Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Toward Accurate Road Detection in Challenging Environments Using 3D Point Clouds

In this paper, we propose a novel method for road recognition using 3D point clouds based on a Markov random field (MRF) framework in unstructured and complex road environments. The proposed method is focused on finding a solution for an analysis of traversable regions in challenging environments without considering an assumption that has been applied in many past studies; that is, that the surface of a road is ideally flat. The main contributions of this research are as follows: (a) guidelines for the best selection of the gradient value, the average height, the normal vectors, and the intensity value and (b) how to mathematically transform a road recognition problem into a classification problem that is based on MRF modeling in spatial and visual contexts. In our experiments, we used numerous scans acquired by an HDL‐64E sensor mounted on an experimental vehicle. The results show that the proposed method is more robust and reliable than a conventional approach based on a quantity evaluation with ground truth data for a variety of challenging environments.
IMPACT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES ON MODERN LEARNING

Information technologies (ITs), used in learning, make influence on the process of learning and change it providing with new opportunities and forms. When describing modern learning, different definitions such as traditional, virtual, distance and e-learning are used. The meaning of these terms is not clearly defined; therefore, they are sometimes used as synonyms, or the same identical phenomena are described as different concepts. This paper analyses the influence of ITs on the process of learning, defines different ways of learning based on the aspect of ITs usage, and justifies the usage of the definitions.
ABDUCTIVE PLANNING APPROACH FOR AUTOMATED WEB SERVICE COMPOSITION USING ONLY USER SPECIFIED INPUTS AND OUTPUTS

ABDUCTIVE PLANNING APPROACH FOR AUTOMATED WEB SERVICE COMPOSITION USING ONLY USER SPECIFIED INPUTS AND OUTPUTS Kuban, Esat Kaan M.S., Department of Computer Engineering Supervisor : Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nihan Kesim Çiçekli February 2009, 76 pages In recent years, web services have become an emerging technology fo r communication and integration between applications in many areas such as business to business (B2B) or business to commerce (B2C). In this growing technology, it is hard to compose web serv ices manually because of the increasing number and compexity of web services. There fore, automation of this composition process has gained a considerable amount of popularity. A u omated web service composition can be achieved either by generating the composition plan dyn mically using given inputs and outputs, or by locating the correct services if an a bstract process model is given. This thesis investigates the former method which is dynamicly generatin g the composition by using the abductive planning capabilities of the Event Calculus. E vent calculus axioms in Prolog language, are generated using the available OWL-S web se rvice descriptions in the service repository, values given to selected inputs from ontolog ies used by those semantic web services and desired output types selected again from the on tologies. Abductive Theorem Prover which is the AI planner used in this thesis, generates comp osition plans and execution results according to the generated event calculus axioms. In this thesi , it is shown that abductive event calculus can be used for generating web service s composition plans automatically, and returning the results of the generated plans by executing the n ecessary web
Energy Efficient HW/SW Integration in an Autonomous Microrobot

This paper addresses the integration of HW and SW for a 3 mm x 3 mm x 3 mm autonomous microrobot called I-SWARM. The robot is intended to be part of a swarm of up to 1000 members for studying large scale swarm behaviour. It presents an overall architecture of the robot and the SW used. The robot is the smallest autonomous robot of the world, equipped with a vibrating contact sensor, a four directional infrared communication module, vibrating legs and an ASIC. The software is comprised of a hardware abstraction layer and an interpreter for a specially designed control language.
Implementation of Information-Based Teaching System for Young College Teachers based on iOS Platform

Targeting the research and implementation of mobile-end live teaching systems, this paper develops a mobile mathematics learning system that can interact and exchange learning with students and teachers in any place with Internet access, designs geometric image drawing, mathematical formula layout and other key algorithms and studies the audio and video data structure on the iOS platform framework. Reality test results show that the live teaching system based on the iPad platform works well - the mathematical whiteboard module can achieve the drawing of geometric images and display and operation of algebraic formulas; the live video module can transmit video stream formed by the images captured by the camera or from the screen and the audio acquired to the server at real time, and can play the video stream from the server in time. This satisfies the requirement of mobile-end video broadcast and helps further promote the development of learning and teaching based on mobile terminal.
A knowledge base for evaluation and design of instructional multimedia software

