Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
FabricCRDT: A Conflict-Free Replicated Datatypes Approach to Permissioned Blockchains

With the increased adaption of blockchain technologies, permissioned blockchains such as Hyperledger Fabric provide a robust ecosystem for developing production-grade decentralized applications. However, the additional latency between executing and committing transactions, due to Fabric's three-phase transaction lifecycle of Execute-Order-Validate (EOV), is a potential scalability bottleneck. The added latency increases the probability of concurrent updates on the same keys by different transactions, leading to transaction failures caused by Fabric's concurrency control mechanism. The transaction failures increase the application development complexity and decrease Fabric's throughput. Conflict-free Replicated Datatypes (CRDTs) provide a solution for merging and resolving conflicts in the presence of concurrent updates. In this work, we introduce FabricCRDT, an approach for integrating CRDTs to Fabric. Our evaluations show that in general, FabricCRDT offers higher throughput of successful transactions than Fabric, while successfully committing and merging all conflicting transactions without any failures.
Design recommendations for augmenting creative tasks with computational priming

Supporting creativity is a grand challenge in HCI. A critical component of creativity is the ability for divergent thinking, and divergent thinking can be fostered through looking at the problem through the lens of a different person, by assuming a role. Prior work found that assuming a role and affective stimulation with images may lead individuals to be more creative. In this work, we investigate the use of roles in stimulating the creativity of individuals in two complementary studies. In the first study, we implemented an online instrument for augmenting creativity with roles and images, and recruited crowd workers (n = 60) to complete a divergent thinking task while assuming a role. Interestingly, and in contrast to earlier findings, our analysis could not confirm the computational priming having an effect on the outcome of a small batch of creative tasks. In the second study, we observed the effect of roles on the ideation process of individuals when they reach an impasse in the flow of ideas. Our complementary studies highlight that adopting roles can help when one runs out of ideas, but this is not a silver bullet for improving divergent thinking, especially in online crowd-sourcing environments that are increasingly being used for experiments and data collection in behavioural science. Our work informs the design of future crowd-powered creativity support tools and contributes a timely case study to the body of literature in the growing field of creativity support online.
DigiMetaplan: supporting facilitated brainstorming for distributed business teams

While facilitated brainstorming is a proven ideation method for professional teams, distributed teams are currently not able to enjoy its benefits. As workers are shifting towards collaborating in distributed settings, understanding how interactive systems can support facilitated brainstorming is becoming necessary to ensure that distributed teams remain creative. To address this challenge we designed, implemented, and evaluated DigiMetaplan---an interactive surface-based system for distributed facilitated brainstorming for co-located and remote users. The design of DigiMetaplan was inspired by a widely-used facilitated brainstorming method called Metaplan, where the brainstorming process of a group is coordinated by a facilitator. We evaluated the usability of DigiMetaplan with five hybrid teams consisting of a co-located facilitator and two team members connected with one remote participant. Results showed that the features used in DigiMetaplan on interactive surfaces effectively supported teams in performing facilitated collaborative brainstorming in partially distributed settings. We contribute knowledge on how a brainstorming environment translated into a multi-surface distributed system affects facilitated collaboration.
Composite Algorithm Based on Clarke - Wright and Local Search for the Traveling Salesman Problem

Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is an NP-hard optimization problem that can be solved by a heuristic composite algorithm. A composite algorithm is a heuristic optimization model that combine tour construction algorithm and tour improvement algorithm. Clarke Wright Savings heuristic is one of the best methods that produce a good initial solution, and local search is known to be a successful operator to make an improvement solution. This paper will present a composite algorithm as a preliminary model based on Clarke wright savings and local search K-opt to solve TSP. The experimental result shows that the proposed algorithm can solve a large problem instance of Traveling Salesman Problem up to 85.900 points, with competitive results, small variations of computing time for 30 problem instances, and relatively short computing time.
Social acceptability of virtual reality in public spaces: experiential factors and design recommendations

With the latest advancements in Virtual Reality (VR), the possible use of VR devices in public and social contexts has increased. Since the use of VR typically requires wearing a Head-Mounted Display (HMD), the user is not able to see others - the spectators - present in the same context. This may lead to a decrease of social acceptability of VR by both the users and the spectators. We conducted a field experiment to explore what are the experiential factors of the users of VR (N=10) and spectators of VR use (N=30). We found experiential factors for the users to be adjustment of interaction, uninterruptable immersion, un-intrusive communication, freedom to switch between realities, sense of safety, physical privacy, shared experience, and sense of belonging. For the spectators, the main factors are shared experience, enticing curiosity, feeling normal, and sense of safety. We then run three sessions with user experience (UX) experts (N=9) to create a set of design recommendations for socially acceptable VR. The resulting ten recommendations provide a holistic view to designing acceptable experiences for VR in public spaces.
FRAMER: a tagged-pointer capability system with memory safety applications

