Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Animated Talking Head with Personalized 3D Head Model

Natural Human-Computer Interface requires integration of realistic audio and visual information for perception and display. An example of such an interface is an animated talking head displayed on the computer screen in the form of a human-like computer agent. This system converts text to acoustic speech with synchronized animation of mouth movements. The talking head is based on a generic 3D human head model, but to improve realism, natural looking personalized models are necessary. In this paper, we report a semi-automatic method for adapting a generic head model to 3D range data of a human head obtained from a 3D-laser range scanner. This personalized model is incorporated into the talking head system. With texture mapping, the personalized model offers a more natural and realistic look than the generic model. The model created with the proposed method compares favorable to generic models.
Série Scientifique Scientific Series Protecting Directors and Officers from Liability Arising from Aggressive Earnings Management Protecting Directors and Officers from Liability Arising from Aggressive Earnings Management

CIRANO Le CIRANO est un organisme sans but lucratif constitué en vertu de la Loi des compagnies du Québec. Le financement de son infrastructure et de ses activités de recherche provient des cotisations de ses organisations-membres, d'une subvention d'infrastructure du Ministère du Développement économique et régional et de la Recherche, de même que des subventions et mandats obtenus par ses équipes de recherche. CIRANO is a private non-profit organization incorporated under the Québec Companies Act. Its infrastructure and research activities are funded through fees paid by member organizations, an infrastructure grant from the Ministère du Développement économique et régional et de la Recherche, and grants and research mandates obtained by its research teams. Le CIRANO collabore avec de nombreux centres et chaires de recherche universitaires dont on peut consulter la liste sur son site web. Les cahiers de la série scientifique (CS) visent à rendre accessibles des résultats de recherche effectuée au CIRANO afin de susciter échanges et commentaires. Ces cahiers sont écrits dans le style des publications scientifiques. Les idées et les opinions émises sont sous l'unique responsabilité des auteurs et ne représentent pas nécessairement les positions du CIRANO ou de ses partenaires. This paper presents research carried out at CIRANO and aims at encouraging discussion and comment. The observations and viewpoints expressed are the sole responsibility of the authors. They do not necessarily represent positions of CIRANO or its partners. Résumé / Abstract Un sujet qui demeure d'actualité quand on pense à la gouvernance des entreprises est le niveau de protection auquel les dirigeants devraient avoir droit en cas de poursuite par les actionnaires. Pour atteindre ce but, nous examinons s'il y a un lien entre la gestion agressive des courus discrétionnaires et la demande d'assurance de la responsabilité civile des administrateurs et dirigeants d'entreprise (ARCAD ci-après). Nous trouvons dans la présente étude que la taille des courus ne semble avoir aucun impact sur la demande d'assurance, que ce soit le fait même d'avoir un contrat ou la limite de la police. Le fait que les courus soient positifs semble toutefois avoir un impact sur le fait que les entreprises possèdent une ARCAD ou non. Nous demeurons perplexes de voir que même si l'ARCAD protège les dirigeants contre le coût de poursuites au civile, ces mêmes dirigeants ne voient pas cela comme une invitation au laxisme dans la supervision des pratiques comptables des entreprises. A lingering topic in …
Natural language processing of lyrics

We report experiments on the use of standard natural language processing (NLP) tools for the analysis of music lyrics. A significant amount of music audio has lyrics. Lyrics encode an important part of the semantics of a song, therefore their analysis complements that of acoustic and cultural metadata and is fundamental for the development of complete music information retrieval systems. Moreover, a textual analysis of a song can generate ground truth data that can be used to validate results from purely acoustic methods. Preliminary results on language identification, structure extraction, categorization and similarity searches suggests that a lot of profit can be gained from the analysis of lyrics.
Design and Study of Scintillator Crystals coupled to Silicon Photomultipliers for PET Application

A relatively new photodetector, the silicon photomultiplier (SiPM), is well suited for PET applications. It has similar sensitivity and gain to the industry standard photomultiplier tube (PMT), but has advantages such as smaller size and insensitivity to magnetic field. These properties make SiPMs an active area of research in the PET field. I will study a simplified setup, comprised of two antiparallel SiPM/LSO coupled detectors using a Na-22 positron source. The coincidence timing and energy resolution will be determined for several crystal geometries and SiPM configurations. To simulate the experiment, GEANT4 code will be formulated to reproduce the results. Once the code successfully simulates this simple set-up, it can be extrapolated to simulate more complicated (and realistic) detector designs.
Leveraging Transactional Execution for Memory Consistency Model Emulation

