Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
GEMINI: A Hybrid Byzantine Fault Tolerant Protocol for Reliable Composite Web Services Orchestrated Delivery

 Abstract —To ensure reliable delivery for composite web services, we argue that Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) must be guaranteed for the service delivery modules (such as BPEL execution engines and dispatchers) as well as for the realizing components of the composite web service. Existing BFT service delivery approaches are mainly focused on atomic web services. However, there are few approaches discussed BFT for composite web services delivery. Unfortunately, such approaches either ensured BFT for the service delivery modules alone or for the service realizing components alone; but not for both. To overcome such limitation, this paper proposes GEMINI; a hybrid BFT protocol for reliable composite web services orchestrated delivery. GEMINI uses a light-weight replication-based BFT protocol to ensure the BFT for service delivery modules, and uses a speculative quorum-based BFT protocol to ensure components BFT. Unlike existing quorum-based BFT approaches that ensure components redundancy via component replication; GEMINI ensures components redundancy via components parallel provisioning. Experimental results show that GEMINI increases the reliability and throughput of composite web service delivery when compared with existing composite web services delivery approaches.
Uncertainty quantification in brain tumor segmentation using CRFs and random perturbation models

Medical image segmentation is a challenging task and algorithms often struggle with the high variability of inhomogeneous clinical data, demanding different parameter settings or resulting in weak segmentation accuracy across different inputs. Assessing the uncertainty in the resulting segmentation therefore becomes crucial for both communicating with the end-user and calculating further metrics of interest based on it, for example, in tumor volumetry. In this paper, we quantify segmentation uncertainties in a energy minimisation method where computing probabilistic segmentations is non-trivial. We follow recently proposed work on random perturbation models that enables us to sample segmentations efficiently by repeatedly perturbing the energy function of the conditional random field (CRF) followed by maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference. We conduct experiments on brain tumor segmentation, with both voxel and supervoxel perturbations, and demonstrate the benefits of probabilistic segmentations by means of precision-recall curves and uncertainties in tumor volumetry along time.
Simultaneous Learning of Robot Impedance Parameters Using Neural Networks

Impedance control is one of the most effective control methods for interaction between a robotic manipulator and its environment. Robot impedance control regulates the response of the manipulator to contact and virtual impedance control regulates the manipulator’s response before contact. Although these impedance parameters may be regulated using neural networks, conventional methods do not consider regulating robot impedance and virtual impedance simultaneously. This paper proposes a simultaneous learning method to regulate the impedance parameters using neural networks. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated in computer simulations of tasks by a multi-joint robotic manipulator.
Design for coincidence: incorporating real world artifacts in location based games

As location based games move players out of the house and onto the streets the experience of game play radically changes. Game designers have the opportunity to incorporate artifacts, elements and events that might naturally occur in the real world into the game play so that a particular place becomes more meaningful. This paper explores the relevance of place and the idea of "design for coincidence". Design for coincidence is illustrated through case studies and a number of example games that show how this approach has been effective in location based games.
Risk measurement with equivalent utility principles

SUMMARY Risk measures have been studied for several decades in the actuarial literature, where they appeared under the guise of premium calculation principles. Risk measures and properties that risk measures should satisfy have recently received considerable attention in the financial mathematics literature. Mathematically, a risk measure is a mapping from a class of random variables to the real line. Economically, a risk measure should capture the preferences of the decision-maker. This paper complements the study initiated in Denuit, Dhaene & Van Wouwe (1999) and considers several theories for decision under uncertainty: the classical expected utility paradigm, Yaari's dual approach, maximin expected utility theory, Choquet expected utility theory and Quiggin's rank-dependent utility theory. Building on the actuarial equivalent utility pricing principle, broad classes of risk measures are generated, of which most classical risk measures appear to be particular cases. This approach shows that most risk measures studied recently in the financial mathematics literature disregard the utility concept (i.e., correspond to linear utilities), restricting their applicability. Some alternatives proposed in the literature are discussed.
Face tracking by using omnidirectional sensor network

