Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Real-Time Glints Rendering with Preﬁltered Discrete Stochastic Microfacets

Many real-life materials have a sparkling appearance. Examples include metallic paints, sparkling fabrics, snow. Simulating these sparkles is important for realistic rendering but expensive. As sparkles come from small shiny particles reﬂecting light into a speciﬁc direction, they are very challenging for illumination simulation. Existing approaches use a 4-dimensional hierarchy, searching for light-reﬂecting particles simultaneously in space and direction. The approach is accurate, but extremely expensive. A separable model is much faster, but still not suitable for real-time applications. The performance problem is even worse when illumination comes from environment maps, as they require either a large sample count per pixel or preﬁltering. Preﬁltering is incompatible with the existing sparkle models, due to the discrete multi-scale representation. In this paper, we present a GPU friendly, preﬁltered model for real-time simulation of sparkles and glints. Our method simulates glints under both environment maps and point light sources in real-time, with an added cost of just 10 ms per frame with full high deﬁnition resolution. Editing material properties requires extra computations but is still real-time, with an added cost of 10 ms per frame.
Soil Biology and Biochemistry

Dead wood is initially a nitrogen (N) poor substrate, where the N content increases with decay, partly due to biological N 2 ﬁ xation, but the drivers of the N accumulation are poorly known. We quanti ﬁ ed the rate of N 2 ﬁ xation in decaying Norway spruce logs of di ﬀ erent decay stages and studied the potential regulators of the N 2 - ﬁ xation activity. The average rate for acetylene reduction in the decaying wood was 7.5nmol ethylene g − 1 d − 1 , which corresponds to 52.9 μ gN kg − 1 d − 1 . The number of nifH copies (g − 1 dry matter) was higher at the later decay stages, but no correlation between the copy number and the in vitro N 2 ﬁ xation rate was found. All recovered nifH sequences were assigned to the order Rhizobiales, and therein mostly (60%) to methane oxidizing genera. We con ﬁ rm that nitrogen ﬁ xing methanotrophs are present in all the wood decay phases and suggest that their interaction between methane producing organisms in decaying wood should be further studied.
Internship report Evaluation and optimization of polling systems

Throughout this internship report, polling systems play a central role. Polling systems are queueing systems consisting of multiple queues, attended by a single server. The server can only serve one queue at a time. Whenever the server moves from one queue to another, a stochastic, non-zero switch-over time is incurred. The server never idles; even when there are no customers waiting in the whole system the server keeps roving between queues. In the literature on these systems, often Poisson arrivals are assumed. In many applications, however, the Poisson assumption is not realistic. This motivates us to study polling models with renewal arrivals, which represent a far broader class of arrival streams. Firstly, an approximation of the complete waiting time distribution in polling systems with renewal arrivals is derived. This approximation may act as a basis for design decisions within polling systems. Secondly, polling systems with renewal arrivals and batch service are studied. Using characteristics of the obtained distributional approximation, the question is addressed how sizes of batches should be chosen in order to optimize the waiting time.
SOME ASPECTS OF INTER DISTRICT DISPARITIES IN TAMIL NADU

The study analyzes the inter-district variations in levels of income and human development in Tamal Nadu in recent years. It also tries to analyze the causes of the relatively low levels of income of some districts. For that purpose, it uses the district level data on per capita income and other indicators and constructs the human development index. The results indicate that the benefits of growth have not been spread evenly. There is a group of districts on the eastern part of the state below Kanchipuram, which has lagged behind economically and socially. However, the income inequality is much higher than the inequality in human development. The low-income districts are associated with low industrial development, low agricultural productivity, low human development, and larger proportion of SC/ST population and high infant mortality rate. We hope that the study could help policymakers and others to formulate appropriate policies to reduce the disparities.
Keskusteluaiheita – Discussion papers

: This paper describes divergences in employers’ and employees’ opinions on the proper share of local bargaining in contract wage gains in Finland. Employers want the locally bargained wage share to be approximately half of the total wage rise, while the majority of employees would prefer this share to be in the region of 1-24%. Employers in firms that are large, foreign-owned or operate in the financial services industry desire the largest locally bargained share of contract wages. Employees in large firms, on the other hand, resist local bargaining. When the firm uses performance-related pay, employees would prefer a large role for local bargaining in contract wage gains.
HILBERT SPACE OF PROBABILITY DENSITY FUNCTIONS WITH AITCHISON GEOMETRY

