Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rate-compatible QC-LDPC codes design based on EXIT chart analysis

This paper proposes a "column extension" design method for rate-compatible quasi-cyclic (QC) low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, which can provide efficient multi-rate coding schemes for communication systems with flexible spectrum efficiency. The optimization of degree distributions among multiple code rates makes the designed QC-LDPC codes achieve excellent performance at each code rate, while the nested parity-check matrix structure of the designed codes facilitates the implementation of multi-rate encoder/decoder and offers the advantage of low-complexity. A comparison with the multi-rate LDPC codes in DVB-S2 specification is addressed. Extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) chart analysis predicts the superiorities of the optimized degree distributions in Eb/N0 thresholds, and the bit error rate (BER) simulation results show that the designed codes perform 0.03-0.1 dB better than the DVB-S2 64K codes at each typical code rate, with even shorter code length.
Associations of Independent IL2RA Gene Variants with Intermediate Uveitis

Purpose The genetic background for the concomitance of uveitis and other autoimmune diseases remains elusive. Here the role of two IL2RA gene variants (rs11594656 and rs12722495) was investigated in intermediate uveitis and HLAB27 acute anterior uveitis. Materials and Methods One hundred fifty-nine patients with HLAB27 acute anterior uveitis, 85 patients with intermediate uveitis, 138 HLAB27 negative controls and 100 HLAB27 positive controls were recruited for this case-control study. Main outcome measures were genotype distribution and allelic frequencies determined by polymerase chain reaction. Results The frequencies of carriers of the minor allele at rs11594656 and rs12722495 were significantly different in patients with intermediate uveitis compared to HLAB27 positive and negative controls combined (p<0.05). For rs12722495 the minor G allele was protective (genotypic OR: 0.29 [0.12-0.69]), and for rs11594656 the minor A allele conferred risk (genotypic OR: 1.59 [1.09-2.32]). No significant differences in genotype distribution were found between patients with HLAB27 acute anterior uveitis and HLAB27 positive or negative control subjects. Conclusions We found rs11594656 and rs12722495 to be associated with intermediate uveitis but not with HLAB27 acute anterior uveitis. The genetic heterogeneity found at the IL2RA locus could help explain patterns of concomitance with other autoimmune diseases.
Analysis of Stroke using texture features

Analyzing the occurrence of Stroke is a challenging issue among different patients. The research work presented here is a two phase classification method in which the initial phase automatically detects the stroke affected and normal Computed Tomography (CT) images while the second phase classifies the hemorrhagic and ischemic stroke from a set of stroke affected images. The proposed method has been tested with a number of CT brain images and has achieved promising results. A classification accuracy of 91% has been obtained by SVM(Support Vector Machine ). The performance evaluation of the proposed approach validates its effectiveness and robustness.
On-board vision system for lane recognition and front-vehicle detection to enhance driver's awareness

The objectives of this research are to develop a driving assistance system that can locate the positions of the lane boundaries and detect the existence of the front-vehicle. By providing warning mechanism, the system can protect drivers from dangerousness. In lane recognition, Gaussian filter, peak-finding procedure, and line-segment grouping procedure are used to detect land markers successfully and effectively. On the other hand, vehicle detection is achieved by using three features, such as underneath, vertical edge, and symmetry property. The proposed system is shown to work well under various conditions on the roadway. The vehicle detection rate is higher than 97%. Besides, the computation cost is inexpensive and the system's response is almost real time. Thus, the results of the present research work can improve traffic safety for on-road driving.
Unified 2-D X-Alignment for Improving the Observability of Response Compactors

Despite the advantages of performing response compaction in integrated-circuit testing, unknown response bits (x's) inevitably reflect into loss in test quality. The distribution of these x's within the captured response, which varies for each test pattern, directly impacts the number of scan cells observed through the response compactor. In this paper, we propose a unified 2-D x-alignment technique in order to judiciously manipulate the distribution of x's in the test response prior to its compaction. The controlled response manipulation is performed on a per pattern basis, in the form of scan chain delay and intra-slice rotate operations, and with the objective that x's are aligned within as few scan slices and chains as possible. Consequently, a larger number of scan cells are observed after compaction for any test pattern. In an effort to tackle the unified 2-D x-alignment problem and to achieve maximum overall observability, we first decipher the interaction between 1-D x-alignment operations, and formulate 1-D and 2-D x-alignment operations all as maximum satisfiability (MAX-SAT) problems; a weighted MAX-SAT formulation is necessitated in the 2-D case to identify the best possible 2-D x-alignment, which may differ from back to back application of the individual best possible 1-D alignments in two dimensions. The proposed technique is test set independent, leading to a generic, simple, and cost-effective hardware implementation. While we show in this paper that x-alignment improves horizontal and vertical compactors, covering a wide spectrum of compactors, it is expected to improve other types of compactors as well by manipulating the x-distribution properly.
Two Hand Tracking Using Colour Statistical Model with the K-means Embedded Particle Filter for Hand Gesture Recognition

