Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparing API Design Choices with Usability Studies : A Case Study and Future Directions

There are more APIs than ever, and designing APIs that are usable by their target audience is difficult. Work at Microso ft has demonstrated that running controlled usability studies with participants from different personas and analyzing the results of these studies using the co gnitive dimensions framework is effective at identifying and preventing usabilit y problems in APIs. This paper presents a generalization of that technique in the form of usability studies of common API design choices. By studying a single des ign choice from multiple perspectives, we can generalize our results to any API that might be affected by the design choice. We show the feasibility of our approach with an initial study on whether or not to require constructor parameters , and present our current and planned work to study more API design choices.
Giant Molecular Clouds in M33. I. BIMA All-Disk Survey

We present the first interferometric 12CO (J = 1 → 0) map of the entire Hα disk of M33. The 13″ diameter synthesized beam corresponds to a linear resolution of 50 pc, sufficient to distinguish individual giant molecular clouds (GMCs). From these data we generated a catalog of 148 GMCs with an expectation that no more than 15 of the sources are spurious. The catalog is complete down to GMC masses of 1.5 × 105 M⊙ and contains a total mass of 2.3 × 107 M⊙. Single-dish observations of CO in selected fields imply that our survey detects ∼50% of the CO flux, hence that the total molecular mass of M33 is 4.5 × 107 M⊙, approximately 2% of the H I mass. The GMCs in our catalog are confined largely to the central region (R < 4 kpc). They show a remarkable spatial and kinematic correlation with overdense H I filaments; the geometry suggests that the formation of GMCs follows that of the filaments. The GMCs exhibit a mass spectrum dN/dM ∝ M-2.6±0.3, considerably steeper than that found in the Milky Way and in the LMC. Combined with the total mass, this steep function implies that the GMCs in M33 form with a characteristic mass of ∼7 × 104 M⊙. More than 2/3 of the GMCs have associated H II regions, implying that the GMCs have a short quiescent period. Our results suggest the rapid assembly of molecular clouds from atomic gas, with prompt onset of massive star formation.
Testing Overreaction and Under-reaction in the Commodity Futures Market

Results from previous studies testing for under-reaction and overreaction in the commodity futures market are mixed and inconclusive. Using a data of more than 20 categories of future contacts ranging from agricultural, metal and energy, we have found significant evidence of under-reaction in food and agricultural commodities but not in the energy and metal sector. It is also found that those relatively inactive commodity future contracts tend to have a stronger tendency to under-react than commodity future contracts are very actively traded. The result also agrees with the behavioral hypothesis that under-reaction is caused by gradual incorporation of information among investors.
Co-Citation Analysis: The Methodology of SciVal Spotlight

Overview To date, research output has been evaluated based on the journal in which it is published. Each scientific journal is classified into a major field despite the fact that journals are progressively covering a wider array of disciplines and paradigms (sub-topics) that are not properly reflected in their field classification. The nature of this " square peg in a round hole " system leaves critical interdisciplinary research overlooked and unaccounted for – allowing only a simplistic and reductionist view of current institutional research initiatives. SciVal Spotlight was developed to overcome this knowledge gap by providing a broader and deeper view of research performance. The purpose of this document is to describe how SciVal Spotlight creates paradigms (also known as clusters) to reveal interdisciplinary research trends within institutions. The method, generally called co-citation analysis, involves classifying the scientific literature into 'natural categories' (small groups of papers that correspond to specific problems that researchers are addressing). When developing SciVal Spotlight, the methodological choices centered around three questions: What are the rules of thumb that indicate a good classification system? Why use co-citation analysis (instead of some of the other approaches)? What are the advantages to the way SciVal Spotlight does co-citation analysis (versus the way others do it)? This paper provides a summary of the answers to these questions. The fundamental task at hand is to create a classification system that will group articles in a way that reflects both the content and granularity of how scientific activity is currently organized. The implicit assumption that leads us to seek a 'natural' classification system rather than an imposed (or disciplinary) classification system, is that researchers self-organize around problems or topics that have an associated literature. These problems (sometimes called paradigms or clusters) are considered the fundamental unit of analysis by many people that study the sociology of science. SciVal Spotlight uses three rules of thumb to identify a good classification system: 1. The size of a cluster should be between 4 and 100 documents 2. The size distribution should be log rank-log size linear (this will be explained later in this paper) 3. Some papers should be allowed to be in more than one cluster Size: Academics trained in the sociology of science have made the reasonable observation that the number of people working on a problem is usually quite small (perhaps a dozen people). Considering that not everyone publishes every year, …
Spacecraft formation flying control design for the Orion mission

