Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Density functions for visual attributes and effective partitioning in graph visualization

Two tasks in graph visualization require partitioning: the assignment of visual attributes and divisive clustering. Often, we would like to assign a color or other visual attributes to a node or edge that indicates an associated value. In an application involving divisive clustering, we would like to partition the graph into subsets of graph elements based on metric values in such a way that all subsets are evenly populated. Assuming a uniform distribution of metric values during either partitioning or coloring can have undesired effects such as empty clusters or only one level of emphasis for the entire graph. Probability density functions derived from statistics about a metric can help systems succeed at these tasks.
A Modified Infomax ICA Algorithm for fMRI Data Source Separation

This study presents a modified infomax model of Independent Component Analysis (ICA) for the source separation problem of fMRI data. Functional MRI data is processed by different blind source separation techniques including Independent Component Analysis (ICA). ICA is a statistical decomposition method used for multivariate data source separation. ICA algorithm is based on independence of extracted sources for which different techniques are used like kurtosis, negentropy, information maximization etc. The infomax method of ICA extracts unknown sources from a number of mixtures by maximizing the negentropy thus ensuring independence. In this proposed modified infomax model a higher order contrast function is used which results in fast convergence and accuracy. The Proposed algorithm is applied to general simulated signals and simulated fMRI data. Comparison of correlation results of the proposed algorithm with the conventional infomax algorithm shows better performance.
Computing Perceptual and Sensory-Motor Equivalence Classes for Map Learning

This invention relates to an improvement upon the film winding and rewinding apparatus forming the subject matter of my copending application Ser. No. 666,187 filed Oct. 29, 1984, by a replacement of its former manually-shifted electrochemical reversing system for changing from a so-called "A-wind" to a "B-wind" with an electromagnetic one employing a pair of electromagnetic clutches on parallel counterrotating output shafts operatively linked together with a belt and pulley power transfer mechanism which cooperates with the clutches to impose a drag upon the supply reel regardless of which direction it is being turned by the power supplied to the take-up reel. The invention also encompasses an electromechanical circuit in which an idler spool responsive to the tension in the film passing between the supply and take-up reels actuates a potentiometer which, in turn, lessens the drag on the supply reel as the tension increases. The invention further encompasses a control circuit in which two or more different combinations of resistances can be switched to vary the drag on the supply reel to adjust for different reel sizes.
Axiomatizing Qualitative Process Theory

We show that the type of reasoning performed by Forbus' 1985] Qualitative Process (QP) program can be justiied in a rst-order theory that models time and other measure spaces as real-valued quantities. We consider the QP analysis of a can of water with a safety valve being heated over a ame. We exhibit a rst-order theory for the microworld involved in this example, and we prove the correctness of the rst two transitions in the envisionment graph. We discuss the possibility of deriving the closure conditions in the theory via non-monotonic inference. One way to increase conndence in a reasoning program is to show that the conclusions that it draws correspond to valid inferences within some easily intelligible logical theory. Such a correspondence has been shown for many of the best known physical reasoning programs. The calculations performed by QSIM Kuipers, 86] correspond to theorems in real analysis, under a natural interpretation ; Duchier, 91] exhibits full rst-order proofs of these. Likewise the reasoning in NEWTON de Kleer, 77] and ENVISION de Kleer and Brown, 85] can be shown to be valid for a simple physical theory, easily formalized in rst-order logic, in which time and other physical parameters are viewed as real-valued quantities. (See, for example, Rayner, 91], Davis, 90, chap. 7].) However, no adequate logical analysis has hitherto been given for the Qualitative Process (QP) program Forbus, 85]. In QP, processes can come into and out of existence, and the topological structure of the physical system may change over time. Hence, the problem of nding an appropriate formulation of the necessary closed-world assumptions on processes and innuences seemed daunting. In a previous analysis Davis, 90] I was unable to nd a reasonable characterization of these closure principles, and hence left them as intuitively plausible, but wholly unformalized, non-monotonic deductions. In this paper, I show that this gap can be closed. It is possible to characterize inference in QP entirely in terms of a monotonic theory based on real analysis. There are two key points: For each parameter, the theory must give an exhaustive enumeration of the types of processes and parameters that can innuence it. These axioms resemble to the kind of frame axioms advocated by Schubert 1991], which give necessary conditions for a uent to change its value. They are also analogous to the circumscription over causes of change discussed in Lifschitz, 87]. Since QP uses only …
Sensitivity of the Chi-Squared Goodness-of-Fit Test to the Partitioning of Data