Authors and users of multimedia educational software are in front of the lack of experience in this recent field. Our works are oriented toward the research of relevant literature that could help understanding what is the specificity of such software. We particularly focus on finding criteria that describe satisfyingly the domain, exploring various areas, from usability to picture semantic, cinematography or text theories. The first part of this paper sums up our research along with the set of criteria we organised. We then applied and validated the knowledge we elaborated and structured, making tools to assist in evaluating and designing multimedia pedagogical software. The second part of the paper present our knowledge base and quickly describe some interfaces we built to exploit it.
Efficient multi-bounce lightmap creation using GPU forward mapping

Computer graphics can nowadays produce images in realtime that are hard to distinguish from photos of a real scene. One of the most important aspects to achieve this is the interaction of light with materials in the virtual scene. The lighting computation can be separated in two different parts. The first part is concerned with the direct illumination that is applied to all surfaces lit by a light source; algorithms related to this have been greatly improved over the last decades and together with the improvements of the graphics hardware can now produce realistic effects. The second aspect is about the indirect illumination which describes the multiple reflections of light from each surface. In reality, light that hits a surface is never fully absorbed, but instead reflected back into the scene. And even this reflected light is then reflected again and again until its energy is depleted. These multiple reflections make indirect illumination very computationally expensive. The first problem regarding indirect illumination is therefore, how it can be simplified to compute it faster. Another question concerning indirect illumination is, where to compute it. It can either be computed in the fixed image that is created when rendering the scene or it can be stored in a light map. The drawback of the first approach is, that the results need to be recomputed for every frame in which the camera changed. The second approach, on the other hand, is already used for a long time. Once a static scene has been set up, the lighting situation is computed regardless of the time it takes and the result is then stored into a light map. This is a texture atlas for the scene in which each surface point in the virtual scene has exactly one surface point in the 2D texture atlas. When displaying the scene with this approach, the indirect illumination does not need to be recomputed, but is simply sampled from the light map. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of a technique that computes the indirect illumination solution for a scene at interactive rates and stores the result into a light atlas for visualizing it. To achieve this, we overcome two main obstacles. First, we need to be able to quickly project data from any given camera configuration into the parts of the texture that are currently used for visualizing the 3D scene. Since our approach for computing and storing indirect illumination requires a huge amount of these projections, it needs to be as fast as possible. Therefore, we introduce a technique that does this projection entirely on the graphics card with a single draw call. Second, the reflections of light into the scene need to be computed quickly. There-
Proxy caching for robust video delivery over lossy networks

Video delivery is anticipated to become among the most popular services in networking. The rapid advances in communication technologies, combined with the increasing efficiency of video compression techniques have paved the way for innovative and exciting video communication applications. However, the acceptance of video communication services can suffer severely from variations and deterioration of the video quality. In the absence of Quality-ofService aware networks, the communicating applications cannot control the service parameters offered to them by the underlying protocol layers. By consequence, the applications may experience varying packet delivery delays and often also packet loss. This results in severe degradation in the video quality as perceived by the user. In this dissertation, we develop a framework for prioritized video delivery. We introduce models for the estimation of distortion resulting from loss of video packets. Based on these models, we propose a video packet prioritization mechanism, which reflects accurately the importance of the video data carried in one packet for the video quality at the end user. Using this prioritization scheme, we design error control and avoidance techniques, which achieve near-to-optimal video quality. Given the trend towards wireless and mobile access to video services, we advocate the deployment of proxy caches in proximity to end users. Proxy caches should adapt the video stream to the needs of each video receiver, hence, ameliorating the perceived video quality, while still meeting tight delay constraints and low device capabilities. We introduce the idea of proxy caching for adaptive retransmission and show how appropriate retransmission schemes, based on size-distortion optimization, leads to significant quality improvements, even under strong delay and buffer constraints. We then construct a forward error correction code, which protects the different video packets at different levels based on their distortion-based priority. We show that our code achieves near-optimal quality at low code rates and end-to-end delays. Finally, we develop a rate estimation and shaping algorithm, which drops low priority video packets to meet rate constraints.
A model Scientific Computing course for freshman students at liberal arts Colleges

