Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hybrid Question Generation Approach for Critical Review Writing Support

Research towards automated feedback can build on the work in other areas. In this paper we explore question generation techniques. Most research in question generation has focused on generating content specific questions that help students comprehend a set of documents that they must read. However, this approach is not so useful in writing activities, as students would generally understand the document that they themselves wrote. The aim of our project is to build a system which automatically generates feedback questions for academic writing support, particularly for critical review support. This paper presents our question generation system which relies on both syntax-based and template-based approaches, and uses Wikipedia as background knowledge.
Template Protection for Biometric Gait Data

Biometric gait recognition is a well suited method for authentication on mobile devices as it is unobtrusive and concurrent. Hence, in contrast to PIN authentication it is no extra-effort for the user. The characteristic gait of a subject can be recorded using accelerometers which are nowadays already contained in many mobile devices. From this data biometric feature vectors can be extracted and stored as reference data on the device. Only if the user is not recognized by his walk an active authentication via PIN is necessary. As the number of attacks on mobile devices increases it cannot be assumed that the data stored on the device is under constant control of the subject. Therefore, template protection techniques should be applied to secure biometric data. As biometric gait recognition is a new field of research no specific template protection methods have been developed so far. This paper describes a new method for securing biometric gait features based on histograms and using the earth mover’s distance for comparison. The method is tested with gait data of 48 subjects recorded using a mobile phone and the results are compared to the ones obtained without template protection.
HRI in an ecological dynamic experiment: The GEE corpus based approach for the Emox robot

As part of a human-robot interaction project, the gestural modality is one of many ways to communicate. In order to develop a relevant gesture recognition system associated to a smart home butler robot, our methodology is based on an IQ game-like Wizard of Oz experiment to collect spontaneous and implicitly produced gestures in an ecological context where the robot is the referee. These gestures are compared with explicitly produced gestures to determine a relevant ontology of gestures. This preliminary qualitative analysis will be the base to build a big data corpus in order to optimize acceptance of the gesture dictionary in coherence with the “socio-affective glue” dynamics.
Seeking and avoiding intergroup contact: Future frontiers of research on building social integration

Over 60 years of research and comprehensive reviews now support Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis that face‐to‐face interactions between members of opposing groups should be promoted to lessen prejudice and improve intergroup relations. Society however does not yet enjoy the full prejudice‐reducing benefits of intergroup contact because opportunities for contact are often not taken up, and segregation persists in the face of diversity. In this article, we review recent investigations on the social psychology of individuals' seeking and avoiding intergroup contact and set the stage for new research in this area. We call for a new generation of research on intergroup contact that addresses a novel and critical research question: What personal, situational, and wider social factors move individuals towards or away from engaging in intergroup contact? This research can help us design intervention strategies to ensure that opportunities for, and benefits of, intergroup contact are fully enjoyed by individuals and groups in increasingly diverse societies.
A Note on Optimal Dynamic Incentive Schemes by

We consider a dynamic setting where both adverse selection and moral hazard concerns are present. We analyze how the power of the optimal incentive scheme varies over time according to the agent's performance history. In many circumstances, the power of later incentive schemes optimally declines as earlier performance improves. The imposition of poor performance incentives following good performance can limit initial incentives to understate one's capabilities.
Generalized PCM Coding of Images

Pulse-code modulation (PCM) with embedded quantization allows the rate of the PCM bitstream to be reduced by simply removing a fixed number of least significant bits from each codeword. Although this source coding technique is extremely simple, it has poor coding efficiency. In this paper, we present a generalized PCM (GPCM) algorithm for images that simply removes bits from each codeword. In contrast to PCM, however, the number and the specific bits that a GPCM encoder removes in each codeword depends on its position in the bitstream and the statistics of the image. Since GPCM allows the encoding to be performed with different degrees of computational complexity, it can adapt to the computational resources that are available in each application. Experimental results show that GPCM outperforms PCM with a gain that depends on the rate, the computational complexity of the encoding, and the degree of inter-pixel correlation of the image.
The Decade of Online Shopping in the Jewish Ultra-Orthodox Community

