Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Survey of Truth Discovery in Information Extraction

In the information era, the data is generated at a dramatic speed and can be collected from various sources. However, the multi-source data of the same object often conflict with each other. Truth discovery is proposed to aggregate the information from different sources and infer the true fact from the data. Information extraction is a task to extract information, such as entities and relations, from unstructured text data. The application of truth discovery in information extraction gains great attention recently as each fact can often be extracted by various systems from various sources. In this survey, we focus on the truth discovery methods, information extraction sub-tasks and application of truth discovery in information extraction.
Moving Least Squares in a nutshell

We advocate the use of point sets to represent shapes. We provide a definition of a smooth manifold surface from a set of points close to the original surface. The definition is based on local maps from differential geometry, which are approximated by the method of moving least squares (MLS). We present tools to increase or decrease the density of the points, thus, allowing an adjustment of the spacing among the points to control the fidelity of the representation. To display the point set surface, we introduce a novel point rendering technique. The idea is to evaluate the local maps according to the image resolution. This results in high quality shading effects and smooth silhouettes at interactive frame rates. CR Categories: I.3. 3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation—Display algorithms; I.3. 5 [Computer Graphics]: Computational Geometry and Object Modeling—Curve, surface, solid, and object representations;
An efficient Multi-Clusters based Routing algorithm in Mobile Opportunistic Networks

Mobile Opportunistic Networks (MONs) are formed by random moving nodes. In MONs, there is no fixed link between any two nodes, the node can only transfer the message based on “storage-carry-and-forwar” data transmission mode. Therefore, a key challenge is to find a routing that can provide a good message delivery performance in MONs. In this paper, we use a phenomenon in real life to design an efficient MultiClusters based routing algorithm MCR. At first, we described a phenomenon that most of us have circle of friends, but also exists in multiple friends circles. Then, we used the encounter history to set up building and updating mechanism for the circles. After that, the multi-clusters had been formed with these friends circles. And we used the multiclusters to design MCR and make some experiments on real mobility traces. Finally our experiments results had shown that MCR outperforms the other three routing algorithms.
An Eye Gaze Model for Controlling the Display of Social Status in Believable Virtual Humans

Designing highly believable characters remains a major concern within digital games. Matching a chosen personality and other dramatic qualities to displayed behavior is an important part of improving overall believability. Gaze is a critical component of social exchanges and serves to make characters engaging or aloof, as well as to establish character’s role in a conversation.In this paper, we investigate the communication of status related social signals by means of a virtual human’s eye gaze. We constructed a cross-domain verbal-conceptual computational model of gaze for virtual humans to facilitate the display of social status. We describe the validation of the model’s parameters, including the length of eye contact and gazes, movement velocity, equilibrium response, and head and body posture. In a first set of studies, conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk using prerecorded video clips of animated characters, we found statistically significant differences in how the characters’ status was rated based on the variation in social status.In a second step based on these empirical findings, we designed an interactive system that incorporates dynamic eye tracking and spoken dialog, along with real-time control of a virtual character. We evaluated the model using a presential, interactive scenario of a simulated hiring interview. Corroborating our previous finding, the interactive study yielded significant differences in perception of status were found (p = .046). Thus, we believe status is an important aspect of dramatic believability, and accordingly, this paper presents our social eye gaze model for realistic procedurally animated characters and shows its efficacy.
Competitive intelligence in support of strategic training and learning

Knowledge assets include the knowledge of employees on their roles and responsibilities (human capital), knowledge about customers and suppliers (relationship capital), the knowledge embedded in databases, processes, structures, rules, routines (structural capital) and, more importantly, knowledge about competitors (competitive capital) (Bontis 2002; Rothberg and Erickson 2002). The sum total of these knowledge assets equals the amount and level of intellectual capital of companies.
Accuracy of short sequence repeats on single‑parent parentage identification in Chinese shrimp Fenneropenaeus chinensis

Based on the parentage identification results using 4 polymorphic short sequence repeats (SSRs) with both parents known, we assessed the accuracy of parentage identification for a single known parent using the same 4 SSRs and 4 other additional SSRs for 2507 Chinese shrimp Fenneropenaeus chinensis recaptured from Jiaozhou Bay in a ‘molecular marker recapture’ program. We detected a high variability in the 4 SSR loci EN0033, RS0622, FCKR002, and FCKR013. The 4 polymorphic loci produced a ≥99.99% cumulative exclusion probability for both known parents. We identified 8 parentage relationships with a logarithm (base 10) of odds (LOD) score of ≥3.0. Similar results were obtained when the 4 additional SSR loci were included. The cumulative exclusion probability decreased to 99.42% for a single known parent using the old 4 SSR loci, which enabled detection of 30 and 44 parentage relationships with a ≥3.0 LOD score for known paternity and maternity, respectively. Inclusion of the additional 4 SSR loci raised, the cumulative exclusion probability to ≥99.99%. However, the number of parentage relationships detected with an LOD score of ≥3.0 was reduced to 8 for the groups with known paternity or maternity, similar to the result obtained with both parents known. In this study, the accuracy of single-parent parentage identification using SSR loci was confirmed. Authentic parentage identification with a single known parent should incorporate both the cumulative exclusion probability and LOD score. Our research provides an alternative method for parentage identification in Chinese shrimp.
CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR TOWARDS ISLAMIC BANKING IN PAKISTAN

