Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi agent system for trip planning

Now a days most people use mobile phones or have small computer devices with them. They use these devices to make calls, send messages and if it has Global Positioning System receiver then they use it for navigation. However these devices usually do not store the information about the places and one has to know the place to navigate. The main idea of this project was to design a system that will run on Android smart phones and web browsers which will be helpful when visiting new places. This system will work as a travelling guide and is able to find a route according user's requirements. User can decide his/her requirements such as type of place, time duration, type of travelling etc, and the system will find a path that fulfils those criteria. Selected path is not always the optimal path, but what is acceptable to the user. The system also has the capability of place suggestion and current location display facilities.
Kanban in software development: A systematic literature review

Using of Kanban in software development is an emerging topic. This systematic literature review was conducted in order to analyze the current trend of Kanban usage in software development and to identify the obtained benefits and involved challenges. The search strategy resulted in 492 papers, of which 19 were identified as primary studies relevant to our research. The main reported benefits of using the Kanban method were improved lead time to deliver software, improved quality of software, improved communication and coordination, increased consistency of delivery, and decreased customer reported defects. The reported challenges included lack of knowledge and specialized training as well as various organizational issues. Additionally, suggested practices were extracted from the primary studies and summarized for guiding the practitioners interested in adopting Kanban. The findings of this literature review are intended for helping researchers and practitioners to gain a better understanding of the current state of Kanban usage in software development.
Improved antibacterial activity and biocompatibility on vancomycin-loaded TiO2 nanotubes: in vivo and in vitro studies

The goal for current orthopedic implant research is to design implants that have not only good biocompatibility but also antibacterial properties. TiO2 nanotubes (NTs) were fabricated on the titanium surface through electrochemical anodization, which added new properties, such as enhanced biocompatibility and potential utility as drug nanoreservoirs. The aim of the present study was to investigate the antibacterial properties and biocompatibility of NTs loaded with vancomycin (NT-V), both in vitro and in vivo. Staphylococcus aureus was used to study the antibacterial properties of the NT-V. There were three study groups: the commercially pure titanium (Cp-Ti) group, the NT group (nonloaded vancomycin), and the NT-V group. We compared NT-V biocompatibility and antibacterial efficacy with those of the NT and Cp-Ti groups. Compared with Cp-Ti, NT-V showed good antibacterial effect both in vitro and in vivo. Although the NTs reduced the surface bacterial adhesion in vitro, implant infection still developed in in vivo studies. Furthermore, the results also revealed that both NTs and NT-V showed good biocompatibility. Therefore, the NTs loaded with antibiotic might be potentially used for future orthopedic implants.
Science of adaptation to climate change and science for adaptation

Adaptation to climate change has gained a prominent place next to mitigation on global, national and local policy agendas. However, while an abundance of adaptation strategies, plans and programmes have been developed, progress in turning these into action has been slow. The development of a sound knowledge basis to support adaptation globally is suggested to accelerate progress, but has lagged behind. The emphasis in both current and newly proposed programmes is very much on practice-oriented research with strong stakeholder participation. This paper supports such practice-oriented research, but argues that this is insufficient to support adaptation policy and practice in a productive manner. We argue that there is not only a need for science for adaptation, but also a science of adaptation. The paper argues that participatory, practice-oriented research is indeed essential, but has to be complemented by and connected to more fundamental inquiry and concept development, which takes into account knowledge that has been developed in disciplinary sciences and on issues other than climate change adaptation. At the same time, the level and method of participation in science for adaptation should be determined on the basis of the specific project context and goals. More emphasis on science of adaptation can lead to improved understanding of the conditions for successful science for adaptation.
Relationship between bully's behaviour and parenting styles amongst elementary school students

This study was done to examine bully’s behavior among elementary school children, as well as to determine differences in parenting styles by parents and targeted child gender. This study involves 270 students of elementary school aged 11 years old. Result suggested that, both male and female school children were likely to perform verbal aggression. Males reacted more aggressive in three forms of bullying (verbal, physical, and indirectly) than females. The findings reveal that respondents’ father and mother practice authoritarian and permissive style to their sons, as compared to their daughters. While, effects of authoritative style for both father and mother are higher on females, as compared to males. Pearson correlation shows a significant positive low relationship between bully behaviour, and authoritarian and permissive parenting style, but there is no significant relationship between bully behaviour and authoritative parenting style. Overall, there is a significant negative low relationship between bully’s behaviour and parenting styles. Possible reasons for this phenomena and measures was discussed in relation to bully’s and parenting styles.
Modeling of a photovoltaic field in malfunctioning

