Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multimodal feedback for mid-air gestures when driving

Mid-air gestures in cars are being used by an increasing number of drivers on the road. Usability concerns mean good feedback is important, but a balance needs to be found between supporting interaction and reducing distraction in an already demanding environment. Visual feedback is most commonly used, but takes visual attention away from driving. This thesis investigates novel non-visual alternatives to support the driver during mid-air gesture interaction: Cutaneous Push, Peripheral Lights, and Ultrasound feedback. These modalities lack the expressive capabilities of high resolution screens, but are intended to allow drivers to focus on the driving task. A new form of haptic feedback — Cutaneous Push — was defined. Six solenoids were embedded along the rim of the steering wheel, creating three bumps under each palm. Studies 1, 2, and 3 investigated the efficacy of novel static and dynamic Cutaneous Push patterns, and their impact on driving performance. In simulated driving studies, the cutaneous patterns were tested. The results showed pattern identification rates of up to 81.3% for static patterns and 73.5% for dynamic patterns and 100% recognition of directional cues. Cutaneous Push notifications did not impact driving behaviour nor workload and showed very high user acceptance. Cutaneous Push patterns have the potential to make driving safer by providing non-visual and instantaneous messages, for example to indicate an approaching cyclist or obstacle. Studies 4 & 5 looked at novel uniand bimodal feedback combinations of Visual, Auditory, Cutaneous Push, and Peripheral Lights for mid-air gestures and found that non-visual feedback modalities, especially when combined bimodally, offered just as much support for interaction without negatively affecting driving performance, visual attention and cognitive demand. These results provide compelling support for using non-visual feedback from in-car systems, supporting input whilst letting drivers focus on driving. Studies 6 & 7 investigated the above bimodal combinations as well as uniand bimodal Ultrasound feedback during the Lane Change Task to assess the impact of gesturing and feedback modality on car control during more challenging driving. The results of study Seven suggests that Visual and Ultrasound feedback are not appropriate for in-car usage, unless combined multimodally. If Ultrasound is used uni-modally it is more useful in a binary scenario. Findings from Studies 5, 6, and 7 suggest that multimodal feedback significantly reduces eyes-off-the-road time compared to Visual feedback without compromising driving performance or perceived user workload, thus it can potentially reduce crash risks. Novel design recommendations for providing feedback during mid-air gesture interaction in cars are provided, informed by the experiment findings.
Notes on range extension and geographic variation of calls in Adenomera thomei (Anura: Leptodactylidae)

New localities are herein reported for Adenomera thomei in Minas Gerais state, increasing its known distribution towards the Brazilian northwest and expanding knowledge on its habitat use. The advertisement calls of Adenomera thomei here reported exhibit variation in the call parameters known for this species, but also reveal a degree of overlap with the calls of a closely related undescribed species, suggesting that further research is needed to elucidate geographic call variation and population identities.
Elephant grass ensiled with wheat bran compared with corn silage in diets for lactating goats

The objective of this study was to evaluate the use of wheat bran as an additive in elephant-grass silage on intake and digestibility of the nutrients, ingestive behavior, and yield and chemical composition of milk. Eight goats with 45 days of lactation were distributed in a (4 × 4) Latin square design.The treatments consisted of corn silage (CS), elephant-grass silage without wheat bran (EGS), elephant-grass silage with 10% wheat bran (EGS+10%WB), and elephant-grass silage with 20% wheat bran (EGS+20% WB). There was no difference in dry matter (DM) intake between diets EGS and CS in g d−1. However, the animals fed EGS+10%WB had lower DM and organic matter (OM) intakes than the animals fed CS in g kg−1 d−1 of body weight. There were lower non-fiber carbohydrate and metabolize energy intakes by animals fed diets based on elephant-grass silages than those fed CS. The EGS+20%WB diet provided lower digestibility coefficients of DM, OM, crude protein, ether extract, neutral detergent fiber (NDF) and digestible nutrients of the diet than the diet with CS. The NDF digestibility coefficient with diet EGS was greater than that obtained with diet CS. The diets with corn and elephant-grass silages provided similar milk yield levels. However, the animals fed diets based on EGS+20% WB produced less total-solids-corrected milk than the animals fed CS. No difference was found in the milk physicochemical properties and ingestive behavior of goats in this study. Corn silage can be replaced by elephant-grass silage harvested at 50 days of regrowth and elephant-grass silage with 10% wheat bran without influencing goat performance, behavioral variables, physiological variables, milk yield or the milk physicochemical properties.
Seed germination and risks of using the invasive plant Eichhornia crassipes (Mart.) Solms-Laub. (water hyacinth) for composting, ovine feeding and biogas production

