Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Characterization of Multi-Carrier Locator Performance

Time-Difference-of-Arrival (TDOA) location estimation is central to an OFDM based Precision Personnel Locator system being developed at WPI. Here we describe a component of the effort towards characterizing the performance of such a system and verifying the functionality of hardware and software implementations. The performance degradations due to noise in the received signal and misalignments between transmitter and receiver clock and heterodyne frequencies are investigated. This investigation involves development of a MATLAB simulator for the entire system, experimental measures using a prototype implementation and linearized analytic analysis of specific subsystems. The three types of characterizations are compared, confirming agreement, and analytic results are used to demonstrate construction of a system engineering design tool. iii Acknowledgements There are many people who have contributed to my success here at WPI. To all of them I am grateful. I would like to thank my parents and entire family for their constant support as I completed college. My friends from UMass-Amherst: Darrin Jacque, Dave Rust, Keith Grimes, Adrienne Brown, Mike Shaw, Scott Foster and Brian Kulig who were always there with encouragement and assistance when needed. My fellow denizens of the Machine Vision Lab: Dave Holl, Nick Hatch, Ben Woodacre, Pavan Reddy and Darius Kazemi. They helped me with my work and made my experience much more enjoyable and easier. Special thanks to Professor David Cyganski for giving me this research opportunity. His knowledge, guidance and sense of humor made this past year pass very quickly and with a minimal amount of pain. I have learned a great deal while working with him. I would also like to thank Professor Edward Clancy, whose advice helped me shape my Masters degree program and led to my working for Prof. Cyganski. My Thesis Committee: Professors David Cyganski, William Michalson and James Duckworth. Many thanks for their advice and support. Their efforts are the reason my thesis was finished on time. This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice. I would like to thank them for their support of this work. Dan Breen April 2004
A geometric theory of Nakagami fading multipath mobile radio channel with physical interpretations

The focus in this paper is on physical interpretation of the Nakagami fading phenomenon in multipath mobile radio propagation through its parameters m and /spl Omega/. In the case of narrowband multipath propagation, it is shown that the m parameter is interpreted in a similar fashion as the K parameter of the Rice distribution. We also formulate a geometric theory of Nakagami multipath fading and relate the m parameter with the number of resolvable multipaths in a wideband multipath propagation scenario. We provide a physical interpretation of this geometric theory which can also be shown to be supported by channel measurements reported in literature. Finally the two interpretations are used together to quantify the multipath diversity of a given channel.
Issues in the evaluation of spoken dialogue systems using objective and subjective measures

The paper presents results and conclusions about the current evaluation methodologies for spoken dialogue systems (SDS). The PARADISE paradigm, used for evaluation in the DARPA Communicator project, is briefly introduced and discussed through the application to the OVID home banking dialogue system. It is shown to provide results consistent with those obtained by the DARPA community, but a number of problems and limitations are pointed out. The issue of user attitude measures obtained through questionnaires is discussed. This is an area that has not received much attention from the speech technology community, but is important in order to obtain valid results and conclusions about usability. A general presentation of the issues that must be addressed when developing and employing questionnaires is given with a focus on how to ensure the reliability and validity of the results. Examples of results obtained from the OVID project are used to illustrate this.
Towards Minimizing Processes Response Time in Interactive Systems

This study considers the process scheduling problem of minimizing the response time (RT) of processes. In This study we schedule a batch of n processes, for servicing on a single resource, in such a way that the response time is minimized. RT minimization finds its applications for process scheduling in manufacturing interactive systems in computer and networks systems for the stabilized QoS, and in other fields where it is desirable to minimize RT of processes with different weights for priorities. We formulate a RT problem as an integer programming problem. Numerical testing shows that proposed technique significantly outperforms existing algorithms. In this paper we use task and process terms interchangeably.
The Neural Representation of Objects in Visual Cortex

Neuroimaging studies have shown that different categories of object evoke different neural responses in the ventral visual pathway. This has been interpreted to suggest that these regions represent high-level conceptual or semantic properties of the stimulus, such as its category. However, images from different categories differ in low-level visual properties. Therefore, the extent to which category-specific neural responses indicate high-level or low-level representations is unclear. This thesis investigates the extent to which low-level properties of objects are important in the neural response of ventral visual pathway. The first study uses a data-driven approach to select clusters of objects based on the similarity of their low-level visual properties. These visually defined clusters did not correspond to typical object categories, but still evoked distinct patterns of response in the ventral stream. The second and third studies show category-specific patterns of response in the ventral stream to scrambled objects that are not recognizable, but nevertheless retain many of their low-level visual properties. The fourth study reveals that the bias toward natural object images found in the ventral stream begins to emerge in early visual areas. The final chapter shows that category-specific patterns of EEG response can be also explained by low-level image properties. Taken together, these results demonstrate the importance of low-level visual properties in the neural representation of objects. These findings suggest that the category-selectivity observed in high-level visual regions can be explained by a distributed organization based around more basic properties of the stimulus.
INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES (ICT)