Security mechanisms for systems programming languages, such as fine-grained memory protection for C/C++, authorize operations at runtime using access rights associated with objects and pointers. The cost of such fine-grained capability-based security models is dominated by metadata updates and lookups, making efficient metadata management the key for minimizing performance impact. Existing approaches reduce metadata management overheads by sacrificing precision, breaking binary compatibility by changing object memory layout, or wasting space with excessive alignment or large shadow memory spaces. We propose FRAMER, a capability framework with object granularity. Its sound and deterministic per-object metadata management mechanism enables direct access to metadata by calculating their location from a tagged pointer to the object and a compact supplementary table. This may improve the performance of memory safety, type safety, thread safety and garbage collection, or any solution that needs to map pointers to metadata. FRAMER improves over previous solutions by simultaneously (1) providing a novel encoding that derives the location of per-object metadata with low memory overhead and without any assumption of objects' alignment or size, (2) offering flexibility in metadata placement and size, (3) saving space by removing any padding or re-alignment, and (4) avoiding internal object memory layout changes. We evaluate FRAMER with a use case on memory safety.
Privacy preserving substring search protocol with polylogarithmic communication cost

The problem of efficiently searching into outsourced encrypted data, while providing strong privacy guarantees, is a challenging problem arising from the separation of data ownership and data management typical of cloud-based applications. Several cryptographic solutions allowing a client to look-up occurrences of a substring of choice in an outsourced document collection have been publicly presented. Nonetheless, practical application requirements in terms of privacy, security and efficiency actively push for new and improved solutions. We present a privacy-preserving substring search protocol exhibiting a sub-linear communication cost, with a limited computational effort on the server side. The proposed protocol provides search pattern and access pattern privacy, while its extension to a multi-user setting shows significant savings in terms of outsourced storage w.r. t. a baseline solution where the whole dataset is replicated. The performance figures of an optimized implementation of our protocol, searching into a remotely stored genomic dataset, validate the practicality of the approach exhibiting a data transfer of less than 200 kiB to execute a query over a document of 40 MiB, with execution times on client and server in the range of a few seconds and a few minutes, respectively.
Factors that Affect Construction Workers' Stress in Indonesia

Nowadays, construction in Indonesia continues to grow positively due to its rapid development, but this is not supported by an increase in the quality of its resources. Construction work is an inherently dangerous occupation that exposure to increase job stressors, it is likely to exacerbate the level of danger that has significant effects on workers' safety. However, research on job stress factors on construction workers in Indonesia has been limited. Thus, it is important to identify the factors that influence the work stress of construction workers, as well as determine the interrelationships between factors that causing work stress. Stress factors on construction workers can be connected with Personal Stressors, Interpersonal Stressors, Task Stressors, and Physical Stressors. A survey instrument was developed, and data were collected from seven different construction sites with 216 construction workers in Jakarta. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was constructed to analyze the relationship between factors affecting work stress in construction workers. Before that, have been doing the potential stress on workers using Logistics Regression. It was concluded, work stress on construction workers has the same potential based on demographic data. The result proved that Private Life and Environment have a significantly positive relationship to Job Stress in construction workers in Indonesia. Also, there is a relationship between the variables used in this research.
A Numerical and Experimental Analysis of the Dynamic Water Propagation in Ship-Like Structures

Current damage stability rules for ships are based on the evaluation of a ship’s residual stability in the final flooding stage. Up to the stage of this report, the dynamic water propagation within the inner subdivision as well as intermediate flooding stages and their influence on the resulting stability are considered on a very basic level in the damage stability regulations and may thus lead to an inappropriate evaluation of the safety level in damaged condition. The investigation of accidents like the one of the Estonia or the European Gateway reveals that intermediate stages of flooding and the dynamic flooding sequence result in significant fluid shifting moments which have a major influence on the dependent stability of damaged ships. Consequently, the critical intermediate stages should be considered when evaluating designs with large cargo decks like RoRo vessels, RoPax vessels and car carriers. Within this report, an enhanced numerical flooding calculation method is validated by a series of model tests with the aim to investigate its capabilities and limitations and to improve the understanding of a ship's time dependent damage stability. The model tests haven been carried out with a ship-like test body which comprises a typical subdivision. In this respect, emphasis has been given on the evaluation of critical intermediate stages of flooding which are characterised by large roll angles and roll velocities. By the end of this report, the results of the model test campaign and the calculation method are compared and discussed in the context of the observed influencing factors on the flooding process to evaluate its' prediction accuracy for intermediate stages of flooding.
DAILY TRANSACTIONS AND MARKET DEPTH IN SHORT STERLING FUTURES