System emulation is widely used in today’s computer systems. This technology opens new opportunities for resource sharing as well as enhancing system security and reliability. System emulation across different instruction set architectures (ISA) can enable further opportunities. For example, cross-ISA emulation can enable workload consolidation over a wide range of microprocessors and potentially facilitate the seamless deployment of new processor architectures. As multicore and manycore processors become pervasive, it is important to address the challenges toward supporting system emulation on these platforms. A key challenge in cross-ISA emulation on multicore systems is ensuring the correctness of emulation when the guest and the host memory consistency models differ. Many existing cross-ISA system emulators are sequential, thus they are able to avoid this problem at the cost of significant performance degradation. Recently proposed parallel emulators are able to address the performance limitation; however, they provide limited support for memory consistency model emulation. When the host system has a weaker memory consistency model compared to the guest system, the emulator can insert memory fences at appropriate locations in the translated code to enforce the guest memory ordering constraints. These memory fences can significantly degrade the performance of the translated code. Transactional execution support available on certain recent microprocessors provides an alternative approach. Transactional execution of the translated code enforces sequential consistency (SC) at the coarse-grained transaction level, which in turn ensures that all memory accesses made on the host machine conform to SC. Enforcing SC on the host machine guarantees that the emulated execution will be correct for any guest memory model. In this article, we compare and evaluate the overheads associated with using transactions and fences for memory consistency model emulation on the Intel Haswell processor. Our experience of implementing these two approaches on a state-of-the-art parallel emulator, COREMU, demonstrates that memory consistency model emulation using transactions performs better when the transaction sizes are large enough to amortize the transaction overhead and the transaction conflict rate is low, whereas inserting memory fences is better for applications in which the transaction overhead is high. A hybrid implementation that dynamically determines which approach to invoke can outperform both approaches. Our results, based on the SPLASH-2 and the PARSEC benchmark suites, demonstrate that the proposed hybrid approach is able to outperform the fence insertion mechanism by 4.9% and the transactional execution approach by 24.9% for two-thread applications, and outperform them by 4.5% and 44.7%, respectively, for four-threaded execution.
A Study on the Factors Influencing the Intention of Blog Usage

Blogs are a new type of media that have recently become popular users on the World Wide Web and have influence throughout society. The purpose of this study is to examine social motivations influencing intention of blog usage. Based on Technology Acceptance Model and Motivation Theory, This study considered perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, reputation, reciprocity, enjoyment of helping, social identity as the determinants of influencing the intention of blog usage. The purposed model was empirically evaluated using online survey data collected from 342 user of popular blog site in Korea (NAVER Blog , cyworld mihompy, daum blog, yahoo blog etc) The results revealed that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, reciprocity, social identity affected directly the intention of blog usage. Also social identity has moderate effect via reciprocity and enjoyment of helping on blog usage. This study contributes to a theoretical understanding of the factors as social motivation that affect the usage of blogs. Practically this study results provide blog service providers useful strategic insights and service guideline to enhance user's intention of blogs.
How Financial and Reputational Incentives Can Be Used to Improve Medical Care

Objectives Narrative review of the impact of pay‐for‐performance (P4P) and public reporting (PR) on health care outcomes, including spillover effects and impact on disparities. Principal Findings The impact of P4P and PR is dependent on the underlying payment system (fee‐for‐service, salary, capitation) into which these schemes are introduced. Both have the potential to improve care, but they can also have substantial unintended consequences. Evidence from the behavioral economics literature suggests that individual physicians will vary in how they respond to incentives. We also discuss issues to be considered when including patient‐reported outcome measures (PROMs) or patient‐reported experience measures into P4P and PR schemes. Conclusion We provide guidance to payers and policy makers on the design of P4P and PR programs so as to maximize their benefits and minimize their unintended consequences. These include involving clinicians in the design of the program, taking into account the payment system into which new incentives are introduced, designing the structure of reward programs to maximize the likelihood of intended outcomes and minimize the likelihood of unintended consequences, designing schemes that minimize the risk of increasing disparities, providing stability of incentives over some years, and including outcomes that are relevant to patients' priorities. In addition, because of the limitations of PR and P4P as effective interventions in their own right, it is important that they are combined with other policies and interventions intended to improve quality to maximize their likely impact.
Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems ( PACIS ) 2014 DATA DRIVEN DETECTION STRATEGY ENGINE FOR BETTER INTRUSION DETECTION ON CLOUD COMPUTING

In this paper, we attempt to base on CIDS framework and initiate a Data Driven Detection Strategy Engine (3DSE), a new thinking on identifying suspected users by adopting Decision Tree and Logistic Regression techniques to mine the usage patterns (from audit log and alert log) of different cloud member. Moreover, according to the analytical mining results, we also propose a danger-coefficient ranking model, which allows system to adopt different security strategies to monitoring users of different security levels. Deploying this engine, cloud system can be automatically trained up and become more efficient and effective on intrusion detection.
Influences of the Thalamus on the Survival of Subplate and Cortical Plate Cells in Cultured Embryonic Mouse Brain