Compositional data analysis motivated the introduction of a complete Euclidean structure in the simplex of D parts. This was based on the early work of J. Aitchison (1986) and completed recently when Aitchinson distance in the simplex was associated with an inner product and orthonormal bases were identified (Aitchison and others, 2002; Egozcue and others, 2003). A partition of the support of a random variable generates a composition by assigning the probability of each interval to a part of the composition. One can imagine that the partition can be refined and the probability density would represent a kind of continuous composition of probabilities in a simplex of infinitely many parts. This intuitive idea would lead to a Hilbert-space of probability densities by generalizing the Aitchison geometry for compositions in the simplex into the set probability densities.
Discussion Papers in Economics Dynamics of Output Growth, Consumption and Physical Capital in Two-Sector Models of Endogenous Growth

This paper proposes and analyses a measure of distance for the unit root hypothesis tested against stochastic stationarity. It applies over a family of distributions, for any sample size, for any specification of deterministic components and under additional autocorrelation, here parameterised by a finite order moving-average. The measure is shown to obey a set of inequalities involving the measures of distance of Gibbs and Su (2002) which are also extended to include power. It is also shown to be a convex function of both the degree of a time polynomial regressors and the moving average parameters. Thus it is minimisable with respect to either. Implicitly, therefore, we find that linear trends and innovations having a moving average negative unit root will necessarily make power small. In the context of the Nelson and Plosser (1982) data, the distance is used to measure the impact that specification of the deterministic trend has on our ability to make unit root inferences. For certain series it highlights how imposition of a linear trend can lead to estimated models indistinguishable from unit root processes while freely estimating the degree of the trend yields a model very different in character.
The ControlShell component-based real-time programming system, and its application to the Marsokhod Martian Rover

Real-time system software is notoriously hard to share and reuse. This paper walks through the methodology and application of ControlShell, a component-based programming system for real-time system software development. ControlShell combines graphical system-building tools, an execution-time configuration manager, a real-time matrix package, and an object name service into an integrated development environment. It targets complex systems that require on-line reconfiguration and strategic control.ControlShell takes advantage of functional object hierarchies to enable code sharing and reuse. It gains flexibility by supporting easy interconnectivity of these objects. It features a unique configuration control system for changing operating modes.The paper concludes by examining the application of this framework to a teleoperated rover under development as a joint effort by NASA, several Russian space research institutes, and US industry. The rover is able to function remotely under control of a virtual reality interface.
Data Mining Techniques to Predict Weather: A Survey

Weather forecasting is one of the major applications in current technology. Data mining uses various technologies to forecast weather, predict rainfall, wind pressure, humidity, etc. Classification in data mining differentiates the parameters to view the clear information. The prediction of weather must be accurate and also the weather should be forecasted earlier at least a month before which will be helpful for many applications like agriculture, military, etc. This paper surveys the various techniques implemented in data mining to predict weather.
EasyChair Preprint No 1157 Mapping Distributional Semantics to Formal Concept Lattice-based Property Norms

Distributional models characterize the meaning of a word by its observed contexts. They have shown great success in many natural language processing tasks, however they are unable to differentiate clearly between different semantic relations. In cognitive psychology, a word is represented by its relations with properties. In this work, we propose that the mathematical structure of formal concept lattice (FCL) can be attached to property-based concepts in the property norm space to model the conceptual hierarchies. The k-nearest neighbors (KNN) method is then used to build a mapping from a distributional semantic space onto a FCL-based property space automatically for predicting property norms of unknown concepts. We evaluate our method on word embeddings learned with different types of contexts and demonstrate the potential of learning large-scale property-based concept representations from a modest-sized human-annotated perceptual data.
Timing of Mid-Cretaceous Relative Sea Level Changes in the Western Interior: Amoco No. 1 Bounds Core