This paper describes a course called, “Introduction to Scien-tiﬁc Computing” that has been developed for freshman students at Wagner college, a private national liberal arts institution. The course trains students in computational thinking and involves hands-on learning of typical work-ﬂows in scientiﬁc data analysis and data visualization. Students develop proﬁciency in the symbolic computing platform, Wol-fram Mathematica R (cid:13) , to apply functional programming to develop data analysis and problem solving skills. The course presents computational thinking examples in the framework of various scientiﬁc disciplines. This exposure helps students to understand the advantages of technical computing and its direct relevance to their educational goals. The students are also trained to perform molecular visualization using open source software packages, such as Avogadro and Visual Molecular Dynamics, to understand secondary and tertiary protein structures, construct molecular animations, and to analyze computer simulation data. These experiences stimulate students to apply these skills across multiple courses and their research endeavors. Student self-assessment data suggests that the course satisﬁes a unique niche in undergraduate education. We have provided a sample syllabus, homework assignments, and examples of student work to aid in the design and implementation of similar courses at other institutions.
Color in the Motion-Picture Industry

Man's interest in the use of color for visual presentation goes back in history to his earliest known attempts at pictorial representation. Its use has persisted in his art and architecture, costume and decoration up to the present time. It was only natural that it should be introduced into his entertainment, games, pageant plays and finally motion pictures. — The first attempts to produce color in motion pictures were crude and far from realistic. Many color systems were invented, developed and used, only to be abandoned when other systems emerged that were preferable from a technical or commercial standpoint. In the course of slightly more than sixty years, the names of over one hundred color processes have appeared in motion-picture advertising and on the theater screens. All of the processes were not individual processes, some were merely names given by a producing company or laboratory to an existing process and still others were foreign films that utilized a process popular in the country in which they were produced. Elimination of the name only and the foreign processes leave approximately fifty which originated or were used in the United States. Each of these systems has contributed to the technological advancement of motion pictures through photographic chemistry and/or optics.
Automatic classification of citation function by new linguistic features

Citation function presents the functional role of a reference in its citing article. These functional information enrich the citation analysis in a semantic perspective and can be used for improving the applications of citation analysis. Though many works on automatic classification have been done, the performance of existing studies cannot satisfy the requirement of analysis on large-scale academic data. In order to overcome the performance bottleneck, in this poster we present some useful features by analyzing and finding unique linguistic patterns in citation context. Our experiments on existing dataset shows the effectiveness of these new features with Support Vector Machine. The performance reaches 86.54% accuracy and a macro F-score of 0.795, which gains an improvement over 20% than previous study on the same dataset.
Cross-domain expression recognition based on sparse coding and transfer learning

Traditional facial expression recognition methods usually assume that the training set and the test set are independent and identically distributed. However, in actual expression recognition applications, the conditions of independent and identical distribution are hardly satisfied for the training set and test set because of the difference of light, shade, race and so on. In order to solve this problem and improve the performance of expression recognition in the actual applications, a novel method based on transfer learning and sparse coding is applied to facial expression recognition. First of all, a common primitive model, that is, the dictionary is learnt. Then, based on the idea of transfer learning, the learned primitive pattern is transferred to facial expression and the corresponding feature representation is obtained by sparse coding. The experimental results in CK +, JAFFE and NVIE database shows that the transfer learning based on sparse coding method can effectively improve the expression reco.
Efficient Orchestration of Data Centers Via Comprehensive and Application Aware Trade Off Exploration

Abstract : Software-defined network (SDN) orchestration, the problem of integrating and deploying multiple network control functions (NCFs)while minimizing suboptimal network states that can result from competing NCF proposals, is a challenging open problem. In this work, we formulate SDN orchestration as a multiobjective optimization problem, present an evolutionary algorithm designed to explore the NCF tradeoff space comprehensively and avoid local optima, and propose a new application-aware approach that explicitly models resource preferences of individual application workloads. Further, we propose a new logical application workload (LAW) abstraction to enable precomputation of the required relative positioning of an applications virtual machines (VMs) and allocation of these VMs in a single atomic step, leading to online algorithms that are one order of magnitude faster than existing solutions for placing data center workloads. For an instance of the SDN orchestration problem subject to four independent NCFs attempting to optimize network survivability, bandwidth efficiency, power conservation, and computational contention, we demonstrate that our approach enumerates a wider range of, and potentially better, solutions than current orchestrators, for data centers with hundreds of switches, thousands of servers, and tens of thousands of VM slots.
Identification of Noisy Arabic Speech Utterance using Multiwavelet Compression