Islamic banking is one of the most developing sectors in Pakistan. This study reveals the relationship between consumer behavior towards bank selection criteria and customer satisfaction. For this purpose, data was collected from a sample of 200 consumers in different Islamic bank in Multan through a structured questionnaire containing 30 questions. SPSS 17 has been used for data analysis. Correlation and regression analysis, ordinary least square (OLS ) method was use to find out relationship among independent variables( religion, high profit &low service charges, influence of friends & family, service quality, responsive attitude of staff ,mass media & bank image) and dependent variable (customer satisfaction). The findings show positive and significant relationship among all variables and customer satisfaction partially mediates the relationship between independent variables and dependent variables. We conclude that customers' satisfaction is increasing day after day and their commitment is strong with the Islamic banks.
A Distributed Hash Table Assisted Intrusion Prevention System

Using collaborative intrusion detection to sense network intrusions comes at a price of handling an enormous amount of data generated by detection probes, and the problem of properly correlating the evidence collected at different parts of the network. The correlation between the recorded events has to be revealed, as it may be the case that they are part of a complex, large-scale attack, even if they manifested at different parts of the network. In this paper we describe the inner workings a peer-to-peer network based intrusion detection system, which is able to handle the intrusion detection data efficiently while maintaining the accuracy of centralized approaches of correlation. The system is built on a distributed hash table, for which keys are assigned to each piece of intrusion data in a preprocessing step. The network traffic requirements of such a system, and the load balancing that can be achieved by using the Kademlia peer-to-peer overlay network are discussed as well. Keywords-collaborative intrusion detection; attack correlation; peer-to-peer; distributed hash table; Kademlia.
DMAT: Deformable Medial Axis Transform for Animated Mesh Approximation

Extracting a faithful and compact representation of an animated surface mesh is an important problem for computer graphics. However, the surface‐based methods have limited approximation power for volume preservation when the animated sequences are extremely simplified. In this paper, we introduce Deformable Medial Axis Transform (DMAT), which is deformable medial mesh composed of a set of animated spheres. Starting from extracting an accurate and compact representation of a static MAT as the template and partitioning the vertices on the input surface as the correspondences for each medial primitive, we present a correspondence‐based approximation method equipped with an As‐Rigid‐As‐Possible (ARAP) deformation energy defined on medial primitives. As a result, our algorithm produces DMAT with consistent connectivity across the whole sequence, accurately approximating the input animated surfaces.
Fully End-to-End Learning Based Conditional Boundary Equilibrium GAN with Receptive Field Sizes Enlarged for Single Ultra-High Resolution Image Dehazing

A receptive field is defined as the region in an input image space that an output image pixel is looking at. Thus, the receptive field size influences the learning of deep convolution neural networks. Especially, in single image dehazing problems, larger receptive fields often show more effective dehazying by considering the brightness and color of the entire input hazy image without additional information (e.g. scene transmission map, depth map, and atmospheric light). The conventional generative adversarial network (GAN) with small-sized receptive fields cannot be effective for hazy images of ultra-high resolution. Thus, we proposed a fully end-to-end learning based conditional boundary equilibrium generative adversarial network (BEGAN) with the receptive field sizes enlarged for single image dehazing. In our conditional BEGAN, its discriminator is trained ultra-high resolution conditioned on downscale input hazy images, so that the haze can effectively be removed with the original structures of images stably preserved. From this, we can obtain the high PSNR performance (Track 1 - Indoor: top 4th-ranked) and fast computation speeds. Also, we combine an L1 loss, a perceptual loss and a GAN loss as the generator's loss of the proposed conditional BEGAN, which allows to obtain stable dehazing results for various hazy images.
A Moderated Distance Based Broadcasting Algorithm for MANETs