The afferent and efferent connections of the cerebral neocortex develop simultaneously toward the end of embryogenesis. At this stage, the neocortex comprises two main cell-dense layers: the thicker and more superficial cortical plate (future layers 2–6) and the thinner underlying subplate. Many early thalamocortical projections temporarily innervate the subplate before leaving it to locate their ultimate targets in the overlying cortical plate. The subplate then disappears. In this study, we performed in vitro experiments on late embryonic murine brain to test whether the thalamus can influence the survival of cortical plate and subplate cells at this stage. In isolated organotypic cortical explants from embryonic day 19 mice, most of the cells that had formed the subplate died. Coculture with a thalamic explant prevented this loss; coculture with additional cortical or cerebellar explants did not. By contrast, many cells in or destined for the cortical plate survived even in isolated cortical explants; coculture with a thalamic explant did not alter the numbers of these cells that survived. Our results suggest that the thalamus provides trophic support for subplate cells but not for late embryonic cortical plate cells. In vivo, a loss of thalamic-derived trophic support for the subplate late in embryogenesis, consequent on the movement of thalamocortical axons into the cortical plate, may contribute to subplate death.
Hardware-In-The-Loop testing of PSS for synchronous generator

This paper presents the Hardware-In-The-Loop type simulation, where an analog power system stabilizer (PSS) is connected in closed loop with a real-time virtual synchronous generator. The synchronous generator along with its excitation controller is simulated in real-time using Real-Time Application Interface (RTAI) on Linux. Forward Euler numerical integration technique with a suitable step-size has been employed for obtaining the solution of the generator model differential equations. The PSS hardware is interfaced with the virtual synchronous generator using a peripheral component interconnect (PCI) card and the simulation results are captured on the oscilloscope. The real-time simulations are also validated using off-line MATLAB simulations. This setup demonstrates different aspects of realtime simulation and a laboratory-oriented Hardware-In-The-Loop simulation.
a UMTS upconversion mixer in 0.25 um CMOS

The design of a fully integrated upconversion mixer for use in a UMTS transmitter is presented. UMTS is the system which is developped for wireless transmission with high datarates. It uses Code Division Multiple Access to separate users of the same channel at the same time. The transmitted signal of one user has a nonconstant envelope due to filtering that is applied to limit the bandwidth. In the future higher Crest-factors are expected due to the demand for higher datarates. So a high linearity of the transmit chain is necessary to transmit the data undistorted. A high-level analysis is performed to recalculate the specifications for out-of-band emissions and in-band signal quality to more designoriented specifications for the upconversion mixer (distortion, LO-leakage, mismatch). A mixer topology is chosen for its excellent linearity. Several non-idealities of this topology are analysed in detail. Since the mixer is not able to drive the load by itself, a high-frequency buffer is required after mixing. A number of current-mirror stages yields current gain with a low distortion. In the design trade-offs are made between mixerand buffer-gain, the number of stages and their mirrorfactors. The most optimal trade-offs are obtained by use of a simulated annealing optimisation loop. By using the accurate mathematical models developed a fast and accurate optimization can be performed. The presented design uses a 3-stage current buffer, delivering −5dBm of output power to a 50Ω load with an IM3 ≤ −49dB. Keywords— RF CMOS, mixers, upconversion, UMTS, linearity
Toward a Pedagogy of Place: Finding Common Ground for Rural Researchers, Teacher Educators, and Practitioners. Roundtable Notes.

There is an evolving paradigm shift in the field of rural education away from emulating urban schools and toward a pedagogy of place. This shift is influenced by the following trends: 1) the rediscovery of the unique features of rural and small schools as strengths to be nurtured, not problems to be solved; 2) the recognition that centralized, large-scale organizational models resulting from a century of global industrial expansion and resource extraction have been inappropriate for rural contexts, and the environmental sensitivity and new appreciation for rural places that has grown in response to these often destructive models; 3) the acknowledgment of the role of teachers as gatekeepers of change within classrooms, the centrality of rural schools within their communities, and the many distinctive features of revitalized rural schools as essential elements of educational reform; 4) the redesign of teacher education to prepare teachers for restructured rural schools; 5) the connection of the classroom with the community through service learning and environmental education programs based on study and stewardship of local ecosystems; 6) the use of new information technologies for developing teacher networks that combat rural teacher isolation; 7) increased efforts to raise levels of sensitivity and tolerance among rural students toward racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity; 8) the use of rural films and literature as source materials for a rural curriculum; and 9) rural teachers as producers of curricula that are appropriate to their needs and contexts. (TD) ******************************************************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** Toward a Pedagogy of Place: Finding Common Ground for Rural Researchers, Teacher Educators, and Practitioners Roundtable notes prepared for the 1997 AERA Conference in Chicago David Leo-Nyquis Saint Michael's College Colchester, VT Paul Theobald University of Wisconsin/LaCrosse U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office of Educational Research and Improvement EDUC DONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) This document has been reproduced as reCeived from the person or Organization originating it. 0 Minor changes have been made to improve reproduction Quality. Points of view or opinions stated in this document do not necessarily represent official OERI position or policy. BEST COPY AVAILABLE 2 "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY
Origin of Evolution versus Origin of Life: A Shift of Paradigm