Abstract Water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes (Mart.) Solms-Laub. ) is an invasive aquatic weed that has one of the highest growth indices of vascular plants, producing large amounts of biomass. Its use for composting, livestock feed and biogas production has been proposed as a management strategy for its control. The work presented here is an assessment of the potential spread of water hyacinth due to the release of seeds from the by-products of some of these manufacturing processes. We tested experimentally if the seeds were destroyed or did not lose germinability when they had passed through the gut of sheep, remained in compost piles or been used in biogas bioreactors. We made optical and electronic microscopic observations, and calculated retrieval and germination percentages of the seeds subjected to these treatments. After having passed through the gut of sheep, the anatomical organization of the seed was completely destroyed, only 30.50 ± 5.83% of the seeds were retrieved and the germinability was null (0 ± 0%). The biogas production and compost-treated seeds both had retrieval percentages of 100 ± 0% and germination values of 1.00 ± 0.57 and 3.50 ± 0.96% respectively, with several anatomical damages. The use for compost or biogas production as a management strategy to control this pest is not completely safe from an environmental perspective and the selected management option should focus on sheep fodder production.
Effects of different photoperiods and wavelengths of light on the life‐history traits of an aphidophagous ladybird, Coelophora saucia (Mulsant)

Abstract: The influence of three photoperiods, viz. short day [8 : 16 h; light : dark (L : D)], long day (16 : 8 h; L : D) and continuous light (24 : 0 h; L : D) and four wavelengths of light, viz. white (control), yellow, blue and red on pre‐imaginal development and reproductive performance of a ladybird, Coelophora (=Lemnia) saucia (Mulsant) (Col., Coccinellidae) have been investigated under laboratory conditions. Long‐day photoperiod and white light resulted in low immature stage mortality. Total larval period was longest under short‐day and red‐light conditions. Females kept at long‐day photoperiod and under white light showed better reproductive performance than those placed under other photoperiods and wavelengths.
Modeling and control for vibration suppression in a large flexible structure with jet thrusters and piezoactuators

Active control of vibrations is a fundamental subject in the field of large flexible space structures. This paper first discusses the problem of modeling and simulation of a large laboratory structure equipped with both air jet thrusters and piezoactuators, which presents some nontrivial issues for the latter kind of actuators. Different control systems for vibration suppression are then taken into consideration. First, a nonlinear control system using jets, and two linear controllers [linear quadratic (LQ) and decentralized force feedback] using piezoactuators are discussed; then, a control system using both kinds of actuators is presented, exploiting the specific features of each. Experimental results relevant to all the cases are presented.
Finding People with Emotional Distress in Online Social Media: A Design Combining Machine Learning and Rule-Based Classification

Many people face problems of emotional distress. Early detection of high-risk individuals is the key to prevent suicidal behavior. There is increasing evidence that the Internet and social media provide clues of people’s emotional distress. In particular, some people leave messages showing emotional distress or even suicide notes on the Internet. Identifying emotionally distressed people and examining their posts on the Internet are important steps for health and social work professionals to provide assistance, but the process is very time-consuming and ineffective if conducted manually using standard search engines. Following the design science approach, we present the design of a system called KAREN, which identifies individuals who blog about their emotional distress in the Chinese language, using a combination of machine learning classification and rule-based classification with rules obtained from experts. A controlled experiment and a user study were conducted to evaluate system performance in searching and analyzing blogs written by people who might be emotionally distressed. The results show that the proposed system achieved better classification performance than the benchmark methods and that professionals perceived the system to be more useful and effective for identifying bloggers with emotional distress than benchmark approaches.
Computational modeling for visual attention analysis

Visual scenes typically contain massive amounts of content that cannot be processed in a short time due to the limited processing capacity of the human visual system. The term, visual attention, is a biologically inspired and psychologically driven mechanism that works by selecting visually relevant information and filtering out the redundant contents. This thesis is a thorough summary of the main subjects around computational modeling for visual attention analysis, consisting of several published papers corresponding to my research progress. First, the data preparation for computational modeling will be introduced, including eye movement data, eye tracking data collection and eye tracking datasets facilitating the evaluation of computational modeling of visual attention. Second, computational models for visual attention analysis, or saliency models, are presented from traditional unsupervised methods to deep saliency models. Third, the subject about saliency integration will be illustrated that unifies multiple saliency maps from the multiple candidate saliency models for better accuracy. The contributions of this study are three folds. Firstly, we collect a task-driven eye tracking dataset for visual attention analysis. Secondly, we propose three saliency models for in-depth investigation in modeling visual attention, including an unsupervised model using the bidirectional propagation method, a Convolutional Neural Networks based model by connecting the Dense Conditional Random Fields for multi-scale saliency refinement, and a Convolutional Neural Networks based model with cascade Conditional Random Fields for joint model training. Thirdly, we propose a saliency integration method and conduct comprehensive experiments and analysis on the topic. Finally, we summarize the contributions of the work and propose the potential applications of saliency models and the extended saliency related topics to boost applications of saliency approaches on other computer vision topics.
A STUDY ON MOBILE ERP APPLICATION USAGE OF SMARTPHONES: A CASE OF TRAVELING SALESMAN IN PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANY

Today, many organizations have implemented the ERP system to enhance the efficiencies of their business processes regardless of the company size and industry sector. Moreover, lots of the organizations have already adopted the mobile version of the ERP system, which actually provide the interface to enable to get access to the back-end ERP system. In this sense, it is obvious that mobile applications that connects to the company’s ERP systems is very useful tool for traveling sales forces since they can complete their tasks without having to open their laptop. In Korea, Pharmaceutical companies are one of the largest industry sectors who are quite dependent on the salesperson’s competencies. However, not many studies regarding the mobile ERP application usage in pharmaceutical industry were found. Thus, this study examined what influences the salesperson’s satisfaction level when they use a mobile ERP application. In addition, the relationships between the user satisfaction level in pharmaceutical industry and that of other industry sectors were investigated. To achieve this goal, this study examined variety of existing mobile application evaluation model, and constructed a conceptual model by adopting some factors from TAM and D&M’s IS success model in order to satisfy the research objectives. This study found not only the significant factors that influenced the satisfaction level of the sales forces in pharmaceutical companies, but also the factors of user satisfactions that varied across industry sectors.
Measuring Wood Quality in Standing Trees

This report summarizes a state-of-the-art review conducted on the topic of field measurement of the quality of wood in trees. The foundation science of micro-resistance drilling and acoustic-based techniques for use with woody materials is presented, and use of these techniques for the detection of biodeterioration in wood is discussed. Quantification of the physical and mechanical properties of wood, in standing timber, is reviewed. Studies designed to examine the use of these techniques with trees are summarized, and a list of commercially available technologies that use these techniques is presented.
HydraList

Increased capacity of main memory has led to the rise of in-memory databases. With disk access eliminated, efficiency of index structures has become critical for performance in these systems. An ideal index structure should exhibit high performance for a wide variety of workloads, be scalable, and efficient in handling large data sets. Unfortunately, our evaluation shows that most state-of-the-art index structures fail to meet these three goals. For an index to be performant with large data sets, it should ideally have time complexity independent of the key set size. To ensure scalability, critical sections should be minimized and synchronization mechanisms carefully designed to reduce cache coherence traffic. Moreover, complex memory hierarchy in servers makes data placement and memory access patterns important for high performance across all workload types. In this paper, we present HydraList, a new concurrent, scalable, and high performance in-memory index structure for massive multi-core machines. The key insight behind our design of HydraList is that an index structure can be divided into two components (search and data layers) which can be updated independently leading to lower synchronization overhead. By isolating the search layer, we are able to replicate it across NUMA nodes and reduce cache misses and remote memory accesses. As a result, our evaluation shows that HydraList outperforms other index structures especially in a variety of workloads and key types.
A PEER-ASSISTED SYSTEM INFORMATION ACQUISITION USING FAST SCANNING ALGORITHM IN HETEROGENEOUS NETWORK

Femtocells have become an integral part of mobile heterogeneous network which is now being widely utilized as solution of coverage and bandwidth limitation. Coverage area could be expanded, and enormous volumes of traffic can be relieved from macrocell. Coexistence of numerous femtocells in macrocell coverage area certainly need a robust mechanism to integrate in such scenario. In this paper, simulation of peer-assisted fast scanning handover has been done to assist inbound CSG femtocell users. To enhance the handover procedure, a fast scanning done by evaluating some parameters, network conditions and used intra-frequency measurement scenario with the help of collocated users. The results show that the proposed method able to mitigate the unnecessary handover and lowered the system interruption time better than that of existing method approximately 85%.
Preliminary Study of Kleptoplasty in Foraminifera of South Carolina