The work presented in this article is registered in the context of the preparation of a diagnostic platform for the industrial diagnosis of a photovoltaic plant. To do this, we are modeled the photovoltaic field for saving the evolution (that is to say the traces) of the IV characteristic and power of the photovoltaic field to take as benchmarks in the rest of this work. Then we selected to model the photovoltaic field malfunction difference four types of electrical faults: short circuit, open circuit, impedance and reverse polarity of the PV module, bypass diode, connections and blocking diode and see for each default its influence on the IV characteristic and the power of the photovoltaic field. So with this application, the controllers of control room can by the comparison of the (IV, P) field in normal functioning, and (IV, P) field simulated malfunction and (IV, P) field experienced to making the decision (make the diagnosis) adequate at the right time.
The Economic Effects of Spectrum Trading

We consider a model in which Cournot-Nash oligopolistic service providers are able to trade radio spectrum licences, subject to interference constraints. The terms of trade are endogenised through Nash bargaining. When the providers are in the same (geographical) market, the incentive to trade is due to cost differences; when they are in separate markets, differential demand conditions can also stimulate trade. We show that trade can enhance the productive efficiency of service provision (by concentrating production in low cost firms) but the resulting service consumer prices may have negative welfare implications. We then present numerical results from a program designed to simulate trading scenarios. these results illustrate a number of outcomes of allowing licence trades. We discuss a number of applications and extensions for our model and the relevance of our results for current government consultations on spectrum trading.
Radiosity for point-sampled geometry

In this paper, we propose a radiosity method for the point-sampled geometry to compute diffuse inter reflection of light. Most traditional radiosity methods subdivide the surfaces of objects into small elements such as quadrilaterals. However, the point-sampled geometry includes no explicit information about surfaces, presenting a difficulty in applying the traditional approach to the point-sampled geometry. The proposed method addresses this problem by computing the inter reflection without reconstructing any surfaces. The method realizes lighting simulations without losing the advantages of the point-sampled geometry.
High-resolution infrared imaging

The hands and mind of an artist are intimately involved in the creative process of image formation, intrinsically making paintings significantly more complex than photographs to analyze. In spite of this difficulty, several years ago the artist David Hockney and I identified optical evidence within a number of paintings that demonstrated artists began using optical projections as early as c1425 - nearly 175 years before Galileo - as aids for producing portions of their images. In the course of our work, Hockney and I developed insights that I have been applying to a new approach to computerized image analysis. Recently I developed and characterized a portable high resolution infrared for capturing additional information from paintings. Because many pigments are semi-transparent in the IR, in a number of cases IR photographs ("reflectograms") have revealed marks made by the artists that had been hidden under paint ever since they were made. I have used this IR camera to capture photographs ("reflectograms") of hundreds of paintings in over a dozen museums on three continents and, in some cases, these reflectograms have provided new insights into decisions the artists made in creating the final images that we see in the visible.
A cross-cultural perspective on relational exchange

Purpose This study aims to examine relational norms in cross-cultural business settings. Cross-cultural business partners may differ in their normative orientations toward relational exchange. Owing to the high extent of international trade, there is a need for developing a more nuanced understanding of cross-cultural relational exchange. Design/methodology/approach The repertory grid method was used to elicit the personal constructs characterizing the perceptions of business-to-business (B2B) relational exchange for 22 Russian and Finnish managers. These items were further categorized into categories of relational elements drawn from relational exchange literature using a content analysis. Then, the category means of scored importance and scored evaluations of domestic and foreign business partners were tested statistically. Findings Relational norms of flexibility, information exchange, long-term orientation, mutuality and solidarity were equally important to both Russian and Finnish managers. The importance of a business partner’s ability seems to be culturally dependent. Sharing the same cultural background might have an adverse effect when evaluating poorly functioning business relations. Research limitations/implications The validity of these findings is limited to this context and material. Future research should repeat cross-cultural comparisons of the relational norms with more data and other nationalities. Practical implications Firms should focus on long-term orientation and mutual targets to form well-functioning cross-cultural business relationships. Originality/value This study provides new knowledge into B2B marketing literature by revealing the role of relational norms, business partner’s ability and shared cultural background on functionality of cross-cultural business relations. It also demonstrates the use of the repertory grid method in studying perceptions of relational norms.
Co-summability from linear to non-linear co-integration

