Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vision Based UAV Formation Sense and Avoid System

With the increasing use of airspace and the wide application of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), the Sense And Avoid (SAA) problem has attracted more and more attention. This paper presents a solution for the SAA of UAV formation equipped with optical sensors. We introduce the stereo vision theory combined with the UAV formation to calculate the position of the targets. The tracking of target is resolved by adopting multi-model (MM) theory so as to solve the problem of the target maneuver. Also during the avoidance, we introduce ellipsoid security region as the safety region and use the flight angle to re-configure the formation’s flight. The simulation results show the effectiveness of this method. In the end, we described our test platform which is used to test the vision based SAA algorithm.
Streaming Codes With Partial Recovery Over Channels With Burst and Isolated Erasures

We study forward error correction codes for low-delay, real-time streaming communication over packet erasure channels. Our encoder operates on a stream of source packets in a sequential fashion, and the decoder must output each packet in the source stream within a fixed delay. We consider a class of practical channel models with correlated erasures and introduce new “streaming codes” for efficient error correction over these channels. For our analysis, we propose a simplified class of erasure channels that introduce both burst and isolated erasures within the same decoding window. We demonstrate that the previously proposed streaming codes can lead to significant number of packet losses over such channels. Our proposed constructions involve a layered coding approach, where a burst-erasure code is first constructed, and additional layers of parity-checks are concatenated to recover from the isolated erasure patterns. We also introduce another construction that requires a significantly smaller field-size and decoding complexity, but incurs some performance loss. Numerical simulations over the Gilbert-Elliott and Fritchman channel models indicate that by addressing patterns involving both burst and isolated erasures within the same window, our proposed codes achieve significant gains over previously proposed streaming codes.
Extending RSVP for QoS support in HMIPv6-based networks

Since mobile computing is getting more widespread, providing QoS guarantees and mobility support for Internet devices has become a hot research topic in the Next Generation Internet technologies. This paper proposed a scheme by extending RSVP to further improve wireless QoS guarantees in HMIPv6-based networks. The key features of the scheme include dynamic resource reservation, priority, pre-registration, and path prediction. Our simulation and experimental results show that the proposed scheme works well in mobile environments.
Influence of family factors and supervised alcohol use on adolescent alcohol use and harms: similarities between youth in different alcohol policy contexts.

OBJECTIVE Harm-minimization policies suggest that alcohol use is a part of normal adolescent development and that parents should supervise their children's use to encourage responsible drinking. Zero-tolerance policies suggest that all underage alcohol use should be discouraged. This article compared hypotheses derived from harm-minimization and zero-tolerance policies regarding the influence of family context and supervised drinking on adolescent alcohol use and related harms among adolescents in Washington State, USA, and Victoria, Australia, two states that have respectively adopted zero-tolerance and harm-minimization policies. METHOD Representative samples of seventh-grade students (N = 1,945; 989 females) were recruited from schools in each state. Students completed comprehensive questionnaires on alcohol use, related problem behaviors, and risk and protective factors annually from 2002 to 2004 when they were in ninth grade. RESULTS Relationships between family context and alcohol use and harmful use were very similar in both states. Adult-supervised settings for alcohol use were associated with higher levels of harmful alcohol consequences. Adult-supervised alcohol use mediated the links between favorable parental attitudes to alcohol use and ninth-grade alcohol use for students in both states. CONCLUSIONS Despite policy differences in the two states, relationships between family context variables and alcohol use and harmful use are remarkably similar. Adult-supervised settings for alcohol use resulted in higher levels of harmful alcohol consequences, contrary to predictions derived from harm-minimization policy. Findings challenge the harm-minimization position that supervised alcohol use or early-age alcohol use will reduce the development of adolescent alcohol problems.
Regional Online Newspapers : paths to glory , or the road to ruin ?