ABSTRACT Based on large scale annual social surveys in Israel, the current study uses an innovation resistance perspective and domestication theory as frameworks for analyzing trends of Internet adoption and online purchasing behavior in Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox community over the past decade (between 2003 and 2012). During the last decade, rates of Internet access and online purchasing have continued to increase in the Ultra-Orthodox community. However, users in this group (similar to other religious groups in Israel) have yet to fully use the potential of online shopping. The odds ratio in Internet adoption and online shopping over time among the Ultra-Orthodox were higher compared to other religiosity groups. Our findings show that socio-demographic characteristics are effective for tracking Ultra-Orthodox Internet adoption. However, the power of these characteristics to differentiate Internet usage behaviors is much lower. Due to the linked processes of Internet domestication, increasing connectivity, and utilitarian Internet use the Ultra-Orthodox community may be considered an attractive target audience for online retailers.
Sprock-it: a physically interactive play system

"Sprock-it" is a hand-sized robotic character that encourages full-body interaction and engaging mental play. Through social and physical interactions with the system and with each other, children influence the character's mobile and responsive autonomous driving behavior. Enabling constructionist activities and participatory adaptive design the system employs RFID tags and readers, wireless Bluetooth modules, Atmega microprocessors within Arduino's development environment, along with a wearable interface and a variety of physiological/activity sensors. Sprock-it has been developed in collaboration with LEGO and the MIT Media Lab as a concept that represents a new strategy for LEGO by updating the original LEGO mantra of "the little constructor" to "the little interactor". This paper presents the system development of Sprock-it.
Character recognition for Writing Robot Control using ANFIS

Robotics has dominates the industrial world since industrial revolution, due to its qualities in precision and accuracy. This paper is designed to display these qualities in a form of a writing robot. Image processing, character recognition, path planning and theta deduction are studied in this project. This paper served as discussion in image processing techniques used for writing robot and neural network to classify the letters. Letters are restricted to uppercase, and in a form of image. Image is converted into binary, which then letters are separated to form an image matrix. Image matrix will serve as training data for neural network. Performances of neural network are evaluated using test set prepared, to determine the scope of font recognizable using neural network.
Active Carbon and Oxygen Shell Burning Hydrodynamics

We have simulated 2.5 × 103 s of the late evolution of a 23 M☉ star with full hydrodynamic behavior. We present the first simulations of a multiple-shell burning epoch, including the concurrent evolution and interaction of an oxygen- and a carbon-burning shell. In addition, we have evolved a three-dimensional model of the oxygen-burning shell to sufficiently long times (300 s) to begin to assess the adequacy of the two-dimensional approximation. We summarize striking new results: (1) strong interactions occur between active carbon- and oxygen-burning shells; (2) hydrodynamic wave motions in nonconvective regions, generated at the convective-radiative boundaries, are energetically important in both two and three dimensions, with important consequences for compositional mixing; and (3) a spectrum of mixed p- and g-modes are unambiguously identified with corresponding adiabatic waves in these computational domains. We find that two-dimensional convective motions are exaggerated relative to three-dimensional ones because of vortex instability in three dimensions. We discuss the implications for supernova progenitor evolution and symmetry breaking in core collapse.
Risk factors for obstetric morbidity in patients with uterine atony undergoing caesarean delivery.

BACKGROUND Uterine atony (UA) is recognized as a leading cause of postpartum haemorrhage. However, knowledge of risk factors of haemorrhage-related morbidity among patients diagnosed with UA is uncertain. We investigated risk factors for haemorrhage-related morbidity among patients undergoing Caesarean delivery with UA. METHODS We conducted a secondary analysis of data sourced from a 4-yr observational study at 19 US academic centres. Patients with UA were identified based on receiving methylergonovine or carboprost. Our primary outcome (haemorrhage-related morbidity) included a composite of intra- or postpartum transfusion; Caesarean hysterectomy; uterine or hypogastric artery ligation; intensive care admission for: pulmonary oedema, coagulopathy, adult respiratory distress syndrome, postoperative ventilation, or invasive line monitoring. RESULTS Among 57,182 patients who underwent Caesarean delivery, 2294 (4%) patients developed UA. Haemorrhage-related morbidity occurred in 450 (19.6%) patients with UA. The risk of haemorrhage-related morbidity was increased among African-Americans [adjusted odds ratio (aOR)=2.36; 95% confidence interval (CI)=1.73-3.23], Hispanics (aOR=1.4; 95% CI=1.04-1.9), women with multiple gestations (aOR=1.59; 95% CI=1.06-2.38), placenta praevia (aOR=4.89; 95% CI=3.04-7.87), patients with ASA class III (aOR=1.4; 95 CI=1.03-1.9), or ASA class IV (aOR=5.88; 95% CI=2.48-13.9), exposure to general anaesthesia (GA) (aOR=2.4; 95% CI=1.59-3.62) and combined general and regional anaesthesia (aOR=4.0; 95% CI=2.62-6.09), and ≥2 prior Caesarean deliveries (aOR=1.62; 95% CI=1.1-2.39). CONCLUSIONS Among patients with UA undergoing Caesarean delivery, the risk of haemorrhage-related morbidity is increased in African-Americans, Hispanics, patients with multiple gestations, placenta praevia, ASA class III or IV, ≥2 prior Caesarean deliveries and those undergoing GA.
Modeling Languages: metrics and assessing tools