Information and communications technology usually abbreviated as ICT , is often used as an extended synonym for information technology (IT), but is usually a more general term that stresses the role of unified communications and the integration of telecommunications (telephone lines and wireless signals), computers, middleware as well as necessary software, storage- and audio-visual systems, which enable users to create, access, store, transmit, and manipulate information. In other words, ICT consists of IT as well as telecommunication, broadcast media, all types of audio and video processing and transmission and network based control and monitoring functions. The expression was first used in 1997 in a report by Dennis Stevenson to the UK government and promoted by the new National Curriculum documents for the UK in 2000.
Solving one-dimensional unconstrained global optimization problem using parameter free filled function method

It is generally known that almost all filled function methods for one-dimensional unconstrained global optimization problems have computational weaknesses. This paper introduces a relatively new parameter free filled function, which creates a non-ascending bridge from any local isolated minimizer to other first local isolated minimizer with lower or equal function value. The algorithm’s unprecedented function can be used to determine all extreme and inflection points between the two considered consecutive local isolated minimizers. The proposed method never fails to carry out its job. The results of the several testing examples have shown the capability and efficiency of this algorithm while at the same time, proving that the computational weaknesses of the filled function methods can be overcomed.
Design and implementation of a configuration management system

The author has designed and implemented a configuration management system, which is based on the CMISE service. It provides several functions to configuration management users such as getting information about network resources, re-configuration of a managed network and so on. The author has introduced the network management domain concept and the object-oriented approach for defining managed objects. The service primitives supported by the configuration management system have been defined and the protocol between configuration managers for multi-domain management has been implemented. The author implemented CMISE service, simulator and management information base (MIB) based on the OSI network management framework. Fault and performance management functions are being implemented. <<ETX>>
Impact of refractive error correction on mental and visual development in children with global developmental delay

PURPOSE: The purpose of the present study is to evaluate visual acuity and refractive status in children with global developmental delay (GDD) and to study the effect of early correction of refractive errors on vision and developmental quotient (DQ). METHODS: In this case series data with pre–post design, 100 consecutive children from 1 to 5 years of age diagnosed with GDD attending the child development clinic and referred to ophthalmology were evaluated for ocular complaints, status of visual acuity, and type of refractive error. Glasses were prescribed on the basis of cycloplegic retinoscopy. Etiological diagnosis and DQ were documented. Follow-up was done after 6 months for visual acuity, DQ, and qualitative questionnaire administered for the caretaker. Statistical analysis was done using the Chi-square test. RESULTS: Fifty-six children were <2.5 years of age and 44 children were >2.5 years. Severe GDD prevalence was more in children <2.5 years (43%) and mild GDD in >2.5 (50%). Of 47 who showed improvement in vision, 39 (71%) showed improvement in social behavior also, which was statistically significant. In children <2.5 years, more improvement in DQ was seen in the moderate intellectual disability group after refractive error correction. However, in the children of 2.5 years and above, more improvement was seen in the severe group. Overall, improvement in DQ in children from 1 to 5 years was statistically significant at 14%. CONCLUSION: Harmful effects of sensory visual deprivation on the development and functioning can be dampened by a simple and cost-effective approach of spectacles therapy which makes a spectacular effect in the case of children with GDD.
Design of registration and validation algorithm of member’s personal data

This paper deals with the methods of verification of web-forum members’ personal data, which are implemented in the algorithm of registration and validation of personal data on web-community member. The problem of personal data verifying and method of registration in an online community is investigated. These issues have the greatest influence on efficiency rise of virtual communities functioning and the level of data authenticity in web-members’ personal profiles. Solution of these problems is possible by using computer-linguistic analysis of web-members’ posts. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.11591/ij-ict.v2i2. 3960 Full Text: PDF
Sustainable Assessment for Large Science Classes: Non-Multiple Choice, Randomised Assignments through a Learning Management System