 Abstract—The presence of new mobile computing devices rise the tendency to use ad hoc networks in which each device connects to its neighbor without the need to connect to a fixed infrastructure network. Broadcasting is sending data packet from a source node to the rest of nodes in the networks; it is characterized by no acknowledgement packets and no request or clear to send dialogue packets. Broadcasting suffer from redundant rebroadcast, contention and collision, these drawbacks lead to increase the delay and the number of dropped packets caused by contention (i.e. degrade in the quality of service). Anew distance based broadcasting algorithm is proposed to enhance broadcasting in wireless mobile ad hoc networks, this algorithm is analyzed and tested using GloMoSim network simulator, the simulated results are used to compare with another two distance based broadcast algorithms.
A Distribution Static Compensator Using a CFNN-AMF Controller for Power Quality Improvement and DC-Link Voltage Regulation

A distribution static compensator (DSTATCOM) is proposed in this study to improve the power quality, which includes the total harmonic distortion (THD) of the grid current and power factor (PF), of a mini grid with nonlinear and linear inductive loads. Moreover, the DC-link voltage regulation control of the DSTATCOM is essential especially under load variation conditions. Therefore, to improve the power quality and keep the DC-link voltage of the DSTATCOM constant under the variation of nonlinear and linear loads effectively, the traditional proportional-integral (PI) controller is substituted with a new online trained compensatory fuzzy neural network with an asymmetric membership function (CFNN-AMF) controller. In the proposed CFNN-AMF, the compensatory parameter to integrate pessimistic and optimistic operations of fuzzy systems is embedded in the CFNN. Furthermore, the dimensions of the Gaussian membership functions are directly extended to AMFs for the optimization of the fuzzy rules and the upgrade of learning ability of the networks. In addition, the network structure and online learning algorithm of the proposed CFNN-AMF are introduced in detail. Finally, the effectiveness and feasibility of the DSTATCOM using the proposed CFNN-AMF controller to improve the power quality and maintain the constant DC-link voltage under the change of nonlinear and linear inductive loads have been demonstrated by some experimental results.
Assessment of boar semen parameters.

Normal morphology, high motility and viability are sperm characteristics that ensure a good fertilizing capacity, being considered crucial for sexing technology. The purpose of this study was to evaluate semen parameters and to estimate its suitability for subsequent sperm sexing. We analyzed five ejaculates (concentration, morphology, motility and viability) from one boar using different computerized analysis systems. The results showed that all 5 sperm ejaculates were suitable for use in the sexing processes and the methods of analysis used were fast and appropriate for evaluating semen characteristics.
Local and Regional Regulation of Species-Area Relations : A Patch-Occupancy Model

Local species diversity (i.e., diversity in a small homogeneous patch of habitat) may be determined by local processes such as competition, predation, mutualism, and disturbance, or by regional processes such as speciation and biogeographical dispersal (Ricklefs 1987). Most recent ecological theory has focused on the local processes that determine membership in a community, rather than the regionlil processes that determine the species pool from which members may be drawn. One approach to distinguishing local from regional control of diversity is to examine a number of communities and plot local diversity as a function of the regional species pool (Terborgh and Faaborg 1980; Cornell 1985a, 1985b; Ricklefs 1987). In saturated communities local diversity should be independent of regional diversity. A direct relation between local and regional diversity, however, is interpreted as evidence that "in these cases, local communities are not saturated, diversity is not prescribed by local conditions, and the number of species found within small areas is sensitive to such regional processes as geographic dispersal . " (Ricklefs 1987, 168). The results of such tests have been mixed. Local diversity of cynipine wasps on oak trees (Cornell1985a, 1985b) and songbirds on Caribbean islands (Ricklefs 1987) is more or less linearly correlated with regional diversity, thus providing no evidence of saturation of local communities. In another study of island birds in the Caribbean, however, Terborgh and Faaborg (1980) found that local diversity was independent of regional diversity above some minimum number of species. In this chapter we construct a model that includes both local processes and a regional species pool, and which makes predictions about local diversity. We find that local-regional diversity regressions must be interpreted with care, because the interaction of disturbance, colonization, and competition in locally saturated communities can produce patterns that completely obscure the effects of saturation. Any model intended to study local and regional regulation of species diversity must contain at least two spatial scales. Most of the classic theories of diversity, however, are based on species-interaction models (the LotkaVolterra equations and their relatives) which include only a single scale. They focus on local processes to the exclusion of regional effects.
Iron(II) modified natural zeolites for hexavalent chromium removal from contaminated water