The dot.com and telecoms meltdown have led to claims in the popular press that eCommerce and eBusiness may have gone as far as they can. In practice, of course, the rationalisation of the Internet-based marketplace has really only meant that sound business practices are now required for online companies, as well as for their more conventional brethren in the physical world. As companies and individuals become more accustomed to the convenience of doing business as and when they like, traditional companies in all sectors are increasingly seeking ways of Internet-enabling their products and services. In this paper we look how the formerly very conservative newspaper industry – in particular, regional newspapers – have developed online business models. A review of relevant, literature-based eBusiness models is followed by a series of mini-case studies of online regional newspapers in Germany, France and Italy. We find that the models actually in use by regional online papers are more sophisticated and more complex than those suggested in the academic literature. While the success of these models is not yet firmly established, it appears that there is considerable potential for successful online positioning of regional newspapers.
Feature Space Modeling Through Surrogate Illumination

The MAP-Elites algorithm produces a set of high-performing solutions that vary according to features defined by the user. This technique has the potential to be a powerful tool for design space exploration, but is limited by the need for numerous evaluations. The Surrogate-Assisted Illumination algorithm (SAIL), introduced here, integrates approximative models and intelligent sampling of the objective function to minimize the number of evaluations required by MAP-Elites. The ability of SAIL to efficiently produce both accurate models and diverse high performing solutions is illustrated on a 2D airfoil design problem. The search space is divided into bins, each holding a design with a different combination of features. In each bin SAIL produces a better performing solution than MAP-Elites, and requires several orders of magnitude fewer evaluations. The CMA-ES algorithm was used to produce an optimal design in each bin: with the same number of evaluations required by CMA-ES to find a near-optimal solution in a single bin, SAIL finds solutions of similar quality in every bin.
Embodiment of Legged Robots Emerged in Evolutionary Design: Pseudo Passive Dynamic Walkers

Many legged robots have been developed, and some of them have already achieved dynamically stable bipedal and quadruped locomotion. Common characteristics of these conventional legged robots are that their motions are precisely manipulated by their control (i.e., gait and balance). In the case of ASIMO (Hirose et al., 2001) and HRP2 (Kaneko et al., 2004), their dynamically stable bipedal locomotion is based primarily on the Zero Moment Point (ZMP) concept, which was originally developed by Vukobratovic (Vukobratovic, 1969): the ZMP is a fictitious point on the ground plane, where the torques around the (horizontal) x and y axes (generated by ground reaction forces, inertial forces, and torques) are equal to zero. These robots dynamically stabilize their balance by manipulating the ZMP to remain within the support polygon area defined by their square feet, and their gait control is applied on top of the balance control. As a result, these conventional legged robots require rapid information processing and high-power drives to achieve locomotion. Therefore, they are characterized as having more complex control systems and larger energy consumption than those of biological locomotion. On the other hand, these design requirements (i.e., fast information processing and highpower drives) are regarded as disadvantageous in biologically inspired robotics. In the field, the specific behaviors and/or structures of biological organisms are imitated (Vogel, 1998) (Alexander, 2002) with robotic technology. As a result, the robot systems have simple design requirements compared to conventional robot systems, and achieve complex tasks. Thus, the design effort tends to focus on control complexity and energy requirements. A representative instance is the Passive Dynamic Walker (PDW), which was originally developed by McGeer (McGeer, 1990). The PDW has no controller (i.e., no sensor and no motor), and the structure is based on the physical characteristics of human walking: passive hip joints, latch knee joints, and curved feet. The PDW walks down a slope, and its structure exploits gravity as the driving force. This design principle has been applied to the Cornell Biped (Collins & Ruina, 2005) and Denise at TU Delft (Wisse, 2003), and the powered passive dynamic walkers achieved passive dynamic walking on a flat plane. In a summary of these two approaches, conventional robots require expensive design components to achieve dynamically stable locomotion. On the other hand, biologically inspired robots require physical characteristics that exploit their own dynamics to achieve
Property and carceral spaces in Christiania, Copenhagen

This article addresses the recent legal and property changes, and their socio-spatial consequences in Christiania, Copenhagen. During recent years the community that has always been against private ownership has lost its special legal status, and has become a property owner of a vast area in the middle of Copenhagen. We analyse the situation in relation to Christiania’s current housing condition, individual residents’ privatisation efforts, and decades-long normalisation efforts by the state. We argue that the processes of normalisation, legalisation, criminalisation and privatisation are expressions of the carceral in more-than-institutional context, and that questions of property are strongly involved in these carceral practices in Christiania. Not only in the relations between Christiania and the state, but also in socio-spatial relations inside of the community, defining who is included or excluded, or how people behave towards each other. Moreover, a part of the community is cultivating a carceral culture towards those in favour of privatisation, using the rights of the property owner and the community’s ideologies as justifications.
Design of a Printed Monopole Antenna for Dualband WLAN Application Using PSO