Particle filtering is an efficient and successful technique for tracking 2D and 3D motion through an image. We present the enhanced tracking of two hands based on a statistical model using only a skin colour feature with particle filtering for gesture recognition. Our framework employs one particle filter per hand individually with the pixel-wise classification of the likelihood of the skin in the window search. The skin classifier decision was trained from a set of skin samples in YCrCb space using an elliptical model. The tracking scheme employs a reliability measurement derived from the particle distribution which is used to adaptively weight the colour classification. The K-means algorithm is used to discriminate the split and merge between left and right hand. Experiments with a set of videos including the movement of two hands in cluttered backgrounds show that adaptive use of our scheme provides improvement compared to use with other techniques such as mean-shift tracking.
Quarterly Series for the Portuguese Economy: 1977-2003

There is no consistent quarterly database for the Portuguese economy available for general use and covering a relatively long period. There are Quarterly National Accounts (QNA) and these are produced by the Instituto Nacional de Estatistica (INE), starting in 1977. Moreover, some methodological changes, the last of which stemmed from the introduction of the European System of Accounts (ESA95), do not allow for a reasonably homogenous dataset for the period from 1977 up to the present. Moreover, the QNA do not yet provide information on households’ disposable income and on the labour market. This situation makes it difficult to carry out studies on the Portuguese economy based on quarterly figures, studies such as building quarterly forecast models and producing a more adequate analysis of the Portuguese business cycles. The database presented in this paper intends to make quarterly figures available for some analysis which Banco de Portugal routinely produces with yearly figures. The publication of this article will enable the available information to be shared encouraging the production of studies which allowed for a deeper understanding of the Portuguese economy. The information presented here should be seen as a first version, to be updated regularly on the Banco de Portugal website. This will reflect not only the more up to date information as it becomes available and the natural statistical revision of more recent data(1), but also the procedure changes that may be deemed important. It should also be mentioned that the INE will be introducing changes to the QNA database, incorporating among other things the results of the 2001 national census (Censos 2001). This could provide an opportunity to re-assess methodologies and retrospective statistical series, both annual and quarterly. It is hoped that the series in this paper can form a cornerstone for that work. The 1977 to 2003 quarterly series published in this article are consistent with the annual values under review. These essentially consist of the figures for the national accounts from INE in ESA95, available between 1995 and 2001(2), updated with the Banco de Portugal estimates for 2002 and 2003 and retropolated back to 1977 using the Historical Series from the Banco de Portugal [(Pinheiro et al. (1999)]. This retropolation is based on the use of growth rates for volumes and prices on the elementary items. Considering the different structures for 1995 stemming from the historical series and the INE series, the growth rates of the components determined from the aggregated figures may differ slightly from those presented in Pinheiro at al. (1999). It is also necessary to operate a few changes
The use of force in UN peace operations

One of the most vexing issues that has faced the international community since the end of the Cold War has been the use of force by the United Nations peacekeeping forces. UN intervention in civil wars, as in Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Rwanda, has thrown into stark relief the difficulty of peacekeepers operating in situations where consent to their presence and activities is fragile or incomplete and where there is little peace to keep. Complex questions arise in these circumstances. When and how should peacekeepers use force to protect themselves, to protect their mission, or, most troublingly, to ensure compliance by recalcitrant parties with peace accords? Is a peace enforcement role for peacekeepers possible or is this simply war by another name? Is there a grey zone between peacekeeping and peace enforcement? Trevor Findlay reveals the history of the use of force by UN peacekeepers from Sinai in the 1950s to Haiti in the 1990s. He untangles the arguments about the use of force in peace operations and sets these within the broader context of military doctrine and practice. Drawing on these insights the author examines proposals for future conduct of UN operations, including the formulation of UN peacekeeping doctrine and the establishment of a UN rapid reaction force.
Improved Speech-Presence Uncertainty Estimation Based on Spectral Gradient for Global Soft Decision-Based Speech Enhancement