Formation ying of multiple spacecraft is an enabling technology for many future space science missions. However, the coordination and control of such instruments present many design challenges. This paper addresses the formation ying spacecraft control problem at several levels. We present low-level, multi-vehicle, station keeping algorithms and a control architecture to keep the vehicles aligned in formation. We also present a high-level eet planner that creates trajectories (e.g. to re-size or re-target the formation) and takes into account the limited fuel onboard each vehicle. A coordinator is introduced at the highest-level to ensure that vehicle resources are expended equally within the eet. Algorithms are discussed for each level, with simulations to compare performance. The simulation results are then veri ed on a formation ying testbed. The control design is then discussed with a perspective on the upcoming Orion mission. 1
PSO Based Global Stable Solution to Relative Pose

Different from the traditional data-driven methods, a new PSO based top-down robust solution for relative pose solution is proposed. Given five or more correspondences, a stable solution can always be calculated with two calibrated views by the proposed method, even with a large proportion of outliers. By taking advantage of the top-down scheme, this method is free from critical configurations. The experiment results show that this new method also has a higher or comparable precision to the classical 8 and 5 points methods under planar degeneration. In addition, the new method does not suffer from singular solution that the 5 points method may encounter. Several modifications upon the original PSO keep it away from local minima and find a global solution.
Tayler instability of toroidal magnetic fields in MHD Taylor‐Couette flows

The nonaxisymmetric Tayler instability (TI) of toroidal magnetic fields due to axial electric currents is studied for conducting incompressible fluids between two infinitely long corotating cylinders. For given Reynolds number of rotation the magnetic Prandtl number Pm of the liquid conductor and the ratio of the cylinder's rotation rates are the free parameters. It is shown that for resting cylinders the critical Hartmann number for instability does not depend on Pm hence the TI also exists in the limit Pm 0. By rigid rotation the instability is suppressed where for Pm = 1 the rotational quenching takes its maximum. Rotation laws with negative shear (i.e. dΩ /dR < 0) strongly destabilize the toroidal field if the rotation is not too fast. In galaxies with their quadrupolar magnetic field geometry this effect could have drastic implications. For sufficiently high Reynolds numbers of rotation, however, the TI completely disappears. For the considered magnetic constellation the superrotation laws support the rotational stabilization. The angular momentum transport of the instability is anticorrelated with the shear so that an eddy viscosity can be defined which proves to be positive. We have also shown the possibility of laboratory TI experiments with a wide-gap container filled with fluid metals like sodium or gallium. Even the effect of the rotational stabilization can be reproduced in the laboratory with electric currents of only a few kA (© 2010 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
The seniority conundrum: bail out countries but bail in private, short-term creditors? CEPS Commentary, 6 December 2010

Despite its large size relative to the small Irish economy, the bailout announced by the Eurogroup following its meeting of 28 November 2010 is not working, as evidenced by the continuing rise in risk premiums. CEPS Director Daniel Gros argues in this commentary that part of the problem lies in a seemingly innocuous provision in the proposed permanent successor to the current European Financial Stability Facility in 2013. The argument is tricky, but at the heart of the problem lies the insistence that rescue financing is senior to private debt while simultaneously ruling out rescheduling of short-term debt.
Human Performance in Six Degree of Freedom Input Control

This thesis investigates human performance in relation to various dimensions of 6 degree of freedom (DOF) interfaces, including device resistance, transfer functions, muscles groups and joints, and input display formats. These dimensions are analysed respectively in terms of human proprioception and control feel, mental processing in forming control actions, motor and sensory cortex representation, and the nature of various visual depth cues. A series of five experiments are presented. Experiment 1 examined isotonic versus isometric resistance modes and position versus rate control transfer functions. A strong interaction was found between the resistance mode and the transfer function: in position control, the isotonic device outperformed the isometric device; whereas in rate control, the isometric device outperformed the isotonic device. Experiments 2 and 3 studied isometric versus elastic devices in rate control. When optimised between two opposing factors, i.e. proprioception and compatibility, the elastic device had performance advantages over the isometric device at the early stage of learning. Experiment 3 also revealed users' control strategies in terms of attentional priority to each degree of freedom. Experiment 4 investigated the effects of different joints and muscle groups on 6 DOF manipulation. The results showed that the participation of fingers significantly improved task performance. Experiment 5 studied the visual representation of users’ input control actions. It was found that partial occlusion through semi-transparency in 3D, a rather novel graphic technique, was strongly beneficial. The major conclusions of the thesis can be summarised briefly as: (1) The physical properties of a 6 DOF input device should provide rich feedback so that the user can easily feel her control actions proprioceptively and thus learn the task quickly. (2) To the extent possible, fine small muscle groups and joints should be included in the operation of input devices. (3) The transfer function used to interface a device with the computer should be compatible with the physical device. (4) The visual representation of the user’s actions should be designed to allow immediate exteroceptive feedback and the application of semitransparency serves this purpose well.
Semantic Noise Modeling for Better Representation Learning