: The Upper Albian-Coniacian section cored in the Amoco No. 1 Rebecca K. Bounds well in Greeley County western Kansas, serves as a reference section for the timing of depositional events in the Western Interior Seaway. Chronostratigaphy ofthis section was calibrated by a multidisciplinary study of nannofossils, dinoflagellates, spores, pollen, foraminifers, and mollusks. Range data of the biota in the Bounds core were compared by graphic correlation to a global composite standard that includes key reference sections in Europe and North Africa. The basal Upper Albian sequence boundary is overlain by transgressive facies of the Purgatoire Formation dated as 102.8 Ma. The upper Upper Albi an sequence boundary between the Purgatoire and Dakota Formations marks a hiatus in deposition from 99.4 to 98.2 Ma. The Albian-Cenomanian intra-Dakota sequence boundary spans from 96.0 to 94.1 Ma. The Turonian-Coniacian sequence boundary between the Carl ile and Niobrara Forma- tions spans from 89.9 to 88.3 Ma. Maximum flooding is documented within the Purgatoire at 101.4 Ma and in the Graneros Shale at 93.7-92.8 Ma. The Albian-Cenomanian boundary defined by European ammonites and correlated by dinoflagellates is placed at the intra-Dakota unconformity. Graphic correlation is an independent method of measuring the durations of Milankovitch-scale depositional cycles and can separate climatic cycles from longer tectono-eustatic cycles. Four orders of depositional cycles are recorded by lithological changes, and their durations are constrained by graphic correlation. The longest cycles range from 2.0 to 3.4 My and are found in the sequences defined by the Purgatoire Formation, the lower part of the Dalcota Formation, the upper Dakota and Graneros Formations, and the Greenhorn and Carlile Formations. The next lower order comprises transgressive-regressive subcycles of about 0.5 My long in the Purgatoire. The third-scale cycles include sandstone-mudrock cycles in the Dakota, limestone-marl cycles in the lower part of the Greenhorn, and cyclical strata in the Fort Hays Limestone Member of the Niobrara Formation that are about 100 ka long. The shortest cycles are limestone-marl couplets in the upper Greenhorn that are about 41 ka long.
Reconstruction Method for Landscape Image

Creating video contents and game need many resources. These contents are constructed significant object and background. Background is usually landscape and needs many resources to create. Landscape image is perspective projection of three dimensional spatial. This means that one image includes spatial information. This paper proposed new 2.5 dimensional modeling for landscape image. The reconstructed 2.5 dimensional image demonstrated good result.
Disorder-speci ﬁ c functional abnormalities during temporal discounting in youth with Attention De ﬁ cit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Autism and comorbid ADHD and Autism

Attention De ﬁ cit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are often comorbid and share cognitive abnormalities in temporal foresight. A key question is whether shared cognitive phenotypes are based on common or different underlying pathophysiologies and whether comorbid patients have additive neurofunctional de ﬁ cits, resemble one of the disorders or have a different pathophysiology. We compared age-and IQ-matched boys with non-comorbid ADHD (18), non-comorbid ASD (15), comorbid ADHD and ASD (13) and healthy controls (18) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during a temporal discounting task. Only the ASD and the comorbid groups discounted delayed rewards more steeply. The fMRI data showed both shared and disorder-speci ﬁ c abnormalities in the three groups relative to controls in their brain-behaviour associations. The comorbid group showed both unique and more severe brain-discounting associations than controls and the non-comorbid patient groups in temporal discounting areas of ventromedial and lateral prefrontal cortex, ventral striatum and anterior cingulate, suggesting that comorbidity is neither an endophenocopy of the two pure disorders nor an additive pathology. & 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).
A study of spell checking techniques for Indian Languages

: Spell checker is one of the most important tools for any language to be digitized. A spell checker is a software tool / plugin that identifies and corrects any spelling mistakes in a text in a particular language. Spell checkers can be combined with other research areas focusing on linguistics like Machine translation, Information retrieval, natural language processing etc. or they can be clubbed with other softwares like compilers, word processor softwares. In this paper authors have made a study on the developmental approaches as well as roles of spell checker with respect to various applications based on Indian languages.
Evaluation of Hydrocarbons in Tissues of Bivalve Mollusks from the Red Sea Coast T

 Abstract — The concentration of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH) in clams ( A. glabrata ) was examined in samples collected from Alseef Beach, 30 km south of Jeddah city. Gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) was used to analyze the 14 PAHs. The concentration of total PAHs was found to range from 11.521 to 40.149 ng/gdw with a mean concentration of 21.857 ng/gdw, which is lower compared to similar studies. The lower molecular weight PAHs with three rings comprised 18.14% of the total PAH concentrations in the clams, while the high molecular weight PAHs with four rings, five rings, and six rings account for 81.86%. Diagnostic ratios for PAH source distinction suggested pyrogenic or anthropogenic sources.
Screening and Isolation of PHB Producers from Plant Sources