In recent years, security camera systems have been installed in various public facilities. More intelligent processes are needed to track people in image sequences for security camera systems. In this paper, we propose a face tracking and recognition method based on a Bayesian framework. We assume that an observed space is three-dimensional, and we estimate the 3D position of a person. We use facial 3D shape, movement, and texture models for face tracking and recognition. Omnidirectional image sensors are used to acquire image sequences of two pedestrians because the sensors have a wide view and are suitable for object tracking. Our system generates 3D positional hypotheses based on the facial movement model and these positional hypotheses are projected onto an image plane. Image features are extracted from projected hypotheses and the system distinguishes faces using these image features. Our evaluation experiments show that our proposed method is effective for face tracking, and that tracking accuracy is proportional to the number of cameras used.
Content-Oriented Internet Cache Protocol: An efficient Web cache sharing protocol

As the rapid development of Internet, multimedia contents become increasingly dominant and voluminous in Web. Meanwhile contents duplication and redundancy become more and more common among different web sites. This bright inefficiency to our caching system, both in the utilization of cache storage and in the bandwidth cost. In this paper, we propose Content-Oriented Internet Cache Protocol (Co-ICP) as a solution to the issues above. In Co-ICP, message digests of contents are used to identify multimedia contents. Also we introduce a new message type to Co-ICP to support message digest based identifier. These modifications of ICP make our caching system much more efficient, saving the memory usage of caches and decreasing the traffic between cooperated caches. In this paper, we also analysis and evaluate Co-ICP system's performance using real data.
Leptin Signaling in Kiss1 Neurons Arises after Pubertal Development

The adipocyte-derived hormone leptin is required for normal pubertal maturation in mice and humans and, therefore, leptin has been recognized as a crucial metabolic cue linking energy stores and the onset of puberty. Several lines of evidence have suggested that leptin acts via kisspeptin expressing neurons of the arcuate nucleus to exert its effects. Using conditional knockout mice, we have previously demonstrated that deletion of leptin receptors (LepR) from kisspeptin cells cause no puberty or fertility deficits. However, developmental adaptations and system redundancies may have obscured the physiologic relevance of direct leptin signaling in kisspeptin neurons. To overcome these putative effects, we re-expressed endogenous LepR selectively in kisspeptin cells of mice otherwise null for LepR, using the Cre-loxP system. Kiss1-Cre LepR null mice showed no pubertal development and no improvement of the metabolic phenotype, remaining obese, diabetic and infertile. These mice displayed decreased numbers of neurons expressing Kiss1 gene, similar to prepubertal control mice, and an unexpected lack of re-expression of functional LepR. To further assess the temporal coexpression of Kiss1 and Lepr genes, we generated mice with the human renilla green fluorescent protein (hrGFP) driven by Kiss1 regulatory elements and crossed them with mice that express Cre recombinase from the Lepr locus and the R26-tdTomato reporter gene. No coexpression of Kiss1 and LepR was observed in prepubertal mice. Our findings unequivocally demonstrate that kisspeptin neurons are not the direct target of leptin in the onset of puberty. Leptin signaling in kisspeptin neurons arises only after completion of sexual maturation.
School Counselor Accountability: A MEASURE of Student Success

Chapter 1 - The Accountability Imperative for School Counselors Chapter 2 - Accountability: The Cornerstone of the ASCA National Model Chapter 3 - Demystifying Data Chapter 4 - MEASURE: Six Steps to Improving Student Success Chapter 5 - School Counselors Demonstrating Accountability Chapter 6 - Preparing Graduate Students to be Data-Driven Practitioners Appendix American School Counselor Association National Model: A Framework For School Counseling Programs Critical Data Examples MEASURE Template and Report Card
Red or Blue? An Exploration of Political Party Affiliation and Resident Attitudes Toward Tourism in Montana - 2006

This study focused on the relationship between political party affiliation and tourism support. From 1998 to 2005, telephone surveys o f Montana residents asked three attitude questions along with political party affiliation. On a 5 -point Likert scale o f strongly agree to strongly disagree, the three questions were: “The overall benefits o f tourism outweigh the negative impacts; ” “I f tourism increases in MT, the overall quality o f life fo r M T residents will improve, and; “In recent years, the state is becoming overcrowded because o f more tourists. ’’Mean responses to all three questions showed similarities between political party affiliation. ANOVAs conducted between party affiliation and resident attitudes d id find significant differences, however, further analysis through an SNK multiple comparison post-hoc test revealed that those claiming to be Independent rather than either Republican or Democrat accountedfor the differences. ANOVA between Democrats and Republicans showed no significant differences between the two parties. Results indicate that a persons ’ affiliation with a political party in Montana does not differentiate ones attitude toward tourism, rather, tourism crosses over party affiliation. This suggests that tourism support should remain stable when a state such as Montana switches the political party in power.
A modular robotic platform for visual perception and computational photography