Latent representation learned from multi-layered neural networks via hierarchical feature abstraction enables recent success of deep learning. Under the deep learning framework, generalization performance highly depends on the learned latent representation. In this work, we propose a novel latent space modeling method to learn better latent representation. We designed a neural network model based on the assumption that good base representation for supervised tasks can be attained by maximizing the sum of hierarchical mutual informations between the input, latent, and output variables. From this base model, we introduce a semantic noise modeling method which enables semantic perturbation on the latent space to enhance the representational power of learned latent feature. During training, latent vector representation can be stochastically perturbed by a modeled additive noise while preserving its original semantics. It implicitly brings the effect of semantic augmentation on the latent space. The proposed model can be easily learned by back-propagation with common gradient-based optimization algorithms. Experimental results show that the proposed method helps to achieve performance benefits against various previous approaches. We also provide the empirical analyses for the proposed latent space modeling method including t-SNE visualization.
Evaluating the impact of perception and decision timing on autonomous robotic exploration

Autonomous robotic exploration of initially unknown environments is at the basis of several applications, including map building and search and rescue. Despite the many recent works on robotic exploration, an issue that has not been adequately addressed in the literature so far is the evaluation of the impact of the perception (for map update) and decision (about where to go next) timing on the behavior of an exploring robotic system. In this paper, we contribute to fill this gap by providing a quantitative experimental analysis of how frequencies of perception and decision influence the performance of an exploring mobile robot. Results, obtained with an experimental simulation framework (implemented and made publicly available) based on ROS and Stage, confirm the intuitive idea that the best performance is obtained with fast-paced perceptions and decisions, but also suggest some tradeoffs for the values of perception and decision frequencies in some settings.
Switchable Microstrip Bandpass-Stopband Filter Based on Periodically Loaded Transmission Lines

This paper presents the design of a microstrip switchable band pass-stopband filter based on periodically loaded transmission lines. The proposed design, takes advantage of the structure symmetry of the left handed periodically loaded based filter and the extra degrees of freedom introduced by the metamaterial structure to switch between stop-band and band-pass behavior. It is shown that the relations between the device physical dimensions and the pass/rejection band bandwidth and central operating frequency, can be controlled through analytical expressions. As illustrative example, a switchable pass/stop band with the same bandwidth and central frequency is presented, showing a good agreement between measurement, simulation and theoretical predictions.
Self-Organized Public Key Management for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) offer communication over a shared wireless channel without any pre-existing infrastructure. Forming security associations in MANETs is more challenging than in conventional networks due to the lack of central authority. The main objective of this paper is to find a low complexity key management scheme that is suitable for self-organized MANETs. The proposed public key management scheme uses subordinate public keys and crypto-based identifiers to eliminate all forms of trusted third party. Nodes can create, disseminate and revocate their own keying material making the scheme self-organized and fully scalable. The paper proves the scheme to be secure in the Random Oracle and Generic model (ROM+GM).
Optogenetic monitoring identifies phosphatidylthreonine-regulated calcium homeostasis in Toxoplasma gondii

Toxoplasma gondii is an obligate intracellular parasite, which inflicts acute as well as chronic infections in a wide range of warm-blooded vertebrates. Our recent work has demonstrated the natural occurrence and autonomous synthesis of an exclusive lipid phosphatidylthreonine in T. gondii. Targeted gene disruption of phosphatidylthreonine synthase impairs the parasite virulence due to unforeseen attenuation of the consecutive events of motility, egress and invasion. However, the underlying basis of such an intriguing phenotype in the parasite mutant remains unknown. Using an optogenetic sensor (gene-encoded calcium indicator, GCaMP6s), we show that loss of phosphatidylthreonine depletes calcium stores in intracellular tachyzoites, which leads to dysregulation of calcium release into the cytosol during the egress phase of the mutant. Consistently, the parasite motility and egress phenotypes in the mutant can be entirely restored by ionophore-induced mobilization of calcium. Collectively, our results suggest a novel regulatory function of phosphatidylthreonine in calcium signaling of a prevalent parasitic protist. Moreover, our application of an optogenetic sensor to monitor subcellular calcium in a model intracellular pathogen exemplifies its wider utility to other entwined systems.
Estimating the statistical significance of classifiers by varying the number of genes