SUMMARY In this paper, we propose a speech-presence uncertainty estimation to improve the global soft decision-based speech enhancement technique by using the spectral gradient scheme. The conventional soft decision-based speech enhancement technique uses a fixed ratio (Q )o f the ap riorispeech-presence and speech-absence probabilities to derive the speech-absence probability (SAP). However, we attempt to adaptively change Q according to the spectral gradient between the current and past frames as well as the status of the voice activity in the previous two frames. As a result, the distinct values of Q to each frequency in each frame are assigned in order to improve the performance of the SAP by tracking the robust ap rioriinformation of the speech-presence in time.
iDNA-Prot: Identification of DNA Binding Proteins Using Random Forest with Grey Model

DNA-binding proteins play crucial roles in various cellular processes. Developing high throughput tools for rapidly and effectively identifying DNA-binding proteins is one of the major challenges in the field of genome annotation. Although many efforts have been made in this regard, further effort is needed to enhance the prediction power. By incorporating the features into the general form of pseudo amino acid composition that were extracted from protein sequences via the “grey model” and by adopting the random forest operation engine, we proposed a new predictor, called iDNA-Prot, for identifying uncharacterized proteins as DNA-binding proteins or non-DNA binding proteins based on their amino acid sequences information alone. The overall success rate by iDNA-Prot was 83.96% that was obtained via jackknife tests on a newly constructed stringent benchmark dataset in which none of the proteins included has pairwise sequence identity to any other in a same subset. In addition to achieving high success rate, the computational time for iDNA-Prot is remarkably shorter in comparison with the relevant existing predictors. Hence it is anticipated that iDNA-Prot may become a useful high throughput tool for large-scale analysis of DNA-binding proteins. As a user-friendly web-server, iDNA-Prot is freely accessible to the public at the web-site on http://icpr.jci. edu.cn/bioinfo/iDNA-Prot or http://www.jci-bioinfo.cn/iDNA-Prot. Moreover, for the convenience of the vast majority of experimental scientists, a step-by-step guide is provided on how to use the web-server to get the desired results.
Applying MapReduce principle to high level information fusion

The InSyTo Synthesis framework is based on graph structures, graph algorithms and similarity measures for soft data fusion managing inconsistencies. The framework can be used to enable non-redundant additions to an information network, as well as graph based information query on several applications. The graph fusion algorithm relies on the search of a maximum common subgraph isomorphism, which makes it a difficult problem, especially on large graphs. In this work, the subgraph matching algorithm is partially parallelized, based on the MapReduce approach and on the Hadoop framework. Using Hadoop enables the management of big graphs, first by avoiding the load of the graphs in memory and secondly by distributing the computations over several processing nodes. Our experiments on the Global Terrorism Database (which contains the descriptions of more than 113,000 terrorist attacks in a graph of more than 20,000,000 nodes) shows that InSyTo Synthesis now scales to so-called "big data" applications.
The Dutch-Mozambican capacity building project in good governance and public administration: a study in north-south collaboration to improve higher education

This article discusses the challenges and lessons learned in an institutional collaborative programme between a Dutch graduate school of development studies (the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague, The Netherlands) and four Mozambican higher education institutesEduardo Mondlane University (UEM), Higher Institute for International Relation (ISRI), Higher Institute of Public Administration (ISAP), and the Police Academy (ACIPOL). The four year programme (2004-2007) “capacity building in good governance and public administration in Mozambique” is sponsored by The Netherlands organisation for international cooperation in higher education (Nuffic). It has four components; (a) developing graduate and post graduate academic curricula in public administration; (b) training of Mozambican lecturers in the discipline of public administration at post-graduate level (MA & PHD); (c) supporting local research and publication; and (d) providing ICT & infrastructure to support teaching and administration. By 2006, the programme had achieved more than 75% of its intended outputs, which by all standards had been effective. However, implementation of the programme has revealed interesting challenges and lessons regarding North-South cooperation to strengthen institutional capacity in the South. Such experiences and lessons have implications for similar collaborative programmes in the future. 1 Nicholas Awortwi is a lecturer in development management at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands. Correspondence to: Awortwi@iss.nl
'Activity in Context' - Planning to Keep Learners 'in the Zone' for Scenario-based Mixed-Initiative Training in Virtual Worlds