This paper presents a method that uses the multiwavelet transform in compressing a noisy speech signal and then, testing its effect on the reconstruction of noisy speech utterances after decompression. The ability of multiwavelet transform in compacting signal energy is employed to separate the significant signal features from the noise contribution. The proposed technique showed an improved SNR for the processed speech samples. In each performed experiment, the correlation coefficients are computed and compared to the correlation coefficient yielded by a similar compression scheme based on the cosine transform. The use of the multiwavelet based compression technique is superior in identification of noisy Arabic speech utterance especially at high input SNR values.
Reading recovery: An orchestration of literacy for the "at risk" first grader

Reading Recovery is a relatively new program in California as it was only introduced in 1991-1992 school year. Its growth in the last four years has been gratifying, but still there are many who do not know what Reading Recovery is and how it is different from the other programs that have been used to help children who are at risk. A brief history of reading instruction gives background information on how Reading Recovery was developed and how it is unique. Additionally, an overview of daily lessons for children and training for Reading Recovery teachers is explored. By design, Reading Recovery fits into an educational system and is meant to be something that children get in addition to their classroom learning. Each player in the educational system can contribute a paft in the success of this prograitl. For this reason, this media project was created. ft is hoped that this video can be used to inform teachers, administrators, policy makers, school boards, and parents about what Reading Recovery is and how it can help low progress children catch up to their peers and become independent readers.
A HYBRID APPROACH FOR INDEXING AND SEARCHING THE HOLY QURAN

Searching and retrieving information from the Holy Quran has recently received special attention by Muslim and Arab researchers. Many applications and websites offered to perform search through the Quran using keywords, semantic search, or even both. Arabic; as the language of the Quran, is having a complex structure and thus the searching process of Arabic scripts is rather more difficult than English. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach; using a combination of syntactic (keyword) and word semantics, to search through the Quran text. The Quran text was pre-processed and represented in a XML format. A system was implemented using Python where the concept of regular expressions is used to test the approach with a Graphical User Interface used to manipulate user requests. Good and promising results from the approach were obtained.
Blended learning in MBA education: a cross-cultural experiment

e-Learning has entered the mainstream in higher education and many institutions are implementing technology-mediated learning at some level. This paper outlines the case of a course taught jointly in 2010 over three months by two graduate programmes in management at the University of Tsukuba in Japan and the Grenoble Ecole de Management in France through a video-conferencing system and other information and communications technology tools. The authors used a blended learning approach aimed at increasing collaboration among instructors and students remotely located. The results of a questionnaire survey of students conducted during the course provide practical recommendations for developing and managing a hybrid course balancing the positive aspects of e-learning with the benefits of face-to-face instruction, while suiting the participants’ cultural learning preferences. Particular insights include selecting a relevant blended learning course topic, addressing student diversity and distinct learning motives, and bringing ‘tangible diversity’ through the exchange of faculty.
Simulation using Interruptions

Simulation of control systems with large amount of interacting objects requires a powerful computer, because traditionally systems with polling are used. The number of conditions to check on each step of simulations becomes so large, that models become unfunction-al. The new simulation technique, using program interruptions, which are organized by the model itself is proposed. Replace of polling by interruptions lets radically increase the speed of simulation and simplify the model structure. Ill. 6, bibl. 7 (in English; abstracts in English and Lithuanian). http://dx.doi. org/10.5755/j01.eee. 108.2. 150
Social computing in blogosphere

Social computing is defined as computing through social media. It refers to the endeavor to understand complex human interactions in social media like blogs, social networking services, wikis, social bookmarking (folksonomies), and online media sharing through computational means. Research in social computing builds on participatory Web characterized by rich Web applications, user generated contents, user enriched contents, user developed widgets, and collaborative environment of participatory web and citizen journalism. Social media has observed a phenomenal growth in past few years. This work focuses on studying the categories of social media and characteristics that make social media immensely popular. Social computing presents both challenges and opportunities. It is a vibrant and fledgling field with many research challenges including phenomenal growth, dynamism, long tail phenomenon, sparse link structure, lack of ground truth, information quality, and data collection. This thesis focuses on the research in Blogosphere—the network of Web logs. Research towards these challenges is presented in the context of the blogosphere, and motivated by the need for identifying influential bloggers in communities, extracting clusters in blogs, and searching for "familiar strangers" in egocentric networks. Novel solutions such as using the network and content information available at the blogosphere simultaneously, leveraging the invaluable and extremely dynamic collective wisdom of the bloggers, constructing social identity of bloggers based on their group affiliations, and providing an evaluation framework that leverages the power of social media to these problems are presented aiming at understanding individuals, communities and their interactions, paving the way for further research and development.