Any traditional engineering field has metrics to rigorously assess the quality of their products. Engineers know that the output must satisfy the requirements, must comply with the production and market rules, and must be competitive. Professionals in the new field of software engineering started a few years ago to define metrics to appraise their product: individual programs and software systems. This concern motivates the need to assess not only the outcome but also the process and tools employed in its development. In this context, assessing the quality of programming languages is a legitimate objective; in a similar way, it makes sense to be concerned with models and modeling approaches, as more and more people start the software development process by a modeling phase. In this paper we introduce and motivate the assessment of models quality in the Software Development cycle. After the general discussion of this topic, we focus the attention on the most popular modeling language -- the UML -- presenting metrics. Through a Case-Study, we present and explore two tools. To conclude we identify what is still lacking in the tools side.
Identification Strategy : A Field Experiment on Borrower Responses to Fingerprinting for Loan Enforcement

How do borrowers respond to improvements a lender’s ability to punish defaulters? We implemented a randomized field experiment in Malawi examining the impact of fingerprinting of borrowers, which improves the lender’s ability to withhold future loans from individuals who have previously defaulted. Study participants were smallholder farmers applying for agricultural input loans, and were randomly allocated to either: 1) a control group, or 2) a treatment group that was fingerprinted as part of the loan application. Both treatment and control groups were given a presentation on the importance of credit history in ensuring future access to credit. For the subgroup of farmers with the highest ex ante default risk, fingerprinting led to substantially higher repayment rates. By contrast, fingerprinting had no impact on repayment for farmers with low ex ante default risk. Higher repayment for the high-default-risk subgroup is due to reductions in adverse selection (smaller loan sizes) and lower moral hazard (more intensive input application yielding higher farm profits).
Energy Conservation in Wireless Sensor Networks Using Top-Down Approach with Regular Sleep and Wake Periods

Wireless sensor network is nothing but collection of wireless sensor nodes these are the battery powered devices. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained a lot of attention from both the research perspective and actual users. As sensor nodes are generally battery-powered devices, the critical problem was how to reduce the energy consumption of nodes, so that network lifetime can be extended to some time. In this paper, a Top-Down approach is designed with regular sleep and wake periods. The objective of proposed network structure is to minimize delays in the data collection process of wireless sensor network. The performance of proposed network structure is analyzed using computer simulations. Simulations shows comparison with other network formation algorithm and shows that proposed network structure is able to shorten delays and increase network lifetime as compared to other. A WSN is a collection of wireless nodes with limited energy capabilities that may be mobile or stationary and are located randomly on a dynamically changing environment. The routing strategies selection is an important issue for the efficient delivery of the packets to their destination. Moreover, in such networks, the applied routing strategy should ensure the minimum of the energy consumption and hence maximization of the lifetime of the network (1). The WSN was first designed by military and defense industries. WSNs were used in various wars for detection of enemies in remote jungle areas. However the implementation have several drawbacks including that the large number of sensors, the energy they consume and the limited network lifetime.
Data Profiling as a Process - Bridging the Gap Between Academia and Practitioners

Dealing with data necessitates understanding data, which can be facilitated by analyzing its metadata. This metadata is often not readily available, and thus, needs to be extracted and collected. This activity is called data profiling and is well established and researched in the literature. However, what is missing is a structured description of a holistic data profiling process, that puts together all the individual pieces and guides a user from the problem to the solution. This paper describes such a process and the results and insights that have been achieved so far.
Long-Term Blood Pressure Control Effect of Celiac Plexus Block with Botulinum Toxin

Celiac plexus block (CPB) is one of the main treatment options for patients resistant to conventional antihypertensive drugs. We present a case of resistant hypertension (RHTN) that was treated with CPB using botulinum toxin. An 18-year-old male patient with RHTN, who suffered from persistent hypertension even after combination therapy and a renal denervation procedure, was referred to our pain center for CPB. CPB using botulinum toxin following the use of only local anesthetics resulted in control of systolic blood pressure (BP) at ~150 mmHg for at least three months.
In-memory hamming similarity computation in resistive arrays