In this paper we introduce a Modular Snakelike Robot designed to satisfy a variety of visual perception tasks. We first explain the novel modular design of the robotic platform to cover the necessary perception strategies proposed to capture the visual information of the scene. The visual model proposed is based on the plenoptic Light Field (LF) captured with the platform. We provide examples for depth estimation and computational photography techniques using the modular robot. The perception and computational photography applications of the proposed platform include Synthetic Aperture, Synthetic Refocusing, Image Stitching and Depth Estimation.
NGO field workers in Pakistan

NGOs came into the society in their present form after World War II and more precisely in 1960s. Before that also different forms of philanthropy existed. Like elsewhere in the world, in Pakistan also state and the market were the two sectors catering for different needs of the people. When foreign funding started coming into the poor countries, the channel of NGOs was considered more appropriate including the fact they had roots in the society and the benefit could reach the far flung areas. NGO field workers are the real actors in the NGOs’ activities but sadly the NGOs those raise the slogans of working for the destitute do not bother to facilitate the NGO field workers. Eventually the NGO field workers are facing problems of job insecurity, poor salary structure, unhealthy working environment and even harassment especially in case of women NGO field workers in Pakistan.
O A ] 8 M ay 2 00 2 SPECTRAL FLOW AND DIXMIER TRACES

We obtain general theorems which enable the calculation of the Dixmier trace in terms of the asymptotics of the zeta function and of the heat operator in a general semi-finite von Neumann algebra. Our results have several applications. We deduce a formula for the Chern character of an odd L-summable Breuer-Fredholm module in terms of a Hochschild 1-cycle. We explain how to derive a Wodzicki residue for pseudo-differential operators along the orbits of an ergodic R n action on a compact space X. Finally we give a short proof an index theorem of Lesch for generalised Toeplitz operators.
Regional Unemployment and its Persistence in Transition Countries

We look at the differences in regional unemployment rates in six major transition countries and their persistence over time. We analyse the role various adjustment mechanisms play. While movement out of the labour force seems to be one consequence in many regions with high relative unemployment, there are also signs of emerging wage flexibility. Employment creation, by contrast, has not picked up in regions of high unemployment. Labour mobility also remains very limited in size although it appears to respond to basic economic incentives. Policies addressing housing market imperfections and information asymmetries are necessary to increase worker mobility and to integrate better national labour markets.
Microfinance Issues and Challenges in the Anglophone Caribbean

This paper describes the microenterprise and microfinance sectors of seven English-speaking Caribbean states, examines main constraints on the development of a well functioning microfinance market in these countries, and highlights the amount, type, and results obtained in microenterprise projects financed by the Inter-American Bank in the last fifteen years. It suggests that English-speaking Caribbean microfinance organizations have not attained as much success in client outreach and sustainability compared to Latin American counterparts due to different legacies. Higher levels of economic and financial stability coupled with high levels of socio-economic development and strong government presence in microfinance have not created the same impetus for the rapid development of a commercially oriented style of microfinance as witnessed in Latin America in the 1980-90s. Several other factors led to a heavier and more sustained reliance on subsidies in the Anglophone Caribbean: notably, NGOs there have had less time, and less sustained external technical assistance, to experiment with commercially sustainable microfinance. This reliance on subsidies has persisted among practitioners as well as policymakers. This differing context should be taken into account in the design of strategies promoting microfinance in the Caribbean. The paper examines the role of the Inter-American Development Bank in the sector, and draws conclusions based on the lessons learned from its Caribbean microenterprise projects of the past decade. The paper concludes with a number of potential strategic interventions: for example, educating public sector policymakers and microfinance organization (MFO) managers about appropriate interest rate policies; creating more favorable conditions for sustainable microfinance, namely by improving secured transactions frameworks and building credit bureaus; encouraging existing commercial banks and finance or trust companies to down-scale and penetrate microenterprise markets; strengthening existing institutions in order to achieve a “breakthrough model” of commercially sustainable microfinance; and, if certain conditions are met, promoting the creation of new institutions dedicated to microfinance. It concludes that the English-speaking Caribbean needs to take advantage of its relatively high level of economic and financial market development and develop new methodologies and products aimed at serving small and micro entrepreneurs.
Efficient management of large DMA memory buffers in microdrivers