In this paper we conduct a Monte Carlo study to determine the power of Pearson’s overall goodness-of-fit test as well as the “Pearson analog” tests (see Anderson (1994)) to detect rejections due to shifts in variance, skewness and kurtosis, as we vary the number and location of the partition points. Simulations are conducted for small and moderate sample sizes. While it is generally recommended that to improve the power of the goodness-of-fit test the partition points are equiprobable, we find that power can be improved by the use of non-equiprobable partitions.
What ' s Value Worth ? Constraining Unsupervised Behaviour

Novel architectures for behaviour focus on self-organization and the possibilities of environmentally situated sensory-motor systems. How well does this perspective extend to understanding de-velopment? Two approaches to unsupervised be-havioural acquisition that are of current interest to roboticists are considered: selection from the system's own activities, based on bias by evolu-tionarily determined value schemes; and imitation through observation of the behaviour of more competent others. Work with robots is compared with studies of naturally intelligent primates, including human infants, demonstrating the primacy ofìearning by doing' to both accounts of behavioural acquisition. For many traditional domains of inquiry, work in arti-cial life is ooering a radically new view of problems and potential solutions, uniied by revealing how complex phenomena can emerge from interaction of many simple processes when an appropriate scale of analysis is adopted for the system in question. In this vein, novel architectures for behaviour increasingly attempt to avoid the programs, plans and goals that underlie the brittle intelligence of traditional computational systems. However, despite their limitations when embodied, embedded agent{environment systems become the focus of interest, traditional notions nevertheless ooer an internally coherent view of some essential dimensions of adap-tive behaviour. Of particular concern here, they support straightforward ways of talking about behavioural decomposition: Recurrent functional patterns that an observer abstracts from an agent's seamless ow of activity can be attributed to operation of permanent components of its program (procedures, sub-routines and so forth); and goals supply explicit`stop rules' that specify when activity has achieved a more or less stable end-state that is deemed advantageous for the agent. Very diierent mechanisms become plausible if we shift focus to action-based knowing that relies for its eecacy on an ongoing process of sensory-motor interaction between agent and environment. Often these mechanisms appear counterintuitive, with little match between tasks that the agent is deemed able to do and mechanism components that are believed necessary for it to do them that is typical of morèbetween the ears' accounts of knowing and acting. Novel robotics proposals for agent design, such as the subsumption architecture instantia-tion of emergent functionality (Brooks, 1991), share the aim of clarifying how intelligent systems can recurrently exhibit context-appropriate patterns of action without being programmed to know what ends they are going to attain, let alone using such knowledge to select behaviours to try to attain those ends. How well does this perspective extend to systems whose adaptive potential lies in …
Using social media technologies for teaching and research

The goal of this workshop is to examine and discuss how educators and researchers can adopt and use social media tools such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogging (e.g. Twitter), social bookmarking tools, photo-sharing sites (e.g. Flickr), or social networking tools (e.g. Facebook) in the service of their teaching and research, and, particularly, in engaging with students and other researchers. We will cover the following topics in the workshop: a. A catalogue of social media tools that can support teaching and research dialogues b. Tips for social networking c. Digital professionalism for educators and researchers d. Social media etiquette for educators and researchers
The Rational Expectations Revolution: Readings from the Front Line

These twenty-one collected readings describe the origins and growth of the revolutionary approach to macroeconomic analysis known as rational expectations. The readings trace the development of this approach from the late 1970s, when it was viewed by many as radical, to the present, when it has attained a central position in macroeconomic theory and policymaking. In the 1970s the rational expectations school challenged the traditional Keynesian view of the world. Economic models built on the ideas of John Maynard Keynes treat the economy more or less as a system of controllable inanimate objects blindly following rules. Models built on the new ideas attempt to acknowledge the ability of humans to change behavior when they expect economic policies to change. The repercussions of this dramatic shift in thought are still being felt among practicing macroeconomic theorists and policymakers.
Efficient Reservoir Sampling for Transactional Data Streams

Reservoir sampling maintains a sample that is a "sketch" of the whole data. Existing reservoir sampling methods introduced by J.S Vitter are based on simple random sampling. These algorithms work fine for larger sampling ratios but for small sampling ratios, their performance drops drastically. Note that for streaming data, it is quintessential that the sampling algorithm works efficiently particularly for a very small ratio because streaming data is potentially infinite in size. We proposed a distance based sampling (DSS) for transactional data streams. DSS is designed to produce samples that are "close" to the whole data. It assures the accuracy of the final sample even at very small sampling ratios. Experimental comparison between DSS algorithm and the existing reservoir sampling methods shows that DSS outperforms them significantly particularly for small sample ratios
Analysis farm: A cloud-based scalable aggregation and query platform for network log analysis