The objective of the present study is to examine the interplay between information, trading volume and volatility in Short Sterling futures. More specifically, the paper concentrates on the role of liquidity variables as conduits of information arrival and whether such variables could be an exclusive platform of the market’s information set. The analytical framework employed, to examine the interaction among those factors, is based on the conditional volatility family of techniques. The approach is well suited as it naturally leads to examine the interaction among volatility and sources of information. In an attempt to identify proxies of information and their role in determining volatility four main conclusions have emerged. First, the empirical findings suggest that both volume and open interest exhibit a positive correlation with volatility. Second, based on the current methodology one can observe the persistence and importance of GARCH effects after accounting for liquidity. Third, both liquidity variables remain significantly exogenous compared with other studies. Finally, although both liquidity variables are found significant, their role as vehicles of transmitting information is proved to be weak with respect to the information itself.
Resource-Aware Object Classification and Segmentation for Semi-Autonomous Grasping with Prosthetic Hands

Myoelectric control of prosthetic hands relies on electromyographic (EMG) signals captured by usually two surface electrodes attached to the human body in different setups. Controlling the hand by the user requires long training and depends heavily on the robustness of the EMG signals. In this paper, we present a visual perception system to extract scene information for semi-autonomous hand-control that allows minimizing required command complexity and leads to more intuitive and effortless control. We present methods that are optimized towards minimal resource demand to derive scene information from visual data from a camera inside the hand. In particular, we show object classification and semantic segmentation of image data realized by convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We present a system architecture, that takes user feedback into account and thereby improves results. In addition, we present an evolutionary algorithm to optimize CNN architecture regarding accuracy and hardware resource demand. Our evaluation shows classification accuracy of 96.5% and segmentation accuracy of up to 89.5% on an in-hand Arm Cortex-H7 microcontroller running at only 400 MHz.
Charging Time Reduction Using Optimized Multistage Constant Current Charging Pattern for Lithium Ion Batteries

Fahad Ur Rehman, Tahir Mehmood and Muhammad Bilal Iqbal Electrical Engineering Department University of Engineering and Technology Taxila 75270Pakistan. Electrical Engineering Department University of Engineering and Technology Taxila 75270Pakistan. GCT Taxila and Former Research Scholar at Electrical Engineering Department University of Engineering and Technology Taxila 75270Pakistan. 1 fahadcust@yahoo.com tahir.mehmood@uettaxila.edu. pk 3bilal.mbi87@gmail.com
Managing Information Extraction in a Mashup Environment

Unstructured text represents a large fraction of the world’s data. It often contains snippets of structured information (e.g. people’s names and zip codes). Information extraction (IE) techniques identify such structured information in unstructured or semi-structured text. As a task it can be seen as a way of filling database slots from sub-segments of text. In parallel, Web mashups are Web applications developed using content and services available online. They offer the end user the ability to combine information or functionality from two or more existing data sources in order to create applications and Web pages customized to their unique needs. In this work we combine the two aforementioned technologies in order to enable the analysis of extracted information with other structured user and enterprise data. For that purpose we use a state-of-the art statistical IE model-Conditional Random Fields (CRF)in the setting of an open source data integration software application.
The Self-Employment Option in Rigid Labor Markets: An Empirical Investigation

This paper studies selection into and returns to self-employment in labor markets with stringent employment protection. Using Spanish administrative panel data, we characterize self-employment dynamics in the presence of rigidities that affect workersâ€™ outside options. We document the negative selection into self-employment when workers enter from unemployment, and the pro-cyclicality of the decision. We identify career heterogeneity in the data and estimate a rich life-cycle income process. The self-employed face shocks with smaller variances but lower returns compared to fixed-term workersâ€”the prevalent contract out of unemployment. These facts call for a revision of active labor market policies in place.
Applications of Nano-Fluid in Nuclear Power Plants within a Future Vision

This study aims at providing an overview of the application of nano-fluid in nuclear reactors, and the statement of practical meeting points between the basic processes in the nuclear reactors and the field of the use of nano-particles in these processes. The conclusion derived from this study suggests a wide scope for scientific research in the field of the use of nano-particles of different types in the cooling processes of the heart of the reactor and in the heat exchange in the process of electricity production or improving the exploitation of hot water in other areas.
From Adherence to Outcomes: Impact of Benefit Design on the HIV Patient