This paper reports on the development of a tool that generates randomised, non-multiple choice assessment within the BlackBoard Learning Management System interface. An accepted weakness of multiple-choice assessment is that it cannot elicit learning outcomes from upper levels of Biggs’ SOLO taxonomy. However, written assessment items require extensive resources for marking, and are susceptible to copying as well as marking inconsistencies for large classes. This project developed an assessment tool which is valid, reliable and sustainable and that addresses the issues identified above. The tool provides each student with an assignment assessing the same learning outcomes, but containing different questions, with responses in the form of words or numbers. Practice questions are available, enabling students to obtain feedback on their approach before submitting their assignment. Thus, the tool incorporates automatic marking (essential for large classes), randomised tasks to each student (reducing copying), the capacity to give credit for working (feedback on the application of theory), and the capacity to target higher order learning outcomes by requiring students to derive their answers rather than choosing them. Results and feedback from students are presented, along with technical implementation details.
Exploiting Cross Domain Relationships for Target Recognition

Cross domain recognition extracts knowledge from one domain to recognize samples from another domain of interest. The key to solving problems under this umbrella is to find out the latent connections between different domains. In this dissertation, three different cross domain recognition problems are studied by exploiting the relationships between different domains explicitly according to the specific real problems. First, the problem of cross view action recognition is studied. The same action might seem quite different when observed from different viewpoints. Thus, how to use the training samples from a given camera view and perform recognition in another new view is the key point. In this work, reconstructable paths between different views are built to mirror labeled actions from one source view into one another target view for learning an adaptable classifier. The path learning takes advantage of the joint dictionary learning techniques with exploiting hidden information in the seemingly useless samples, making the recognition performance robust and effective. Second, the problem of person re-identification is studied, which tries to match pedestrian images in non-overlapping camera views based on appearance features. In this work, we propose to learn a random kernel forest to discriminatively assign a specific distance metric to each pair of local patches from the two images in matching. The forest is composed by multiple decision trees, which are designed to partition the overall space of local patch-pairs into substantial subspaces, where a simple but effective local metric kernel can be defined to minimize the distance of true matches.
An Efficient Mining for Approximate Frequent Items in Protein Sequence Database

The rapid increase of available proteins, DNA and other biological sequences has made the problem of discovering the meaningful patterns from sequences, a major task for Bioinformatics research. Data mining of protein sequence databases poses special challenges, because several protein databases are non-relational whereas most of the data mining and machine learning techniques considers the data input to be a relational database. The existing sequence mining algorithms mainly focus on mining for subsequences. However, a wide range of applications such as biological DNA and protein motif mining needs an effective mining for identifying the approximate frequent patterns. The existing approximate frequent pattern mining algorithms have some delimitations such as lack of knowledge to finding the patterns, poor scalability and complexity to adapt into some other applications. In this paper, a Generalized Approximate Pattern Algorithm (GAPA) is proposed to efficiently mine the approximate frequent patterns in the protein sequence database. Pearson’s coefficient correlation is computed among the protein sequence database items to analyze the approximate frequent patterns. The performance of the proposed GAPA is analyzed and tested with the FASTA protein sequence database. FASTA database files hold the protein translations of Ensembl gene predictions. GAPA is compared with the existing methods such as Approximate Frequent Itemsets (AFI) tree and Approximate Closed Frequent Itemsets (ACFIM) in terms of support, accuracy, memory usage and time consumption. The experimental results shows GAPA is scalable and outperforms than the existing algorithms.
Applying a Psychotherapeutic Theory to the Modeling of Affective Intelligent Agents

In this paper, we propose the application of a well-known psychotherapeutic model, the Ellis’s ABC theory, to the modeling of intelligent agents. The final aim is to be able to simulate human realistic behavior in situations in which varied reactions are possible and are determined by several factors such as personality, affective state, prior experiences, and regulation capabilities. The proposed framework, called ABC-EBDI, is the result of integrating the ABC theory into a BDI framework. Other affective theories have also been taken into account to support the modeling of personality, mood, and affect regulation. The distinguishing feature of the proposed framework is the classification of the agent’s cognitive-affective process as either rational or irrational. This process will lead to functional emotions and adaptive conduct, in the first case, and dysfunctional emotions and maladaptive conduct in the second. While the ABC-EBDI framework may be used in different application domains due to its characteristics it can be particularly useful in mental health application. A prototype has been implemented and applied to simulate a bad news scenario. A first evaluation with specialists has been carried out with promising results.
Statistical properties of speckle and full polarimetric filters in SAR