Network monitoring data provides insights into the network operation status. With increasingly sophisticated ways of probing, sampling and recording network activities, the huge amount of monitoring data brings both an opportunity and a challenge for network data analysis. We aim to build a scalable platform, named Analysis Farm, for analyzing network logs. Analysis Farm's targets include fast log aggregation and agile log query. To achieve these goals, storage scalability, computation scalability and query agility should be addressed. The cloud computing and NoSQL technologies meet our needs by providing manageable on-demand hardware resources and novel data storage models. We choose OpenStack, an open-source cloud tool set, for resource provisioning, and MongoDB, a RDBMS-like document-oriented NoSQL system, for log storage and analysis. By combining scalability at both OpenStack and MongoDB, we build Analysis Farm capable of storage scale-out, computation scale-out and agile query. The Analysis Farm prototype in use, consisting of 10 MongoDB servers, aggregates about 3 million log records in a 10-minute interval and handle ad hoc query effectively in the log database accumulated with more than 400 million records per day. In this paper, we describe Analysis Farm's background, targets, architecture and some experimental results. We believe Analysis Farm will benefit those who work on big-log-style data analysis.
Facial Soft Tissue Thickness Database for Craniofacial Reconstruction in Korean Adults

Abstract: One hundred Korean adults (50 men, 50 women) were scanned in the upright position using a cone‐beam CT (CBCT) scanner. The soft tissue (ST) thicknesses were measured at 31 landmarks, 10 midline and 21 bilateral landmark sites, and the means and standard deviations were obtained for male and female subjects. While 18 of 31 landmarks showed sex differences, the majority showed higher values for male subjects with the exception of a few landmark sites corresponding to the zygoma area, which showed smaller values in men than in women. The mandibular area showed greater differences between the right and left sides. Overall, the ST thickness measurements obtained in this study can be used as a database for the forensic craniofacial reconstruction of Korean adult faces.
Rapid and Highly Sensitive Detection of Variant Creutzfeldt - Jakob Disease Abnormal Prion Protein on Steel Surfaces by Protein Misfolding Cyclic Amplification: Application to Prion Decontamination Studies

The prevalence of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) in the population remains uncertain, although it has been estimated that 1 in 2000 people in the United Kingdom are positive for abnormal prion protein (PrPTSE) by a recent survey of archived appendix tissues. The prominent lymphotropism of vCJD prions raises the possibility that some surgical procedures may be at risk of iatrogenic vCJD transmission in healthcare facilities. It is therefore vital that decontamination procedures applied to medical devices before their reprocessing are thoroughly validated. A current limitation is the lack of a rapid model permissive to human prions. Here, we developed a prion detection assay based on protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) technology combined with stainless-steel wire surfaces as carriers of prions (Surf-PMCA). This assay allowed the specific detection of minute quantities (10−8 brain dilution) of either human vCJD or ovine scrapie PrPTSE adsorbed onto a single steel wire, within a two week timeframe. Using Surf-PMCA we evaluated the performance of several reference and commercially available prion-specific decontamination procedures. Surprisingly, we found the efficiency of several marketed reagents to remove human vCJD PrPTSE was lower than expected. Overall, our results demonstrate that Surf-PMCA can be used as a rapid and ultrasensitive assay for the detection of human vCJD PrPTSE adsorbed onto a metallic surface, therefore facilitating the development and validation of decontamination procedures against human prions.
Blind assessment of image quality employing fragile watermarking

The provision of blind quality assessment is an important requirement for modern multimedia and communication systems. Fragile watermarking techniques have been proposed earlier for this purpose. This paper proposes a novel approach which makes use of both fragile and robust watermarking techniques. The embedded fragile watermark is used to assess the degradation undergone by the transmitted images. Robust image features, on the other hand, are used to construct the reference watermark from the received image, for assessing the amount of degradation of the fragile watermark. Construction of the watermark from the image itself, dispenses with the need for embedding an extraneous watermark which must be made known to the user separately, a significant contribution of the present work in image quality assessment. Another contribution is the use of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) for the extraction of the fragile watermark. The validity of the proposed approach is veri#ed through extensive simulations using different kinds of gray-scale and color images.
Novel image quality metric based on similarity

In this paper, we present a novel approach to image quality metric taking into account degradation of contrast and brightness as well as block similarity. The metric is achieved by performing of the following steps: 1) reducing contrast and brightness in distorted image, 2) using block-matching (BM) to group similar 2D image fragments into 3D data arrays in original image and preprocessed distorted image separately, 3) analyzing of these blocks in DCT domain. The DCT coefficients differences are calculated between pixel values with contrast sensitivity function (CSF) and reduced by contrast masking according to Human Visual System (HVS). We validate the performance of our algorithms with five most popular quality image databases: TID, LIVE, CSIQ, IVC and Cornell-A57. The analysis of the results shows that the proposed quality metric provides better correlation to Mean Observer Score (MOS) than most of recent popular state-of-the-art metrics, e.g. MSSIM, SSIM. The average Spearman Correlation of proposed metric reaches 0.894.
Chapter 1 DETECTING COLLUSION IN ERP SYSTEMS

