Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems Learning Representative Features for Robot Topological Localization Regular Paper

This paper proposes a new method for mobile robots to recognize places with the use of a single camera and natural landmarks. In the learning stage, the robot is manually guided along a path. Video sequences are captured with a front‐facing camera. To reduce the perceptual alias of visual features, which are easily confused, we propose a modified visual feature descriptor which combines the dominant hue colour information with the local texture. A Location Features Vocabulary Model (LVFM) is established for each individual location using an unsupervised learning algorithm. During the course of travelling, the robot employs each detected interest point to vote for the most likely place. The spatial relationships between the locations, modelled by the Hidden Markov Model (HMM), are exploited to increase the robustness of location recognition in cases of dynamic change or visual similarity. The proposed descriptors are compared with several state‐of‐the‐art descriptors including SIFT, colour SIFT, GLOH and SURF. Experiments show that both the LVFM based on the dominant Hue‐SIFT feature and the spatial relationships between the locations contribute considerably to the high recognition rate.
Perplexity on Reduced Corpora

This paper studies the idea of removing low-frequency words from a corpus, which is a common practice to reduce computational costs, from a theoretical standpoint. Based on the assumption that a corpus follows Zipf’s law, we derive tradeoff formulae of the perplexity of k-gram models and topic models with respect to the size of the reduced vocabulary. In addition, we show an approximate behavior of each formula under certain conditions. We verify the correctness of our theory on synthetic corpora and examine the gap between theory and practice on real corpora.
Wage Indexation and Inflation Persistence

This paper presents a model whose key feature is the existence of wage indexation clauses to lagged inflation. The main result that can be drawn is that the higher the proportion of labour contracts that include indexation clauses, the more important past inflation will be when explaining current inflation movements. However, a plausible (small) degree of indexation does not explain observed US inflation autocorrelations. Besides, optimal monetary policy is computed and the optimal degree of indexation is obtained. Finally, a two-country configuration is presented and the losses incurred as a result of setting a common monetary policy are calculated.
Big Data for Musicology

Digital music libraries and collections are growing quickly and are increasingly made available for research. We argue that the use of large data collections will enable a better understanding of music performance and music in general, which will benefit areas such as music search and recommendation, music archiving and indexing, music production and education. However, to achieve these goals it is necessary to develop new musicological research methods, to create and adapt the necessary technological infrastructure, and to find ways of working with legal limitations. Most of the necessary basic technologies exist, but they need to be brought together and applied to musicology. We aim to address these challenges in the Digital Music Lab project, and we feel that with suitable methods and technology Big Music Data can provide new opportunities to musicology.
A Framework for Agent Communication based on Goals and Argumentation

This paper proposes a formal framework for agent communication where agents can reason about their goals using strategic reasoning. This reasoning is argumentation-based and enables agents to generate a set of strategic goals depending on a set of constraints. Sub-goals are generated using this reasoning and they can be cancelled or substituted for alternatives during the dialogue progress. An original characteristic of this framework is that agents can use this strategic reasoning together with a tactic reasoning to persist in the achievement of their goals by considering alternatives depending on a set of constraints. Tactic reasoning is responsible of selecting the communicative acts to perform in order to realize the strategic goals. Some constraints are fixed when the conversation starts and others during the dialogue progress. The paper also discusses the computational complexity of such a reasoning.
Who limits environmental federalism in Croatia

This paper explores the role of different levels of government in the design, implementation and enforcement of environmental regulatory measures, including environmental financing mechanisms. The first section presents basic theoretical insights of fiscal federalism. Further, it reviews factors which most affect the decision regarding the governmental level to be responsible for environmental protection Â– externalities, information, costs, interjurisdictional competition, and government capabilities. The second section elaborates the institutional and administrative framework of environmental policy and questions why local authorities are reluctant to take a more active role in shaping and financing environmental policy. One Â«success storyÂ» of local initiative in Croatia is described. Additionally, this section presents some evidence on budget revenues related to environmental protection and natural resource management, both at central and local levels. The last section summarizes our analysis and offers several recommendations aiming at the improvement of environmental policy.
The response of amphibian communities to fish and habitat features in Mediterranean permanent ponds