Abstract Three different types of Fe(II)-modified natural zeolites were tested as supports in continuous-flow columns for the treatment of Cr(VI) contaminated water. The natural zeolites chosen as support were commercially available Zeosand (80% clinoptilolite), ATZ (79% phillipsite/chabazite), and ZS-55RW (90% Chabazite). All the examined modified zeolites turned out active for hexavalent chromium abatement, lowering its concentration below the European regulation level, even at relatively high flow rates (40 mL/h, linear velocity 15 cm/h). Zeosand, having a broader pH range of stability, was found to be the best one in terms of both Fe(II) uptake (0.54 wt%) and Cr removal (90 mg Cr/Kg zeolite).
Across breed QTL detection and genomic prediction in French and Danish dairy cattle breeds

Our objective was to investigate the potential benefits of using sequence data to improve across breed genomic prediction, using data from five French and Danish dairy cattle breeds. First, QTL for protein yield were detected using high density genotypes. Part of the QTL detected within breed was shared across breed. Second, sequence data was used to quantify the loss in prediction reliabilities that results from using genomic markers rather than the causal variants. 50, 100 or 250 causative mutations were simulated and different sets of prediction markers were used to predict genomic relationships at causative mutations. Prediction of genomic relationships at causative mutations was most accurate when predicted by a selective number of markers within 1 Kb of the causative mutations. Whole-genome sequence data can help to get closer to the causative mutations and therefore improve genomic prediction across breed.
On the modelling of semi-insulating GaAs including surface tension and bulk stresses

The necessary heat treatment of single-crystal semi-insulating gallium arsenide (GaAs), which is deployed in micro- and optoelectronic devices, generates undesirable liquid precipitates in the solid phase. The appearance of precipitates is influenced by surface tension at the liquid–solid interface and deviatoric stresses in the solid. The central quantity for the description of the various aspects of phase transitions is the chemical potential, which can be additively decomposed into a chemical and a mechanical part. In particular, the calculation of the mechanical part of the chemical potential is of crucial importance. We determine the chemical potential in the framework of the St. Venant–Kirchhoff law, which gives an appropriate stress–strain relation for many solids in the small-strain regime. We establish criteria that allow the correct replacement of the St. Venant–Kirchhoff law by the simpler Hooke law. The main objectives of this study are the following: (i) we develop a thermo-mechanical model that describes diffusion and interface motions, which are both strongly influenced by surface tension effects and deviatoric stresses, (ii) we give an overview and outlook on problems that can be posed and solved within the framework of the model, and (iii) we calculate non-standard phase diagrams for GaAs above 1059 K, i.e. those that take into account surface tension and deviatoric stresses, and we compare the results with classical phase diagrams without these phenomena.
Methodological issues for the study of phonetic variation in the Italo-Romance dialects

In questo articolo si discutono alcune tecniche di elicitazione e se ne valuta l’adeguatezza per lo studio della variazione fonetica nei dialetti italiani. Le riflessioni teoriche sono ancorate all’analisi di uno specifico fenomeno linguistico: l’alternanza sincronica tra dittonghi e monottonghi nel dialetto di Pozzuoli (in provincia di Napoli). In rapporto a questo fenomeno di variazione, vengono messi a confronto dati raccolti con l’intervista libera e risposte a un questionario di traduzione. L’analisi mette in luce l’opportunità del ricorso a materiale parlato spontaneo elicitato in situazioni il meno artificiose possibili. Nello stesso tempo, si argomenta in favore di un metodo di analisi che parta dai dati dell’uso per risalire induttivamente ai patterns di variazione, limitando così il ricorso ad assunzioni fonologiche a priori.
BAG S53P4 putty as bone graft substitute – a rabbit model

Abstract Bioactive glass (BAG) S53P4 granules represent a bone augmentation biomaterial for the surgical treatment of bony defects, even in challenging conditions such as osteomyelitis. The aim of this eight-week rabbit implantation study was to evaluate the biocompatibility and bone regeneration performance of a BAG S53P4 putty formulation following its implantation into the proximal tibia bone of twenty-eight New Zealand white rabbits. BAG S53P4 putty was compared to BAG S53P4 granules (0.5-0.8 mm) to evaluate whether the synthetic putty binder influences the bone regeneration of the osteostimulative granules. The putty formulation facilitates clinical use because of its mouldability, injectability and ease of mixing with autograft. Implantation of putty and granules into proximal tibia defects resulted in good osseointegration of the two groups. Both biomaterials were biocompatible, showed high new bone formation, high vascularization and periosteal growth. No signs of disturbed bone formation were observed due to the PEG-glycerol binder in the BAG S53P4 putty. Instead, intramedullary ossification and stromal cell reaction were more advanced in the putty group compared to the control group (p = 0.001 and p < 0.001). In conclusion, the novel mouldable BAG S53P4 putty showed reliable bone regeneration in bony defects without adverse tissue or cell reactions.