This paper develops a framework to calculate Hamming similarity between vectors stored in resistive memory. A single-parameter model is proposed for the resistive measurement channel, which is then used to analytically reveal an interesting tradeoff between this parameter and succeeding in the calculation task. We suggest coding techniques that can improve this tradeoff under natural usage assumptions. The proposed constructions work to change the Hamming weight of the stored vectors without corrupting the Hamming distance between pairs of vectors.
Electronic shopping

he global electronic market will have a profound impact on commerce in the 21st Century. While current U.S. sales in cyberspace ($1 billion in 1995) are small in comparison to total U.S. retail sales ($1.7 trillion in 1995) [3], U.S. cybersales projections for the year 2000 range from $7 to $117 billion [9]. More importantly, most experts predict a radical shift in how business will be conducted in the next century. This shift not only has businesses scrambling to meet this new marketing reality, but also raises many important research questions about business strategy, technical infrastructure, government policies, the electronic market demographics as well as how people will use the technology. Issues of technology usage become critical as businesses and retailers attempt to exploit the boom in electronic marketing. There are large differences between a physical store and its electronic counterpart. A help button on the home page of the Web shopping site replaces the sales clerk’s friendly advice and service. The familiar layout of the physical store becomes a maze of pull-down menus, product indices, and search features. Now more than ever, the promise of electronic commerce and online shopping will depend to a great extent upon the interface and how people interact with the computer. Account managers, production staff, and merchant partners should not assume customers do not want an item in an online retail store if it is not selling. Nor should they conclude that a poor response to a given store design is due to the merchandising mix. It is important to look at the relationship between sales and user interface design. Limited menus, poorly designed navigation, and the difficulty in comparing multiple products on the same screen all have adverse effects on electronic shopping [2]. Can customers find what they want in the stores? Are customers aware of what products are available? After all, diligence in browsing a store is not a virtue retailers should expect from its online customers. We review online retail store attributes such as the number of links into the store, image sizes, number of products, and store navigation features. By reviewing the user interface features in the context of electronic shopping, we hope to facilitate the process of designing and evaluating alternative storefronts by identifying key features that impact traffic and sales. While this article specifically addresses user interface design issues for electronic shopping, user interface design is an important component of all software development [10] with important implications for productivity [5]. Unfortunately, Web information systems (WIS) designers sometimes do not heed the importance of the message advocated by user interface design pundits such as Jakob Nielsen [11] and Vincent Flanders (www.webpagesthatsuck.com). Many of the lessons learned from online stores also apply to WIS applications.
Denoising and analysis of surface EMG signals

In this research, surface electromyography (SEMG) signal analysis from the right rectus femoris muscle is performed during walk. Wavelet transform (WT) has been applied for removing noise from the surface SEMG. Gaussianity tests are conducted to understand changes in muscle contraction and to quantify the effectiveness of the noise removal process. Results show that the proposed method can effectively remove noise from the raw SEMG signals for further analysis.
Functional Analysis of p53 Binding under Differential Stresses

ABSTRACT Hypoxia and DNA damage stabilize the p53 protein, but the subsequent effect that each stress has on transcriptional regulation of known p53 target genes is variable. We have used chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by CpG island (CGI) microarray hybridization to identify promoters bound by p53 under both DNA-damaging and non-DNA-damaging conditions in HCT116 cells. Using gene-specific PCR analysis, we have verified an association with CGIs of the highest enrichment (>2.5-fold) (REV3L, XPMC2H, HNRPUL1, TOR1AIP1, glutathione peroxidase 1, and SCFD2), with CGIs of intermediate enrichment (>2.2-fold) (COX7A2L, SYVN1, and JAG2), and with CGIs of low enrichment (>2.0-fold) (MYC and PCNA). We found little difference in promoter binding when p53 is stabilized by these two distinctly different stresses. However, expression of these genes varies a great deal: while a few genes exhibit classical induction with adriamycin, the majority of the genes are unchanged or are mildly repressed by either hypoxia or adriamycin. Further analysis using p53 mutated in the core DNA binding domain revealed that the interaction of p53 with CGIs may be occurring through both sequence-dependent and -independent mechanisms. Taken together, these experiments describe the identification of novel p53 target genes and the subsequent discovery of distinctly different expression phenomena for p53 target genes under different stress scenarios.