OBJECTIVE: To review the current impact of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/ acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and its treatment on the population and on managed care. SUMMARY: In 2006, HIV/AIDS remains as big a problem as ever, with many countries reporting an incidence of 40% or higher among intravenous drug users. While daunting, this does not detract from the many victories that have occurred over the HIV/AIDS landscape. Mortality has declined dramatically since 1995. Treatment with highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) has been simplified and offers substantial survivor benefits. The net effect of these advances has been to change the face of HIV/AIDS, from a fatal to a chronic illness. Accordingly, current and evolving management strategies need to encompass long-term care. CONCLUSION: As people live longer, health care management organizations will be looking to balance good outcomes and successful long-term care with acceptable costs.
ASSESSING INTRODUCTORY RURAL SOCIOLOGY

This article reports on the results of an assessment of an introductory rural sociology course offered at two land-grant universities, which are very different in size. These institutions are North Carolina A&T State University and The Ohio State University. The authors use similar assessment tools, including an embedded pre and post test of knowledge gained, students’ written comments to open-ended questions administered at the end of term about the quality of the class and the instructors, and the traditional, standardized Student Evaluation of Instruction, an instrument used across many universities. In addition, at OSU, a small group diagnostic of students enrolled in introductory rural sociology was independently conducted by personnel from the university’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching. The results indicate that knowledge is gained, although post test results for some multiple choice questions were disappointing. Students’ written comments indicate that there was much about a sociological perspective applied to rural societies, communities and peoples that they find interesting and about which they learned something. As well, students were uniformly positive about the way the courses were taught and graded. However, they were critical of the textbooks adopted by the instructors for both versions of the course, which they found inadequate because they were not rural-oriented in their content. The primary recommendation is for a follow-up assessment of various rural sociology courses and specific practices used by rural sociology instructors that include as many universities as possible, despite challenges this presents to development of a standardized methodology.
Grapevine trunk diseases in German viticulture. III. Biodiversity and spatial distribution of fungal pathogens in rootstock mother plants and possible relation to leaf symptoms

Three rootstock mother blocks, planted with cultivars SO4 (planted 2004), 125AA (2005) and 5BB (2005), and located in southwestern Germany were examined for the existence of grapevine trunk disease (GTD) pathogens and related internal and external symptoms between 2011 and 2017. Frequency of leaf symptoms ranged from 0.2 % in six-year old blocks to appr. 1.5 % in 12-year-old blocks. While the typical "tiger stripe pattern" was less common, the majority of affected leaves was characterized by irregularly arranged necrotic spots spread over the leaf surface. Irrespective of leaf symptoms, in cross sections of 9-12 year old vines all sampled trunks (n ≥ 20 for each block) showed the typical GTD symptoms in the wood, with symptoms prevalent in the trunk head compared to the middle section and the basis of trunks. Pathogens were isolated from all trunks, with Fomitiporia mediterranea (Fmed), Cadophora luteo-olivacea (Clo), Phaeomoniella chlamydospora (Pch), Eutypa lata (Elata), and Phaeoacremonium aleophilum (Pal) being the most common. Other GTD species included Cadophora cf. novi-eboraci (new for German viticulture), Diaporthe eres, D. nobilis (new for German viticulture), D. rudis (new for German viticulture), Eutypa laevata (new for German viticiculture), Ilyonectria europaea, I. liriodendri, and Pestalotiopsis sp. The significance of the once found Sarocladium strictum remains unclear. GTD species were revealed from all sampled trunk parts, with maximum diversity and overall frequency in the trunk head. Further species, not related to GTDs, existed in all parts of the trunk. GTD pathogens were also demonstrated for all shoots (two shoots each of ten vines SO4, 125AA and 5BB, with five vines each externally symptomatic and non-symptomatic), but mostly could be detected by molecular means only. Clo, Pch, and Pal were the predominant species in shoots; further GTD species were Ilyonectria europaea, I. liriodendri, and Phaeoacremonium angustius.
High Sensitivity L-band Phased Array Feeds for the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope

A novel method to form multiple high-sensitivity beams with a reflector based radio telescope is to use a phased array feed (PAF). To accurately reconstruct the polarization state of the incident radio waves, the beam patterns of the PAF are of crucial importance. The coand cross-polar element patterns of an oversampled L-band PAF prototype system have been measured in an interferometric setup. It is demonstrated that, although the antenna elements sampling the two orthogonal polarizations of the focal field are not co-located, dual polarized beams can be formed by combining the element responses in a beamformer. The capability of the PAF to optimize its beams in terms of sensitivity, sidelobes and polarization characteristics is demonstrated. Keywords-antenna arrays; polarimetry; antenna feeds; reflector antennas; beam steering; antenna radiation patterns