Recently, a novel evolutionary optimization algorithm, particle swarm optimization (PSO), has been successfully applied to a large variety of fields. In this paper, a printed monopole antenna for dualband WLAN is designed by using PSO. It is shown that the antenna can be quickly designed to meet the requirements for dualband WLAN application.
Supplementary Material of Generalized Singular Value Thresholding

Canyi Lu, Changbo Zhu, Chunyan Xu, Shuicheng Yan, Zhouchen Lin3,∗ 1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore 2 School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology 3 Key Laboratory of Machine Perception (MOE), School of EECS, Peking University canyilu@nus.edu. sg, zhuchangbo@gmail.com, xuchunyan01@gmail.com, eleyans@nus.edu. sg, zlin@pku.edu. cn
MODELING PEER-TO-PEER NETWORK TOPOLOGIES THROUGH “ SMALL-WORLD ” MODELS AND POWER LAWS

I INTRODUCTION The recent emergence of novel network applications such as Gnutella, Freenet, and Napster has reincarnated the familiar peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture model of the original Internet in new and innovative ways in an effort to facilitate worldwide sharing of information [1]. As a result, there is an ever-increasing need for distributed protocols that would allow peer-to-peer applications to scale to a large community of users. The main difficulty in designing such protocols is that currently, very little is known about the nature of networks on which they would be operating. Current protocols were designed without any knowledge about the underlying network topology. The end result is that even simple protocols, as in the case of Gnutella, result in complex interactions that can adversely affect system performance. To study these interactions, we first need an accurate model of the network topology. We model the topology of P2P networks by undirected graph G, where nodes represent hosts and edges represent connections between those hosts. In this paper we point out several important structural characteristics of the P2P network topology graph, namely the " small-world " properties and several power law distributions of various graph metrics. We report measurements through experimental studies of a large P2P network application known as Gnutella. To obtain the Gnutella topology data, a network crawler that allows topology discovery to be performed in parallel was developed. Upon analysing the obtained topology data, we discovered it exhibits strong "small-world" properties. More specifically, the properties of small diameter and clustering were observed. In addition, we report evidence of four different power laws previously observed in other technological networks, such as the Internet and the WWW. Recent research results show that the " small-world " and power-law properties of the underlying network topology can significantly impact the performance of algorithms such as those for routing and searching [2, 3]. Therefore the existence of these properties in P2P networks presents an important issue to consider when designing new, more-scalable application-level protocols. II " SMALL-WORLD " PROPERTIES The term " small-world " originated with a famous social experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram in the late 1960s. Watts and Strogatz in [4] showed that other networks, such as those occurring in nature and technology, also exhibit "small-world" behavior. Throughout this work we use the term " small-world " loosely to mean that the network possesses both small diameter and is also highly clustered. …
F U N C T I O N a L P E a R L S Back to Basics: Deriving Representation Changers Functionally

A representation changer is a function that converts a concrete representation of an abstract value into a diierent concrete representation of that value. Many useful functions can be recognised as representation changers; examples include compilers, and arithmetic functions such as addition and multiplication. Functions that can be speciied as the right inverse of other functions are special cases of representation changers. In recent years, a number of authors have used a relational calculus to derive representation changers from their speciications. In this paper we show that the generality of relations is not essential, and representation changers can be derived within the more basic setting of functional programming. We illustrate our point by deriving a carry-save adder and a base-converter, two functions which have previously been derived relationally.
Attribute-based continuous user authentication on mobile devices

We present a method using facial attributes for continuous authentication of smartphone users. The binary attribute classifiers are trained using PubFig dataset and provide compact visual descriptions of faces. The learned classifiers are applied to the image of the current user of a mobile device to extract the attributes and then authentication is done by simply comparing the difference between the acquired attributes and the enrolled attributes of the original user. Extensive experiments on two publicly available unconstrained mobile face video datasets show that our method is able to capture meaningful attributes of faces and performs better than the previously proposed LBP-based authentication method.
Directionality-aware rectilinear texture warped shadow maps