Traditional education has often been seen as teacher led, with a predefined body of knowledge in some domain to be conveyed via instruction. But some educators advocate a student driven approach involving knowledge construction through experience of the world initiated by exploration. A mixed-initiative approach potentially can retain the best of both forms of education. It means that the various agents can take the lead or initiative in an interaction at appropriate times, in contrast to purely tutor-guided learning or student discovery-based learning. This paper explores how scenario-based training and learning may be staged in a 3D virtual world, and what is an effective way to support learners in such a context. It seeks to establish a number of “elements” or “influences” involved in supporting mixed-initiative scenario-based training and relate these to principles of game-based learning and experience gained in that field. A number of threads have been brought together in this work:  to study the cognitive psychological foundations for socially situated learning;  to identify effective learning methods relevant to mixed-initiative interaction between agents;  to describe the relationship between cognitive psychological activity models and an AI research-informed conceptual model of activity;  to provide a methodology for how the concepts identified could be utilised in a training-orientated “I-Zone” supported by intelligent systems technology – a virtual space for intelligent scenario-based learning; and  to create, document and demonstrate a resource base for experimentation and potential re-use on projects in this area. This approach takes the form of providing a conceptualisation, describing a methodology and providing a realisation of a virtual space to support scenario-based training in a community context. The work has made available a coherent set of resources and related readings which could form the basis for future collaborative research and student projects. It provides useful inputs to continuing intelligent systems and collaboration focused research on I-Rooms – Virtual Spaces for Intelligent Interaction – with an emphasis on mixed-initiative support to scenariobased training for emergency responders.
Environmental Participation and Environmental Motivation

We explore whether environmental motivation affects environmental behavior by focusing on volunteering. The paper first introduces a theoretical model of volunteering in environmental organizations. In a next step, it tests the hypothesis working a large micro data set covering 32 countries from both Western and Eastern Europe using several different proxies to measure environmental motivation. As a robustness test we also explore the relationship at the macro level extending the number of countries investigated. Our results indicate a strong positive relationship between environmental motivation and individualsi? ½ voluntary engagement in environmental organizations.
NASA UAS traffic management national campaign: Operations across Six UAS Test Sites

NASA's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Traffic Management research aims to develop policies, procedures, requirements, and other artifacts to inform the implementation of a future system that enables small drones to access the low altitude airspace. In this endeavor, NASA conducted a geographically diverse flight test in conjunction with the FAA's six unmanned aircraft systems Test Sites. A control center at NASA Ames Research Center autonomously managed the airspace for all participants in eight states as they flew operations (both real and simulated). The system allowed for common situational awareness across all stakeholders, kept traffic procedurally separated, offered messages to inform the participants of activity relevant to their operations. Over the 3-hour test, 102 flight operations connected to the central research platform with 17 different vehicle types and 8 distinct software client implementations while seamlessly interacting with simulated traffic.
Osh proteins regulate COPII-mediated vesicular transport of ceramide from the endoplasmic reticulum in budding yeast

ABSTRACT Lipids synthesized at the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) are delivered to the Golgi by vesicular and non-vesicular pathways. ER-to-Golgi transport is crucial for maintaining the different membrane lipid composition and identities of organelles. Despite their importance, mechanisms regulating transport remain elusive. Here we report that in yeast coat protein complex II (COPII) vesicle-mediated transport of ceramide from the ER to the Golgi requires oxysterol-binding protein homologs, Osh proteins, which have been implicated in lipid homeostasis. Because Osh proteins are not required to transport proteins to the Golgi, these results indicate a specific requirement for the Osh proteins in the transport of ceramide. In addition, we provide evidence that Osh proteins play a negative role in COPII vesicle biogenesis. Together, our data suggest that ceramide transport and sphingolipid levels between the ER and Golgi are maintained by two distinct functions of Osh proteins, which negatively regulate COPII vesicle formation and positively control a later stage, presumably fusion of ceramide-enriched vesicles with Golgi compartments.
Asymptotically minimax Bayes predictive densities

Given a random sample from a distribution with density function that depends on an unknown parameter 0, we are interested in accurately estimating the true parametric density function at a future observation from the same distribution. The asymptotic risk of Bayes predictive density estimates with Kullback-Leibler loss function D(f θ ∥f) = f f θ log (f θ /f) is used to examine various ways of choosing prior distributions; the principal type of choice studied is minimax. We seek asymptotically least favorable predictive densities for which the corresponding asymptotic risk is minimax. A result resembling Stein's paradox for estimating normal means by maximum likelihood holds for the uniform prior in the multivariate location family case: when the dimensionality of the model is at least three, the Jeffreys prior is minimax, though inadmissible. The Jeffreys prior is both admissible and minimax for one- and two-dimensional location problems.