The question of the primordial ancestor must be approached through the search for the origin of evolution, not through the search for the origin of life. There is a major issue with the concept of life because it is impossible to define, thus is not a scientific but a metaphysical concept. On the contrary, evolution may be defined by as few as three conditions. These do not necessarily involve biopolymers. However, such an approach must give clues to explain the emergence of distinct lineages to allow Darwinian natural selection. A plausible solution exists within an autotrophic lipidic vesicle-based model that is presented. The model requires the existence of hydrothermal sites such as the Lost City Hydrothermal Field leading to specific constraints. For this reason Mars and Europa may be questioned as possible cradles of evolution. If we replace the search for the origin of life by the one for the origin of evolution our priority first is to find a consensus on the minimal conditions that would allow evolution to emerge and persist anywhere in the universe.
Martian Volcanic Gases: Are They Terrestrial-like?

Introduction: Volcanism was a major geological process in the geologic history of Mars [1-3]. Associated volcanic degassing [4,5] should have affected the composition of the atmosphere, contributed to the greenhouse effect [6,7], and influenced the chemistry and mineralogy of crustal materials through condensation of volcanic aerosols and chemical weathering [8]. Despite the importance of volcanic degassing, the chemical composition of martian volcanic emanations is weakly constrained. The presence of H 2 O, CO 2 , oxidized sulfur, and Cl compounds in the atmosphere and surface materials implies that typical martian volcanic gases contain water, carbon oxides, and S-, Cl-bearing species. Even with tentative detection of magmatic H 2 O and CO 2 in tiny fluid-gas inclusions in pyroxene in the ALH84001 meteorite [9] and the presence of a magmatic amphibole in several martian rocks, martian meteorites generally reveal volatile-depleted magmatic environments [e.g., 10]. Although terrestrial volcanic gases are often used as analogs in martian climatic and geochemical models [4-7], several factors could affect bulk composition, speciation, and the amount of martian volcanic gases compared to their terrestrial counterparts. Here I briefly review those factors and then evaluate the effects of pressure, temperature, oxidation state, and the Cl/S ratio on speciation of modeled martian volcanic gases. Why is Mars' volcanic degassing different from the Earth's? The lack of plate tectonics, low gravity, and low atmospheric pressure on Mars, as well as discrepancies in bulk planetary compositions could account for differences in the composition and abundance of terrestrial and martian volcanic gases. The lack of subduction of lithospheric plates may cause a sharp contrast in the oxidation states [11,12] and volatile contents between the mantle and crust. It could also account for higher liquidus temperatures of H 2 O-depleted mantle magmas. Deep mantle plumes, which could have been responsible for the formation of major volcanic structures (Alba Patera, Syrtis Major, and major Tharsis volcanoes), could have supplied reduced high-temperature and volatile-depleted magmas, consistent with mostly effusive eruptions in those areas. A high percentage of ultramafic rocks among the martian meteorites [10] and the detection of abundant olivine in surface materials [13] imply a broad occurrence of high-temperature magmas that could be characterized by specific degassing products. Nevertheless, mor-phologic evidence of explosive activity, especially in earlier periods of martian history, indicate degassing of volatile-rich magmas [3]. The majority of the volatiles degassed from those and many other martian volca
Performance evaluation of downlink LTE system

The design of the LTE physical layer is heavily influenced by the requirements for high peak transmission rate (100 Mbps DL/50 Mbps UL), spectral efficiency and designed to have wider channels up to 20MHz. Unfortunately, different constraints have a strong influence on system performance such as the velocity of user equipment and effect of multipath channel. In this paper, we carry out a performance evaluation of downlink LTE system for orthogonal frequency division multiple accesses (OFDMA) under LTE parameters. Different schemes of LTE configuration are described and simulated. Simulation result shown that the system performance is increased when the system is adapted to the state of the transmission channel.