While co-integration theory is an ideal framework to study linear relationships among persistent economic time series, the intrinsic linearity in the concepts of integration and co-integration makes it unsuitable to study non-linear long run relations among persistent processes. This drawback hinders the empirical analysis of modern macroeconomics, which often addresses asymmetric responses to policy interventions, multiplicity of equilibria, transitions between regimes or polynomial approximations to unknown functions. In this paper, to cope with non-linear relations and consequently to generalise co-integration, we formalise the idea of co-summability. It is built upon the concept order of summability developed by Berenguer-Rico and Gonzalo (2013), which, in turn, was conceived to address non-linear transformations of persistent processes. Theoretically, a co-summable relationship is balanced -in terms of the variables involved having the same order of summability- and describes a long run equilibrium that can be non-linear -in the sense that the errors have a lower order of summability. To test for these types of equilibria, inference tools for balancedness and cosummability are designed and their asymptotic properties are analysed. Their finite sample performance is studied via Monte Carlo experiments. The practical strength of co-summability theory is shown through two empirical applications. Specifically, asymmetric preferences of central bankers and the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis are studied through the lens of co-summability.
Unsupervised and active learning in automatic speech recognition for call classification

A key challenge in rapidly building spoken natural language dialog applications is minimizing the manual effort required in transcribing and labeling speech data. This task is not only expensive but also time consuming. We present a novel approach that aims at reducing the amount of manually transcribed in-domain data required for building automatic speech recognition (ASR) models in spoken language dialog systems. Our method is based on mining relevant text from various conversational systems and Web sites. An iterative process is employed where the performance of the models can be improved through both unsupervised and active learning of the ASR models. We have evaluated the robustness of our approach on a call classification task that has been selected from AT&T VoiceTone/sup SM/ customer care. Our results indicate that with unsupervised learning it is possible to achieve a call classification performance that is only 1.5% lower than the upper bound set when using all available in-domain transcribed data.
Training the Multilayer Perceptron Classifier with a Two-Stage Method

We propose a two-stage training for the multilayer perceptron (MLP). The first stage is bottom-up, where we use a class separability measure to conduct hidden layer training and the least squared error criterion to train the output layer. The second stage is top-down, we use a criterion derived from classification error rate to further train the network weights. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed training algorithms with computer simulations.
PRIVATE INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT IN EMERGING ECONOMIES : COMPARING THE LATIN AMERICAN AND ASIAN EXPERIENCE

Foreign direct investment (FDI) in emerging markets has grown rapidly throughout the 1990s. Driven both by investment in newly privatized state-owned enterprises and new, Greenfield projects, infrastructure investment has grown even faster than overall FDI. Using a database of telecommunications projects in emerging markets, we compare key characteristics of private infrastructure projects in Latin America and Asia. We also identify economic, political, cultural, and geographic differences between these regions that may serve as possible explanations for the project differences. We develop propositions that incorporate the apparent and latent explanations for the project differences in order to provide a richer theoretical base for examination of regional differences and how such differences may affect international investment in emerging markets.
An Agent-Based Model of Traders' Interaction

In order to investigate what induce the stylized facts in financial markets, we built an agent-based financial market model in which agents interacted with their nearest neighbors and can adjust their propensity to be influenced by their neighbors according to trading histories. Agents' actions are determined by their independent judgments, public news and neighbors' influence. Simulation results show that the model can reproduce the stylized facts of fat tail and volatility clustering.
Dynamic Simulation of Software Workers and Task Completion

As more and more companies are trying to leverage crowd sourcing to reduce cost and time-to-market of software production, it is very important to better understand the dynamics of crowd sourced software development in order to fully realize its benefits and avoid hidden pitfalls. This paper presents a systems dynamic model for crowd sourced software development platforms based on data gathered from Top coder. The model is composed of three components: the worker sub-model, the task sub-model, and the interactions between the two sub-models. Results of simulations are compared with empirical data gathered from Top coder for validation. The major simulation results indicate that task uploading and software workers arrival in the platform follow typical exponential patterns, incentivizing the crowd developers to become more active will lead to more tasks completion and success, and tasks associated with higher awards generally receive few submissions.
Wiimote squash: comparing DTW and WFM techniques for 3D gesture recognition