Generalized linear models were used to test the effect of fish, using ponds with and without fish and habitat features as covariates, on richness and abundance of amphibian species. Five fish species and six amphibian species were recorded in 60 permanent ponds located in central Italy. The choice of covariates (macrophyte cover and pond surface area) was made after studying the correlations. The richness of amphibian species was not significantly affected by fish presence or macrophyte cover, in line with previous studies, since almost all the fish species were non-predatory. However, abundance of urodeles (newts) was negatively affected by fish and positively affected by macrophyte cover. Although fish may strongly influence the abundance and composition of amphibian communities, the results indicate that the cover of aquatic macrophytes may increase the available habitat for amphibians and therefore their abundance. Anuran species preferred ponds where fish were present, since both groups preferred larger ponds. Concordance between fish and amphibian species composition was not found by the Mantel and Partial Mantel tests. This indicates that the fish assemblages do not predict which amphibian species occur in the pond.
Causal Linkage between International Financial Integration and Economic Growth: Evidence from Post Globalized Indian Scenario

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a growing literature highlighting, at both theoretical and empirical level, the importance of having a deep financial integration to promote economic growth. The impact of international financial integration on economic growth continues to be one of the most debated issues among international economists. This paper re-examines causal relationship between financial integration and economic growth, more precisely, the effect of international financial integration on the economic growth in India. The Johansen cointegration test suggests that there is cointegration and hence, confirmed the existence of long run equilibrium relationship between financial integration and economic growth. The Granger- causality test finally confirmed the existence of uni-directional causality which runs from economic growth (GDP) to international financial integration (IFI) and not vice versa. This indicates that economic growth accelerates financial integration in India but financial integration does not found to have any impact of economic growth of India.It is suggested that government has to deepen foreign capital inflow as well as capital outflow and undertake essential measures to strengthen the long run relationship between financial integration and economic growth.
Human attribute analysis using a top-view camera based on multi-stage classification

This paper proposes pedestrians' attribute analysis such as gender and whether they have bags with them based on multi-layer classification. One of the technically challenging issues is we use only top-view camera images to protect the privacy of the pedestrians. The shape features over the frames are extracted by bag-of-features (BoF) using histogram of oriented gradients (HoG) vectors with the optimized parameters. Then, multiple classifiers using support vector machine (SVM) were generated by changing the parameters for the feature generation. A set of classification results using the multiple classifiers is fed to the second stage classifier to obtain the final results. The experimental results using 60-minute video captured at Haneda Airport, Japan, show that the accuracies for the gender classification and the with/without baggage classification were 95.8% and 97.2%, respectively with low false positive/negative rates, which is a significant improvement from our previous work which yielded 68.5% and 78.8% of accuracy, respectively.
Representation, Optimization and Compression of High Dimensional Data

The exponential growth of available computing power opens the door for new capabilities in modeling the objects in the high dimensional real world that we live in. Traditionally we have manipulated data defined on simple entities such as the real line (e.g. audio), a rectangle in the plane (e.g. images) or a three-dimensional open-ended box (e.g. video - sequence of planar images). Today graphics cards and accelerators, powerful processors and cheap memory allows us to interact with complex 3D and higher dimensional objects. We need to build mathematical representations, algorithms and software that will allow us to easily represent, compress and manipulate such objects. In this paper we will summarize some algorithms designed to that goal and used in the areas of robotics, computer graphics, 3D haptics (touch interaction with the environment) and data compression,. Those algorithms use novel methods in evolutionary computation, motion planning and geometric modeling, wavelets and embedded signal coding.
COMPLEMENTS OR SUBSTITUTES?: ORGANIZATION AND PROJECT TEAM STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPING THE CAPABILITY TO MOBILIZE AND CREATE NEW KNOWLEDGE *

Work in progress. Comments are welcome. Please do not quote without permission from the authors. helped improve previous versions of the paper. We would like to thank the managers of the companies studied for sharing their experiences. The first author would also like to thank The MIT-Japan Program Starr Foundation, the CS Holding Fellowship in International Business, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Doctoral Fellowship for the financial support for this study. All errors remain ours.
Tourism: Politics and Public Sector Management

Tourism looks set to replace oil as the most important global industry. James Elliot explores the ways in which governments of both developed and developing countries manage this increasingly diverse and volatile industry, providing a historic and economic overview as well as the reasons why and how governments are involved in tourism management. Using case studies from the UK, Australia and the Third World this wide ranging book covers: policy-making and planning; local governments; airlines and airports; and environmental control and sustainable development. Detailed information boxes and excerpts of official documents illustrate government management of the tourism system and provide critieria for evaluation
SLIDING MODES, Δ‐MODULATORS, AND GENERALIZED PROPORTIONAL INTEGRAL CONTROL OF LINEAR SYSTEMS