As a result of the problems associated with petrochemical based plastics as regards to its adverse impact on the environment coupled with rapid depletion of fossil fuels, there has been extensive research done on search, production and development of fermentation process to produce biodegradable plastics (Phanse et al., 2011; Chandra & Rustgi, 1988; Ghanbarzadeh & Almasi, 2013; Kalia et al., 2000). Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA), being biodegradable, can be used as an ecofriendly alternative to the conventionally produced synthetic polymers which are nonbiodegradable and responsible for numerous environmental hazards (Lee, 1996). A wide variety of microbes when cultivated under unfavourable growth conditions, are capable of accumulating PHA as an intracellular reserve food material. The accumulated PHA can be utilized later as a carbon and energy source by the producing bacteria (Nehra et al., 1994). Polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB) is the most common representative of PHA family and is produced by various International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 5 Number 4 (2016) pp. 413-423 Journal homepage: http://www.ijcmas. com
Influence of agricultural practices on micrometerological spatial variations at local and regional scales

Soil–vegetation–atmosphere transfers significantly influence interactions and feedbacks between vegetation and boundary layer, in relation with plant phenology and water status. The current study focused on linking micrometeorological conditions to cultural practices at the local and regional scales (lower than 100 km2), over an agricultural region in South Western France. This was achieved considering observation and modelling tools designed for characterising spatial variabilities over land surfaces. These tools were the ASTER high spatial resolution optical remote sensing data, and the SEBAL spatialised surface energy balance model. Surface bidirectional reflectance and brightness temperature were first derived from ASTER data through solar and thermal atmospheric radiative transfer codes, and next used to infer surface radiative properties required for model simulations. Assessing model consistency in terms of air temperature simulations gave satisfactory results when intercomparing against weather station data, although basic model assumptions were not systematically verified in terms of spatial variability. Next, spatialised simulations of evapotranspiration and air temperature were analysed at the regional and local scales, in relation with pedology, land use, and cultural practices. It was shown model estimates were consistent with the considered crops and the related cultural practices. Irrigation appeared as the main factor amongst others (soil, landuse, sowing date…) explaining the micrometeorological variability. Although interesting and promising in terms of linking micrometeorological conditions to cultural practices, the results reported here emphasised several difficulties, specially about capturing subfield scale variability and monitoring the considered processes at an appropriate temporal sampling.
Pervasive and Mobile Computing

The Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) have been proposed as viable wireless connection method for the implementation of the Internet of Things (IoT), thanks to their wide coverage, low complexity and low power consumption. In this scenario, LoRaWAN emerged as a de-facto leading technology, because of its openness and the current availability of many devices (like sensors and gateways). Several implementations of the LoRaWAN specifications have appeared in the market, each one showing support for different hardware, different software architectures, and different operating systems. Thus, the need of test procedures for comparing them is evident. In this paper, a test methodology for the experimental assessment of architectural delays of LoRaWAN implementations is presented. The new approach is composed of: a mapping phase, needed for highlighting the LoRaWAN blocks inside the implementation under test; followed by a measurement phase, in which the relevant timestamps are taken along the information path from LoRaWAN node to LoRaWAN customer application. The use and the effectiveness of the proposed methodology are shown by means of use cases that involve different LoRaWAN implementations and several hardware platforms. The experiments described in the paper are not intended to evaluate particular implementations but they are aimed to assess the suitability of the proposed methodology. The results demonstrate that the proposed approach can be used to compare the performance of entire LoRaWAN systems, helping the owner of the infrastructure and the user in making choices and optimizations.
Face recognition system using 2 D and 3 D information fusion

The system using both 3D and 2D face information has been developed and tested. We use 3D face surface reconstructed from 4 images. These face images are obtained from 4 calibrated high definition cameras without any additional structured illumination. 2D face texture information is obtained using frontal face 3D view with face texture. Neural networks are used both for 2D texture recognition and for 2D and 3D fusion. The developed face recognition system achieves the accuracy of 98,5%.
MIT Open Access Articles Security challenges and opportunities in adaptive and reconfigurable hardware

—We present a novel approach to building hardware support for providing strong security guarantees for computations running in the cloud (shared hardware in massive data centers), while maintaining the high performance and low cost that make cloud computing attractive in the ﬁrst place. We propose augmenting regular cloud servers with a Trusted Computation Base (TCB) that can securely perform high-performance computations. Our TCB achieves cost savings by spreading functionality across two paired chips. We show that making a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) a part of the TCB beneﬁts security and performance, and we explore a new method for defending the computation inside the TCB against side-channel attacks.