Reducing the speckle effects in polarimetric data implies the use of statistical models for the speckle. A well known model is the product model which assumes the same texture variable for all the elements of the covariance matrix (CM). The authors present 2 models which allow differences between channels. For each model, a filtering technique is also presented. Finally, an analysis of texture variations is realized on several natural and non natural clutters.
Recent results on coding for multiple-antenna transmission systems

We describe recent results on multiple-antenna transmission systems. These are known to offer a potential performance, in terms of bit/s/Hz, that cannot be obtained otherwise with present-day technology. We summarize recent results showing the theoretical performance limits of these systems under the assumptions that the channel gains are known to the receiver, to the transmitter and to the receiver, or to neither. The design of coding schemes that approach these limits is also addressed.
Iterative feedback tuning—an overview

Adaptive and iterative control algorithms based on explicit criterion minimization are briefly reviewed and an overview of one such algorithm, iterative feedback tuning (IFT), is presented. The basic IFT algorithm is reviewed for both single‐input/single‐output and multi‐input/multi‐output systems. Subsequently the application to non‐linear systems is discussed. Stability and robustness aspects are covered. A survey of existing extensions, applications and related methods is also provided. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Analysis of fixed-point and floating-point arithmetic representations’ impact on synthesized area of a digital integrated circuit

This thesis compared fixed-point and floating-point representations, using signal-toquantization-noise-ratio (SQNR) and synthesized area as key comparison methods. Goodenough SQNR was set to 40 dB, and the goal was to choose area that was as small as possible, but still had sufficient dynamic range (DR), and also fulfilled the SQNR requirement. Quantization models for both representations were implemented with Matlab. For examination of the SQNR, an algorithm was chosen and aforementioned quantization models were added inside it. The chosen algorithm was memory-based 64-point FFT, implemented with radix-2 butterfly. The performance drop inside algorithm caused by arithmetic representation quantization was examined using SQNR. To be able to calculate the error value, a reference model was implemented, and that was done using FFTfunction of Matlab. When SQNR-analysis had been executed, synthesis was run for arithmetic operation models, for area and power estimate calculation. From these results, a conclusion of impact on area of FXP and FLP on different FFT models was done and a superiority comparison was possible.
The Impact of Laos’ Accession to the World Trade Organization

World Trade Organization (WTO) accession produces tangible benefits but also has costs, especially for transitional economies and Least Developed Countries (LDC) like Laos. Despite the benefits and costs of WTO accession, there are very few quantitative studies on Laos’ accession to the WTO. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to attempt to quantify the economy-wide impact and poverty of Laos’ WTO accession. We employ a standard GTAP model for this analysis. The simulation results show that Laos will gain from accession to the WTO, but these gains are quite small. The real GDP will increase about 0.5% and welfare (equivalent variation) will increase by about US$ 8 million. On the other hand, the trade deficit will increase and output in some sectors will be reduced. Therefore, it is difficult to conclude that Laos will gains benefits from WTO accession. The micro-simulation using the household survey indicates that the change in household welfare due to the tariff reduction is heterogeneous. The winners from the tariff reduction are households which live in Vientiane capital, and are the non-poor in the urban area. The losers from this policy change are the households which do not belong to the above categories, and their household income drops and their poverty rates increase slightly. The policy implication is that social safety nets for the possible losers are necessary in the future when the trade liberalization policy is implemented. Since this study focuses only the impact of the tariff reduction, the obtained impact might under- or over-estimate all of the impact of the WTO accession.
An Effective Academic Research Papers Recommendation for Non-profiled Users

With the tremendous amount of research publications online, finding relevant ones for a particular research topic can be an overwhelming task. As a solution, papers recommender systems have been proposed to help researchers find their interested papers or related papers to their fields. Most of existing papers recommendation approaches are based on paper collections, citations and user profile which is not always available (not all users are registered with their profiles). The existing approaches assume that users have already published papers and registered in their systems. Consequently, this neglects new researcher without published papers or profiles. In this paper, we propose an academic researcher papers recommendation approach that is based on the paper’s topics and paper’s main ideas. The approach requires as input only a single research paper and extracts its topics as short queries and main ideas’ sentences as long queries which are then submitted to existing online repositories that contains research papers to retrieve similar papers for recommendation. Four query extraction and one paper recommendation methods are proposed. Conducted experiments show that the proposed method presents good improvement.