In today’s technological age, fraud has become more complicated, and increasingly more difficult to detect, especially when it is collusive in nature. Different fraud surveys showed that the median loss from collusive fraud is much greater than fraud perpetrated by a single person. Despite its prevalence and potentially devastating effects, collusion is commonly overlooked as an organizational risk. Internal auditors often fail to proactively consider collusion in their fraud assessment and detection efforts. In this paper, we consider fraud scenarios with collusion. We present six potentially collusive fraudulent behaviors and show their detection process in an ERP system. We have enhanced our fraud detection framework to utilize aggregation of different sources of logs in order to detect communication and have further enhanced it to render it system-agnostic thus achieving portability and making it generally applicable to all ERP systems.
Evidence for structural constraint on ovulin, a rapidly evolving Drosophila melanogaster seminal protein

The egg-laying hormone ovulin (Acp26Aa) is among the most rapidly evolving proteins in the Drosophila genome. Against the background of ovulin's high sequence variability within and between species, we have identified highly conserved motifs that may play an important structural role. Using yeast two-hybrid and GST-pull-down assays, we show that ovulin interacts with itself. The C terminus of ovulin is necessary and sufficient for self-interaction, with its C-terminal 45 aa playing a major role. Under nonreducing conditions, ovulin participates in a high-molecular-mass complex, suggesting that it occurs in an oligomeric form. One or more of three predicted coiled-coil domains in the C terminus of ovulin may be involved in its self-interaction. These structural elements are conserved between species despite an overall rapid pace of evolution in ovulin's primary sequence. We therefore suggest that domains involved in ovulin's self-interaction form a conserved structural backbone for the protein, resulting in greater evolutionary flexibility at other sites.
User modeling in changeable environments

One of the challenges which need to be faced in the field of the information processing is the need to cope with huge amounts of data. There exist many different environments in which large quantities of information are produced. For example, in a command-line interface, a computer user types thousand of commands which can hide information about the behavior of her/his. However, processing this kind of streaming data on-line is a hard problem. This paper address the use of a dimensionality reduction perspective to classify streaming data and present a preliminary work for its adaptation to new data in changeable environments. This new extended proposal allows from a computational point of view the treatment of the new data without any penalty and evolving the previously analyzed data. Some results of the general technique are presented jointly with a comparison between the dimensionality reduction approach and using the full dataset. The results obtained show some of the advantages of using dimensionality reduction in streaming data and gives a new perspective to use it in changeable environments.
Do Cryptic Species Exist in Hoplobatrachus rugulosus? An Examination Using Four Nuclear Genes, the Cyt b Gene and the Complete MT Genome

he Chinese tiger frog Hoplobatrachus rugulosus is widely distributed in southern China, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam. It is listed in Appendix II of CITES as the only Class II nationally-protected frog in China. The bred tiger frog known as the Thailand tiger frog, is also identified as H. rugulosus. Our analysis of the Cyt b gene showed high genetic divergence (13.8%) between wild and bred samples of tiger frog. Unexpected genetic divergence of the complete mt genome (14.0%) was also observed between wild and bred samples of tiger frog. Yet, the nuclear genes (NCX1, Rag1, Rhod, Tyr) showed little divergence between them. Despite this and their very similar morphology, the features of the mitochondrial genome including genetic divergence of other genes, different three-dimensional structures of ND5 proteins, and gene rearrangements indicate that H. rugulosus may be a cryptic species complex. Using Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood, and maximum parsimony analyses, Hoplobatrachus was resolved as a sister clade to Euphlyctis, and H. rugulosus (BT) as a sister clade to H. rugulosus (WT). We suggest that we should prevent Thailand tiger frogs (bred type) from escaping into wild environments lest they produce hybrids with Chinese tiger frogs (wild type).
Literacy and technology : Bridging the divide

Let me start with an example, not from my own research, but from that of J. Hillis Miller, a colleague at UC Irvine. Miller (2002) documents the lives of two middle-class white teenagers, Horace, in 1946, and Jimjim, in 2001. Horace, as a post-World War II teen, is totally wrapped up in the lives of books, from Alice and Wonderland to Wuthering Heights to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, the grand narratives of which all helped shape his identity. And beyond books alone, Horace’s whole world was immersed in paper, from his mawkish diary to his love letters to his handwritten examinations.