Recent studies of living foraminifera, microscopic aquatic protists, indicate that some species have the ability to steal photosynthetic plastids from other microorganism and keep them viable through a process called kleptoplasty. Studying the symbiotic relationships within these diverse protists gives insight not only into evolutionary history, but also their importance to the ecosystem. We determined the presence of these kleptoplastic species and identified presence and origin of sequestered plastids based on morphological identification and molecular data from samples collected at Waties Island, South Carolina. We identified two kleptoplastic genera (Elphidium and Haynesina) and two non-kleptoplastic genera (Ammonia and Quinqueloculina) present in the lagoon. Phylogenomic results indicated that sequestered plastids originated from pennate diatoms from the genus Amphora. However, further research is needed to prevent bias due to environmental impact and corroborate host specificity and plastid origin.
IMPROVING TRAFFIC SIGN DETECTION WITH DEEP CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS

Motivated by the observation that traffic signs are still not well-detected by deep convolution neural network-based methods because of the constraint of the size of feature maps, this paper is focused on improving the performance of traffic sign detection, especially for small-sized traffic signs. In this paper, a novel approach for traffic sign detection based on Faster R-CNN framework is proposed. First, Inception-ResNet model is used as the base network to provide a rich and discriminative hierarchy of feature representations. Next, a deconvolutional module is integrated into Faster R-CNN framework to bring additional context information which is helpful to improve the detection accuracy for small-sized traffic signs. Finally, atrous convolution is adopted in the region proposal network to enlarge the receptive field of the synthetic feature map. Experimental results on the German traffic sign detection benchmark show that the proposed approach obtained an accuracy comparable to other the state-of-the-art approaches in traffic sign detection.
Securing Fog Storage Nodes using an Attribute-based Encryption Scheme and Multi-Factor Authentication

Fog computing is an extended and distributed infrastructure where the application processes are managed between the end devices and the edge of the grouped system for better and reliable services. Fog computing is a non-insignificant augmentation of cloud which comes in to the same security and production difficulties of cloud computing. Existing conventional techniques like digital certificates and signature verification schemes suffers due to the advancement of cyber criminals in revoking the certificates. To enable authentication and confidentiality among a group of gathered fog nodes, in this paper, a novel CP-ABE based scheme along with multi-factor user authentication (CP-ABE-MA) is proposed. Further, the paper uses some obfuscation technique which obscures the data to evade the illegal user access. In general, the cloud is a RAW data type which consists of any data format, hence respective on the data type the encryption conversion can be used. CP-ABE can be connected to letters in order and alphanumeric sort of information and jumbling can be connected to a numeric kind of information. Applying encryption methods on the cloud information will give more security against unapproved use. Privacy could be accomplished with a blend of encryption and confusion. In order to evaluate the efficiency, the proposed protocol is implemented and tested in AVISPA and compared with the certificate-based schemes. Further, the proposed protocol outflanks the existing certificate based schemes with 97% accuracy.
Effects of Delayed Placement and Used Litter on Broiler Yields

Abstract Male broiler chicks having either immediate or a 24-hr delayed access to feed and water after transportation from the hatchery were placed in floor pens having new or used pine shaving. All birds received common feeds not containing antimicrobials other than coccidiostats to 7 wk. Chicks experiencing delayed access had a 50% reduction in yolk sac contents compared to those placed earlier, reduced weight gain at 3 wk which was never recovered, and additional mortality Employing used litter also led to reductions in weight gain at 3 wk, but birds subsequently compensate. Broilers delayed in placement had reduced carcass weight and a decreased percentage of grade A's, but proportion of parts after cone deboning was unaffected. Although birds reared on used litter had carcass weight similar to those on new litter, bruised drumsticks were more apparent and the proportion of breast fillets increased at the expense of rib cage and frame, particularly with delayed placement. For the most part, the adverse effects of delayed placement were independent of those resulting from used litter.
THE IMPACT OF CHARACTERISTICS OF ONLINE FAN COMMUNITY AND FANS ON LOYALTY TO STARS AND THE COMMUNITIES

This study seeks to enhance understanding of online fan communities. We examined how online fan communities and their members affect loyalty to stars and the communities. We also examined how social and psychological factors such as social presence and identification mediate those impacts. By surveying online fans of Korean Wave Stars, we found that, among the online fan community characteristics, social connectedness, self-disclosure and deep profiling affect social presence, and, among the fan characteristics, self-focused attention and empathy affect social presence. We also found that social presence affects online fan community identification and star identification, which in turn affect online fan community loyalty and star loyalty. Moreover, star identification is found to transit to online fan community identification while star loyalty transited to online fan community loyalty. These findings provide significant theoretical and practical implications for the entertainment and media industries by adding to scant research on online fan communities.