References OLANO, M. , AND BAKER, D. 2010. LEAN mapping. In Proc. I3D’10, 181–188. ROSEN, P. 2012. Rectilinear texture warping for fast adaptive shadow mapping. In Proc. I3D’12, 151–158. Figure 1. Our technique (b) warps the shadow map more appropriately especially for regions distant to the camera. Thus, sharper shadows are rendered with 0.12 ms overhead. RTWSMs without rotation produce moderate importance distribution for both vertical and horizontal axes when importance is obliquely distributed. By using our rotation, sharper importance distribution is produced for the vertical axis. Crytek Sponza (262 k triangles) GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 resolution: 1920x1080
Memory proportionate APSA with individual activation factors for highly sparse system identification in impulsive noise environment

This paper proposes a memory proportionate affine projection sign algorithm (IAF-MP-APSA) by assigning an individual activation factor to each filter coefficient. In this algorithm, each individual activation factor is calculated by past and current values of the corresponding coefficient magnitude. Moreover, taking into account the memory property of the proportionate factors leads to a decrease in computational complexity. Simulation results to estimate impulse responses having high sparseness have demonstrated that the IAF-MP-APSA not only inherits good robustness of the affine projection sign algorithm (APSA) against impulsive noise, but also outperforms other existing proportionate APSAs in terms of convergence rate and tracking capability.
An Organizational Strategic Analysis for Dynamics of Generating Firms- Alliance Networks

This paper proposes an analytical method for the dynamics of generating firms’ alliance networks along with business phases. Dynamics in network developments have previously been discussed in the research areas of organizational strategy rather than in the areas of regional cluster, where the static properties of the networks are often discussed. The analytical method introduces the concept of business phases into innovation processes and uses relationships called prior experiences; this idea was developed in organizational strategy to investigate the state of networks from the viewpoints of tradeoffs between link stabilization and node exploration. This paper also discusses the results of the analytical method using five cases of the network developments of firms. The idea of Embeddedness helps interpret the backgrounds of the analytical results. The analytical method is useful for policymakers of regional clusters to establish concrete evaluation targets and a viewpoint for comparisons of policy programs. Keywords—Regional Clusters, Alliance Networks, Innovation Processes, Prior Experiences, Embeddedness.
The Everyday Experiences of Personal Role Engagement: What Matters Most?

Despite increasing interest from the HRD community, little is known about how personal role engagement is experienced in everyday work situations and which factors are most important for facilitating or thwarting such experiences. A total of 124 employees from six U.K. organizations were interviewed about the factors that heighten versus reduce their everyday experiences of the emotional, cognitive, and physical aspects of personal role engagement. Template analysis revealed that task, relational, and organizational resources were the most relevant for heightened personal role engagement whereas relational and organizational hindrances were the most prominent for reduced personal role engagement. There was some variation in the salience of task and personal resources as well as challenge demands across organizational settings. Moreover, resources and demands seemed to influence personal role engagement through the psychological conditions of meaningfulness, availability, and, to some degree, safety. This study is one of the first to qualitatively explore the everyday experience of personal role engagement. In doing so, it provides deeper insight into how an HRD approach to engagement can be further advanced with an appreciation of the situational and organizational context.
Living roots magnify the response of soil organic carbon decomposition to temperature in temperate grassland

Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration is both a strong driver of primary productivity and widely believed to be the principal cause of recent increases in global temperature. Soils are the largest store of the world's terrestrial C. Consequently, many investigations have attempted to mechanistically understand how microbial mineralisation of soil organic carbon (SOC) to CO2 will be affected by projected increases in temperature. Most have attempted this in the absence of plants as the flux of CO2 from root and rhizomicrobial respiration in intact plant‐soil systems confounds interpretation of measurements. We compared the effect of a small increase in temperature on respiration from soils without recent plant C with the effect on intact grass swards. We found that for 48 weeks, before acclimation occurred, an experimental 3 °C increase in sward temperature gave rise to a 50% increase in below ground respiration (ca. 0.4 kg C m−2; Q10 = 3.5), whereas mineralisation of older SOC without plants increased with a Q10 of only 1.7 when subject to increases in ambient soil temperature. Subsequent 14C dating of respired CO2 indicated that the presence of plants in swards more than doubled the effect of warming on the rate of mineralisation of SOC with an estimated mean C age of ca. 8 years or older relative to incubated soils without recent plant inputs. These results not only illustrate the formidable complexity of mechanisms controlling C fluxes in soils but also suggest that the dual biological and physical effects of CO2 on primary productivity and global temperature have the potential to synergistically increase the mineralisation of existing soil C.