We present a statistically well founded method to construct cancer predictors using gene expression profiles. This methodology is applied to a new microarray data set extracted from 25 patients affected by colon cancer. In particular, we answer to precise questions: how many gene expression levels are correlated with the pathology and how many are sufficient for an accurate classification? The proposed method provides answer to these questions avoiding the potential pitfalls hidden in the analysis of microarray data. We have evaluated the generalization error, estimated through the Leave-K-Out Cross Validation error, of two different classification schemes by varying the number of selected genes. We found that, Regularized Least Squares (RLS) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifiers, using the whole gene set, have error rates of e = 14% (p = 0.023) and e = 11% (p = 0.016) respectively. Concerning the number of genes, the performances of RLS and SVM classifiers do not change when the 74% of genes is used. The statistical significance was measured by using permutation test.
Human Capital and Income Inequality: Some Facts and Some Puzzles

Using a broad number of indicators from an updated data set on human capital inequality for 146 countries from 1950 to 2010, this paper documents several facts regarding the evolution of income and human capital inequality. The main findings reveal that, in spite of a large reduction in human capital inequality around the world driven by a decline in the number of illiterates of several hundreds of millions of people, the inequality in the distribution of income has hardly changed. In many regions, the income Gini coefficient in 1960 was very similar to that in 2005. Therefore, improvements in literacy are not a sufficient condition to reduce income inequality, even though they improve life standards of people at the bottom of the income distribution. Increasing returns to education, external effects on wages of higher literacy rates or the simultaneous concurrence of other exogenous forces (e.g., globalization or skill-biased technological progress) may explain the lack of correlation between the evolution of income and education inequality.
Aggregated GSM data in Origin Destination studies Final Report

and at the company Dat.Mobility in Deventer. This report covers the subject of obtaining Origin-Destination information from the viewDat database provided by Dat.Mobility and from aggregated GSM datasets in general. This thesis is intended for transportation engineers that use commercially available datasets which are usually in an aggregated form and for data handlers who create these datasets. It provides 3 methodologies that could be used for extracting origin destination information from such datasets, makes suggestions on their most useful specification and their limitations, deliberates on potential uses and discusses the observations made by using aggregated GSM datasets. I would like to thank Dat.Mobility B.V. for allowing me to work at their project and for using their database. I would extend my gratitude to all the people of Dat.Mobility and Goudappel Coffeng for their hospitality and assistance that made this work possible. I would like to thank in particular ir. K. Aardoom for their support in making this research work possible. Furthermore, I want to thank the assessment committee for their reviews and comments; their guidance assisted me in extending my skills and to reach an outcome that I am proud of. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, E. Papacharalampous and V. Tzitzikopoulou, for their strong support in the process of this work and in adjusting to the new environment that this thesis was completed in. In the realm of Big Data, the improvements are faster than anticipated. New data and data sources are coming to light every day and their analysis is becoming more pivotal than ever. That is because: " You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data", Summary Problems in society are becoming increasingly complicated. On the other hand, the information available is also increasing. The increase in information leads to new possibilities for solving these problems and creates the background for improvements in the existing services and technologies. The plethora of information requires techniques and innovations to assist in its usage meaning to solve questions such as where, when, how and why should this information be used. Mobility planning and management is one of the areas on which Big Data had a great impact. That is because transportation planning is governed by many variables; it evolves with small changes of the circumstances. A better understanding in the movements of network's users will go a long way towards improving the efficiency …
Investigation of switched-mode rectifier for control of small-scale wind turbines

This paper investigates the suitability and experimental testing of a simple power converter for a permanent magnet generator for use with a small-scale variable-speed wind turbine. The controller uses a switched-mode rectifier in conjunction with a high inductance generator that allows generator torque and power to be controlled via the switch duty-cycle. The controller maximises output power for wind speeds below rated, and limits turbine speed for higher wind speeds. Dynamometer and limited wind turbine test results are presented.
Towards a cognitive dimension

: Organizational ambidexterity is central for strategic renewal, as organizations struggle with simultaneous dualities, such as exploration and exploitation, as well as maintaining routines while being flexible. In this book chapter, we examine the cognitive microfoundations of management decision in such conditions. To this end, we integrate literature on organizational ambidexterity, dualities such as paradoxes, as well as management cognition. We discuss the role of cognition in achieving spatial, temporal, and contextual ambidexterity and introduce ‘cognitive ambidexterity’ as a manager’s ability to deal with contradictory dualities in their decision-making.