pages of a web domain, regardless of their structure. The final part of our work describes the experiments conducted with our method. One experiment uses pre-aligned data, and its results are evaluated automatically. The other experiment involves real-world data provided by the Common Crawl Foundation and presents a solution to the task of mining parallel corpora from a hundreds of terabytes large set of web-crawled data. Both experiments show satisfactory results, implying that our proposed method is a promising baseline for acquiring parallel corpora from the web. We believe the amount of parallel data obtainable with our method might enable SMT systems to get trained better and eventually achieve superior translation results.
Effect of an Educational Intervention About Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension (DASH) on Changing Knowledge, Attitude and Blood Pressure of Hypertensive Patients Attending Zagazig University Hospitals

Background: Hypertension is an important risk factor for cardio vascular illness and mortality all over the world. The burdens of hypertension can be significantly controlled and reduced by lifestyle modification and treatment adherence. DASH diet is proved to reduce blood pressure either alone or combined with other life style modification. Aim of the Study is to evaluate effect of an educational intervention about Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension (DASH) on Changing knowledge, attitude and blood pressure of hypertensive Patients Attending Zagazig University Hospitals. Methodology: this study was an interventional study carried out in cardiology outpatient clinic in Zagazig University Hospitals. The sample included 132 hypertensive patients chosen by systematic random sampling. The patients were divided into two equal groups 66 patients in the intervention group (G1) and 66 patients in the control group (G2). Data were collected through interviewing questionnaire which cover socio demographic characteristics, knowledge and attitude toward DASH diet. Results: The results showed that there was no significant difference between both groups in socio demographic characteristics, knowledge and attitude toward DASH before the intervention. There was significant improvement in all items of knowledge and attitude toward DASH in studied group 1 after application of health education sessions. There was significant reduction in blood pressure of studied group 1 after the intervention but there was no significant change in group 2. Conclusion: The health education program for hypertensive patients about DASH diet proved its success in improving their knowledge, attitude and reduction of their blood pressure level.
Chapter 2:Wormlike Micelles: Solutions, Gels, or Both?

Wormlike micelles (WLMs) formed by the self-assembly of surfactants in water typically form transient networks of entangled chains, and as a result exhibit viscoelasticity, i.e., a combination of elastic rheology at short timescales and viscous rheology at long timescales. This chapter focuses on the unusual case of some micellar systems that instead exhibit gel-like (elastic) rheology regardless of timescale (i.e., their relaxation time and zero-shear viscosity are infinite). Gels are shown to form when the surfactants have ultra-long hydrophobic tail(s) (with a total of 22 carbons or more). In such cases, the micellar chains are expected to have exceptionally large contour lengths and also to have very long breaking times. These chains are then believed to undergo strong topological interactions (‘entanglements’) that give rise to a relatively permanent network, thereby explaining the gel-like behaviour.
Parasitic Humanoid: the wearable robotics as a behavioral assist interface like oneness between horse and rider

The Parasitic Humanoid (PH) is a wearable robotic human interface for sampling, modeling, and assisting nonverbal human behavior. This anthropomorphic robot senses the behavior of the wearer and has the internal models to learn the process of human sensory motor integration, thereafter it begins to predict the next behavior of the wearer using the learned models. When the reliability of the prediction is sufficient, the PH outputs the difference from the actual behavior as a request for motion to the wearer by motion induction using sensory illusion. Through the symbiotic interaction, the internal model and the process of human sensory motor integration approximate each other asymptotically. This process is available to transmit modalities such as senses of sight, hearing, touch, force and balance with human embodiment. This synergistic multimodal communication between distant people wearing PH can realize experience-sharing, skill transmission, and human behavior supports.
CWLProv - Interoperable Retrospective Provenance capture and its challenges

The automation of data analysis in the form of scientific workflows is a widely adopted practice in many fields of research nowadays. Computationally driven data-intensive experiments using workflows enable Automation, Scaling, Adaption and Provenance support (ASAP). However, there are still several challenges associated with the effective sharing, publication, un-derstandability and reproducibility of such workflows due to the incomplete capture of provenance and the dependence on particular technical (software) platforms. This paper presents CWL-Prov, an approach for retrospective provenance capture utilizing open source community-driven standards involving application and customization of workflow-centric Research Objects (ROs). The ROs are produced as an output of a workflow enactment defined in the Common Workflow Language (CWL) using the CWL reference implementation and its data structures. The approach aggregates and annotates all the resources involved in the scientific investigation including inputs, outputs, workflow specification, command line tool specifications and input parameter settings. The resources are linked within the RO to enable re-enactment of an analysis without depending on external resources. The workflow provenance profile is represented in W3C recommended standard PROV-N and PROV-JSON format to capture retrospective provenance of the workflow enactment. The workflow-centric RO produced as an output of a CWL workflow en-actment is expected to be interoperable, reusable, shareable and portable across different platforms. This paper describes the need and motivation for CWLProv and the lessons learned in applying it for ROs using CWL in the bioinformatics domain. Research
Development of a preference-based outcome measure for use in economic evaluations of palliative care services

Background Numerous instruments measure outcomes in palliative care. However, these instruments are not preference-based and so are unable to yield quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). Conversely, the generic preference-based measures (PBM) are neither appropriate nor sensitive enough to measure changes in palliative care outcomes. Aim The objective of this thesis was to propose a new palliative-care health state classification system, called POS-E, and to estimate its preference weights so that it can be used in QALY calculations. Methods and results Design: Secondary data analysis followed by a cross sectional survey informed by the Health Technology Assessment guide for developing and testing methods for deriving preference-based measures of health from condition-specific measures (and other patient-based measures of outcome). This thesis consists of two main stages. The first stage explored the feasibility of deriving QALYs “indirectly” by mapping a commonly used palliative care instrument – the Palliative Care Outcome Scale (POS) – onto a generic PBM (EQ-5D; 3-level) using regression techniques. Data from three studies which included both POS and EQ-5D (N = 783) were combined and then randomly split into estimation and validation data sets. The overlap between both measures was assessed using principal component analysis (PCA) and correlation matrix analysis. Subsequently, we attempted to map the POS to the EQ-5D using three regression models. The mean absolute error (MAE), adjusted R, and predicted/observed plots were used to assess the quality of mappings. The results showed low correlations between both instruments and that the POS is associated with only two