Microdrivers run entirely in user space. The paradigm of such user-space device drivers has already shown to improve reliability and portability over pure kernel-space drivers. While the microdriver approach has been successful so far for low throughput and high latency use-cases such as USB, little research has been done on high performance applications. The Portable Driver Architecture (PDA) is a library which supports programming of microdrivers for high-speed PCI devices. This paper presents how it is possible to simplify large DMA buffer handling by using I/O Memory Management Units (IOMMU). Additionally, we optimized our library for intra-node communication in non-uniform memory access architectures.
Building Functional Prototypes Using Conductive Inkjet Printing

The recently developed conductive inkjet printing process enables conductive circuits to be created quickly, cheaply, and easily using a consumer-grade inkjet printer. In its basic form, the technique supports a single layer of wiring on a flexible substrate. This can be a valuable tool for pervasive computing research because it allows simple electronic circuits and devices to be built and iterated quickly, in an analogous manner to the use of 3D printers for prototyping mechanical structures. It is possible to rapidly create touch- and proximity-sensitive surfaces, to cut and fold the printed conductive patterns, and to augment them with off-the-shelf electronic components and custom-made subcircuits. The authors present the possibilities enabled by conductive inkjet printing, bringing together their previously published results and presenting their latest insights and findings. They consider these printing and fabrication techniques as a suite of tools for researchers and practitioners who wish to fabricate a variety of functional device prototypes. They aim to enable others to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and applicability of conductive inkjet printing across a range of pervasive computing applications. This article is part of a special issue on printing and fabrication.
Differential Pricing for Information Sharing Under Competition

We consider a two‐echelon supply chain with a manufacturer supplying to multiple downstream retailers engaged in differentiated Cournot competition. Each retailer has private information about uncertain demand. The manufacturer is the Stackelberg leader who sets the contract terms with the retailers, and benefits from retailers sharing their private information. When all retailers are given the same wholesale price, truthful information sharing is not an equilibrium outcome. We propose two variants of differential pricing mechanisms that induce truthful information sharing by all retailers. The first variant rewards a retailer for providing optimistic information and achieves truthful information sharing as a unique equilibrium. The differential pricing mechanism is optimal in the class of linear‐price, incentive‐compatible, direct mechanisms. The second variant, which incorporates provision for a fixed payment in addition to wholesale prices, preserves all the equilibrium properties of the first variant and additionally “nearly coordinates” the supply chain. Our analysis of differential pricing with a fixed payment provides interesting observations regarding the relationship between product substitutability, number of retailers, information precision, and market power. As products become closer substitutes and/or number of retailers increase, the manufacturer's market power increases, enabling her to extract a larger fraction of the supply chain surplus.
Inertial Motion Capture Costume Design Study

The paper describes a scalable, wearable multi-sensor system for motion capture based on inertial measurement units (IMUs). Such a unit is composed of accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer. The final quality of an obtained motion arises from all the individual parts of the described system. The proposed system is a sequence of the following stages: sensor data acquisition, sensor orientation estimation, system calibration, pose estimation and data visualisation. The construction of the system’s architecture with the dataflow programming paradigm makes it easy to add, remove and replace the data processing steps. The modular architecture of the system allows an effortless introduction of a new sensor orientation estimation algorithms. The original contribution of the paper is the design study of the individual components used in the motion capture system. The two key steps of the system design are explored in this paper: the evaluation of sensors and algorithms for the orientation estimation. The three chosen algorithms have been implemented and investigated as part of the experiment. Due to the fact that the selection of the sensor has a significant impact on the final result, the sensor evaluation process is also explained and tested. The experimental results confirmed that the choice of sensor and orientation estimation algorithm affect the quality of the final results.
Causation, Explanation and Persistence

We introduce a new approach to reasoning about action and change using nonmonotonic logic. The approach is arrived at by applying Pearl's theory of causal networks to logical for-malizations of temporal reasoning domains. It comes in two versions: version S 0 that works for logical theories in which causal knowledge is represented explicitly, and version I 0 that works for logical theories in which this is not the case. We show that various restrictions of S 0 are equivalent to various existing approaches that are explicitly based on causation. For most other existing causation-based approaches, we give examples of reasoning domains that S 0 handles better than they do. In a similar manner we show that two of the most well-known non-causal approaches, namely Baker's account and`chronological minimization with lter preferential entailment', can be reinter-preted as approximations of I 0. We thus provide a reinterpretation in terms of causal network theory of much of the work done in non-monotonic temporal reasoning.