In this article, we attempt a reapproachment between sliding mode control of linear systems and classical control through the possibilities of evading state measurements and circumventing the use of asymptotic state observers in the sliding surface synthesis. This is shown to be possible thanks to the use of integral state reconstructors combined with iterated integral output error compensation. The proposed scheme is also robust with respect to unmatched perturbation inputs. A connection between sliding modes and classical analog Δ‐modulators, and their natural generalization, is also brought to attention as a tool for the realization of integral reconstructor based sliding mode control schemes.
Hayat: Harnessing Dark Silicon and variability for aging deceleration and balancing

Elevated power densities result in the so-called Dark Silicon constraint that prohibits simultaneous activation of all the cores in an on-chip system (in the full performance mode) to respect the safe thermal limits, thus enforcing a significant amount of on-chip resources to stay `dark' (i.e., power-gated). In this paper, we show that how Dark Silicon together with the manufacturing process induced variability can be harnessed to mitigate reliability threats in the nano-era. In particular, we propose a run-time system Hayat* that harnesses Dark Silicon to decelerate and/or balance temperature-dependent aging, while also considering variability in order to improve the overall system performance for a given lifetime. Experimental evaluation across a range of chips to account for process variations illustrates that our Hayat system can provide a significant aging/performance improvement and decelerates the chip aging by 6 months - 5 years (depending upon the required lifetime constraint) compared to state-of-the-art techniques.
Discrete wavelet packet transform based cooperative spectrum sensing for cognitive radios

Cognitive Radio (CR) can be viewed as a novel approach to improve the overall Spectrum utilisation. In a CR, the most challenging operation is to detect the presence of any unutilized frequencies (White Spaces) in the spectrum by using the appropriate Spectrum Sensing Technique. The choice of Spectrum Sensing Technique is an important factor which determines the performance of a CR. In this paper, the performance evaluation of various centralized and decentralized Cooperative spectrum sensing techniques with variation in SNR and Noise Uncertainty (NU) is performed. A Discrete Wavelet Packet Transform (DWPT) based Cooperative Spectrum Sensing scheme is introduced which has improved spectrum utilisation than the conventional Energy Detector (ED).
Analysis and modeling of a broad-band CPW to slotline transition in THz frequency

This paper analyzes a brand-band coplanar waveguide (CPW) to slotline transition using slotline ring only in THz band, which is a useful component in uniplanar MMIC applications. Two different types of air bridges were studied, which could suppress the slotline mode in CPW and widen the bandwidth. The paper shows a slotline ring fed by CPW printed in the center conductor of the CPW. Compared with the slotline ring printed in the ground plane, the proposed transitions have additional degrees of freedom, wider bandwidth and reduce the number of air bridges.
Good Citizenship and Educational Provision

Citizenship has been taught in school around the world for many years now, and is due to be introduced to the UK curriculum over the next few years. Teachers, Headteachres, administrators and policy makers have the opportunity to develop citizenship education programs for all their students. This book takes a pragmatic approach to the issue, and answers many of the crucial questions that will be emerging: what definitions of citizenship are to be followed, and how is citizenship taught? What approaches will be taken by teachers and what is the likely shape of best practice for citizenship education? How will the issue impact on schools and teacher training, and how should they rise to the challenge? What are the key factors influencing or threatening the development of good citizens? Based on the analysis of data collected form over 700 teachers the book provides real solutions to questions raised by citizenship education, and makes recommendations for practice in schools and in the training and development of teachers.
Optimization of microstructured fiber for dispersion compensation purposes

A new dispersion compensating microstructured optical fiber is presented. The dispersion slope of the designed fiber is opposite to the dispersion of standard PCF for potential broadband dispersion compensation. Since chromatic dispersion is optimized for wide bandwidth, the considered structure is suitable for repeaters in transmission systems with wavelength division multiplex. Another contribution of this work is a new flat-dispersion PCF operating at telecom wavelengths. Required dispersion, achieved by balancing material and waveguide dispersion are done for wide spectrum of wavelengths. For example, dispersion of −0.025 ps/nm/km from a wavelength of 1200 nm to 1700 nm is achieved using a highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber. The results are obtained by using the full-vectorial finite difference frequency domain method.
A Review of Flavobacterium Psychrophilum Biology, Clinical Signs, and Bacterial Cold Water Disease Prevention and Treatment