This paper compares Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and Waveform Matching (WFM), the two gesture recognition techniques, applied on a specific Squash game application we have developed. Our application gets accelerometer readings by moving the Nintendo™ Wiimote in a 3D space. This application manipulates the Wiimote gestures in the form of signals. These signals are the effect of the movements, the positioning and the orientations of Squash racket (actually Wiimote) on the computer screen. We implemented five Squash shots (i. e., 3D uni-stroke gestures) in order to compare DTW and WFM. The results indicate that there is not a significant difference in the detection of gestures by both techniques (DTW and WFM) but there exists a strong degree of association between both techniques.
The SkipTrie: low-depth concurrent search without rebalancing

To date, all concurrent search structures that can support predecessor queries have had depth logarithmic in m, the number of elements. This paper introduces the SkipTrie, a new concurrent search structure supporting predecessor queries in amortized expected O(log log u + c) steps, insertions and deletions in O(c log log u), and using O(m) space, where u is the size of the key space and c is the contention during the recent past. The SkipTrie is a probabilistically-balanced version of a y-fast trie consisting of a very shallow skiplist from which randomly chosen elements are inserted into a hash-table based x-fast trie. By inserting keys into the x-fast-trie probabilistically, we eliminate the need for rebalancing, and can provide a lock-free linearizable implementation. To the best of our knowledge, our proof of the amortized expected performance of the SkipTrie is the first such proof for a tree-based data structure.
The effect of free-hit rule changes on match variables and patterns of play in international standard women’s field hockey

Rule changes are a common feature in sports today and objective assessments are required to ascertain the impact of such changes. The current project sought to investigate the intention of the latest rule change in field hockey that was introduced in 2009 by the International Hockey Federation (FIH) - the use of a “self-pass” as a legitimate method of taking a free hit, and changes to the procedures for taking free hits within the 25 yard area. Twenty-eight (n=28) international women’s field hockey games were analysed for changes in time-variables from repossession to final outcome, along with methods and areas of repossessions and circle penetrations. Results indicate that the intention of the self-pass rule was met by significantly decreasing the average amount of time taken to engage in free hits (8.0 ± 0.9s in 2008 to 4.6 ± 0.3s in 2009), reducing the disruption of flow to the game. A significant difference was found in the method of circle penetrations, with most penetrations occurring by dribbling (33% in 2008, 57% in 2009). A significant decrease in time taken from repossession in the defensive 25 left and defensive left indicates an increase in the intensity of the game, emphasising the importance of aerobic capacity of participants.
THE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF A SCALEABLE E-LEARNING AUTHORING SYSTEM

This flexible and scaleable e-Learning Resource Authoring (ERA) system is designed to support the rapid development of content structures, instructional features and user interfaces. By separating content from design, we execute rapid global refinements to the user interface while maintaining reliability in large-scale e-Learning resource development. The user interface elements include multiple navigation strategies with pagination and position indicators, a main table of contents and submenus that support a modular design allowing lessons to be used independently. Interactive features include: multiple choice and open-ended assessments with tailored remediation and hyperreference links to context sensitive glossaries and other instructional features. The primary instructional components are the lesson previews and presentations that are available in a text format and streaming media versions with segmented play lists. Over fifty e-Learning modules have been developed with ERA. Modules can be easily mirrored on remote servers using commonly available web and streaming media software.
Implementation aspects of data visualization based on map of attributes

The aim of this study is to present an original data visualization method with greatest focus on selected aspects of its implementation. The proposed method is designed for visualization of multidimensional data sets consisting of objects described by nominal attributes. The goal of the visualization is to facilitate objects recognition and remembering based on human perceptual capabilities. The expected result for a given input data set is a twodimensional map of all attributes. Arrangement of the attributes on the map allows visualization of individual objects as, so called, good figures. The study is focused on the algorithm, which searches for the optimal maps; implementation aspects and overall complexity of the problem are also explored.