Bacterial coldwater disease and other infections caused by Flavobacterium psychrophilum are a worldwide concern, particularly for freshwater salmonid hatcheries. F. psychrophilum infections can be difficult to control; antibiotic resistance is common and no effective vaccines are currently available. This review summarizes the biology and charac- teristics of this important pathogen, as well as the techniques required for isolation and identification. In addition, the epi- demiology, clinical signs, treatment, and possible preventative measures of bacterial coldwater disease are discussed.
Proposed Architecture for Enhancing the Efficiency of Security Systems by using Systematic Combination of Different Recognition Systems

a future where the interaction between human and a computer has become advanced enough so as to be able to understand the motion of an arm, blink of an eye or even the emotions of a human. With the interaction between humans and computers becoming decidedly easy for us, now is the right time to use such an advanced technology in order to secure our information in computers and private networks. We are well aware of the importance and the money spent in order to either collect information or to protect information. Therefore, in this paper we are proposing the architecture of a security system that uses the gesture and human body action recognition techniques in the efforts of creating a safe, secure and spoof free system for access to critically important information.
CORRELATION OF THE THEORY OF MIND AND THE LEVEL OF COGNITIVE FUNCTIONING IN AUTISTIC CHILDREN

Introduction. A deficit in "theory of mind" (ToM), i.e. an inability to conceive what others may be thinking or feeling, has often been posited as an essential feature of childhood autism. Our research goal was to search for correlation between ToM-related tasks and the overall level of cognitive performance in autistic children. Material and methods. The study included 25 autistic children under treat ment at the Specialised Clinic of Diagnosis and Rehabilitation in Lublin, Poland. Each child had been under the care of the clinics for at least three years, and three consecutive series of examinations were administered to each child. We assessed the subjects' ability to initiate interpersonal contact and to make a parent look at an object presented by the subject (task ToM1), as well as their ability to simulate a given action with the use of symbolic objects (task ToM2). The ability to imitate others and the level of cognitive performance was assessed with the Psychoeducational Profile Revised. Results. We found significant correlation between performance on both ToM tasks and cognitive functioning, as well as cognitive verbal scores and the ability to imitate others. Conclusions. The autistic children we studied are capable of making inferences about the mental states of other people and of understanding and predicting their behavior. Moreover, the results of the study suggest that the ability to make social inferences is connected with the level of development of these skills. CORRELATION OF THE THEORY OF MIND AND THE LEVEL OF COGNITIVE FUNCTIONING IN AUTISTIC CHILDREN
Security Measures and the Apartment Market

This paper examines the effect of security measures on apartment rent and occupancy. Three variables representing various security measures are estimated in a simultaneous model of rent and occupancy. Providing 24 hour security has a significant positive effect on both rent and occupancy. Having a manager living on site or a manned front desk/restricted entry does not significantly affect rent. All three variables, however, have a significant positive effect on occupancy. It would appear that, although landlords cannot extract higher rents for some security measures, all three measures included in this study act to increase occupancy.
Migration Taxes and Human Capital Formation

Use of migration tax as an instrument for financing development expenditure in poorer countries has received renewed attention recently and is evolving as an important subject of research in development economics. This paper discusses a related issue where the revenue collected by taxing skilled and unskilled migrants moving from poor to rich countries can help raising the level of human capital in the source country. The paper provides an unifying analysis for two distinct strands of literature—one claims that lack of restriction on skill migration promotes human capital formation and the other, the more conventional one, argues for greater restriction against negative impact of brain drain. Considering that both human capital formation and migration involve risk, we then explore a connection between imposition of migration tax, human capital formation and risk aversion. For a country with low level of human capital to start with, we establish that a proportionally higher migration tax imposed on the unskilled migrants considerably raises the average level of human capital for all nonmigrants. The disincentive effect of the migration tax and its use as educational subsidy shifts the critical relative risk aversion among the non-migrants in favour of acquiring more human capital. The proposed migration tax pattern also raises the average income level of all individuals and only conditionally for the non-migrants.
Towards Qualitative Assessment of Machine Learning Algorithms: Utilising Signal Modality Characterisation

A novel method for the assessment of the qualitative performance of machine learning algorithms is proposed. This is achieved by a modification of the recently proposed "delay vector variance" (DVV) method for the signal modality characterisation. Based on the local predictability in phase space we propose to employ the scatter diagram of DVV features in order to gauge the changes in signal nature after being processed by machine learning algorithms. A set of comprehensive simulations on representative data sets supports the analysis.