Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gravitational lensing of quasars by edge-on spiral galaxies

In this thesis, I studied the lensed quasar CX2201-3201, which is lensed by an edgeon spiral galaxy. The unusually high tilt of the spiral galaxy provides us with a rare opportunity for mass modeling. In addition, the unusual placement of the two visible images of the system offers an intriguing lensing system for study-the two images straddle the lensing galaxy's visible disk, but are off to one side of the light centroid. Based on mass models for the lens that are constrained by the visible disk of the galaxy, the quadrupole of the disk is strong enough to make CX2201 a "naked cusp" system, which should have three images-the two images we see, plus another located in the disk of the galaxy. We attempt to explain the absence of the third "naked cusp" image by using a series of increasingly exotic mass models. Unfortunately, none of these models turn out to be both satisfactory and a feasible solution. Although we are unable to answer the question of why the two images of CX2201 are located off to the side of the lensing galaxy's center, we gain a better understanding of the challenges this system poses for those attempting to model the lensing galaxy's mass. HST data has been obtained for the system, and although this data were obtained too late for proper inclusion in this thesis, they may aid future investigators in analyzing CX2201. Plans to obtain detailed rotation curves for the lensing galaxy are also underway, and it is the hope that future investigators will come to a better understanding of CX2201's unique features. Thesis Supervisor: Professor Paul L. Schechter Title: William A. M. Burden Professor of Astrophysics
Test Architecture Design and Optimization for Three-Dimensional System-on-chips

Core-based system-on-chips (SoCs) fabricated on three-dimensional (3D) technology are emerging for better integration capabilities. Among all available manufactures techniques, 3D SoCs manufactured with die-to-wafer and die-to-die bonding techniques provides higher yield due to its capability of pre-bond test. Effective test architecture design and optimization techniques are essential to minimize the manufacturing cost for such giga-scale integrated circuits. In addition, the prebond test-pin-count constraint during optimization should be carefully considered since these pins occupy large silicon area that cannot be used in functional mode. To address above issues, in this thesis, we first propose novel test access mechanisms solutions for 3D SoCs by our simulated annealing-based technique, considering both testing time and routing cost. In addition, the proposed test-architecture design takes the SoC layout and pre-bond-test-pin into consideration and facilitates the sharing of test wires between pre-bond tests and post-bond test, which significantly reduces the routing cost for a test-access mechanism in 3D technology without violating the test-pin constraint. Afterwards, a thermal-aware test scheduling algorithm is proposed to eliminate the hotspots during test. Experimental results for the ITC’02 SoC benchmarks circuits demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.
Transforming Experience: The Potential of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality for Enhancing Personal and Clinical Change

During life, many personal changes occur. These include changing house, school, work, and even friends and partners. However, the daily experience shows clearly that, in some situations, subjects are unable to change even if they want to. The recent advances in psychology and neuroscience are now providing a better view of personal change, the change affecting our assumptive world: (a) the focus of personal change is reducing the distance between self and reality (conflict); (b) this reduction is achieved through (1) an intense focus on the particular experience creating the conflict or (2) an internal or external reorganization of this experience; (c) personal change requires a progression through a series of different stages that however happen in discontinuous and non-linear ways; and (d) clinical psychology is often used to facilitate personal change when subjects are unable to move forward. Starting from these premises, the aim of this paper is to review the potential of virtuality for enhancing the processes of personal and clinical change. First, the paper focuses on the two leading virtual technologies – augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) – exploring their current uses in behavioral health and the outcomes of the 28 available systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Then the paper discusses the added value provided by VR and AR in transforming our external experience by focusing on the high level of personal efficacy and self-reflectiveness generated by their sense of presence and emotional engagement. Finally, it outlines the potential future use of virtuality for transforming our inner experience by structuring, altering, and/or replacing our bodily self-consciousness. The final outcome may be a new generation of transformative experiences that provide knowledge that is epistemically inaccessible to the individual until he or she has that experience, while at the same time transforming the individual’s worldview.
Effect of electromagnetic field exposure on the reproductive system

The safety of human exposure to an ever-increasing number and diversity of electromagnetic field (EMF) sources both at work and at home has become a public health issue. To date, many in vivo and in vitro studies have revealed that EMF exposure can alter cellular homeostasis, endocrine function, reproductive function, and fetal development in animal systems. Reproductive parameters reported to be altered by EMF exposure include male germ cell death, the estrous cycle, reproductive endocrine hormones, reproductive organ weights, sperm motility, early embryonic development, and pregnancy success. At the cellular level, an increase in free radicals and [Ca2+]i may mediate the effect of EMFs and lead to cell growth inhibition, protein misfolding, and DNA breaks. The effect of EMF exposure on reproductive function differs according to frequency and wave, strength (energy), and duration of exposure. In the present review, the effects of EMFs on reproductive function are summarized according to the types of EMF, wave type, strength, and duration of exposure at cellular and organism levels.
Symbolic model checking for event-driven real-time systems

We consider symbolic model-checking for event-driven real-time systems. The concrete syntax of these systems is given in terms of a graphical programming language called Modechart. We propose a logic, Synchronous Real-Time Event logic (SREL) for specifying the timing properties of these systems. We then present a symbolic model-checking algorithm which checks a modechart against an SREL formula, and discuss several implementation issues. In particular, we give an efficient solution to the problem of encoding timing and event counting functions based on Binary Decision Diagram (BDD). This solution has been incorported into the SMV system v2.3 and has been able to achieve one to two orders of magnitude in speedup and space saving when compared to the solution based on the integer operations provided by the SMV system. <<ETX>>
The Case for and Against Standardized Testing

This research explores the global use of standardized testing with a focus on the United Arab Emirates (UAE) experience in utilizing The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Five semi-structured interviews were conducted to investigate teacher perspectives regarding the use of standardized tests, specifically TIMSS. Four out of five interviewees felt preparing their students for TIMSS in 2014-2015 was a challenging experience, due to mismatch with their curricula. To cover this gap, they attempted to make their students absorb as much pertinent information as possible in a short duration which may jeopardize their ability to foster student creativity in class. It is possible aligning curricula of different schools to TIMSS topics would enhance fairness and effectiveness of academic evaluation of the schools, teachers’, and students’ performance. This research recommends supporting teachers and providing them with appropriate professional development and well outlined curriculum, instead of solely holding them responsible for poor student achievement on TIMSS.
Language attrition and ideology: Two groups of immigrants in Israel

There is a great body of research on the role of attitudes, motivation and emotions for the development of bilingualism, providing compelling evidence that these factors are among the most important for predicting success in the ultimate attainment of second and foreign language learners. Attempts have also been made to establish a similar link between these emotive factors and language attrition. Overall, findings from such investigations have been inconclusive and unsatisfactory. It has been hypothesized that this may in part be due to the fact that there was not enough diversity between the subjects investigated, and that clearer findings might be achieved through investigations which contrast different immigrant populations. The present study presents a comparison of two groups of immigrants in Israel.
An Antisense Oligonucleotide to the N-Methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) Subunit NMDAR1 Attenuates NMDA-Induced Nociception, Hyperalgesia, and Morphine Tolerance

We determined whether the i.t. administration of an 18-mer phosphodiester antisense oligodeoxynucleotide (ODN) that reduces the expression of the rat NMDAR1 subunit of the N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor would affect nociceptive behaviors and prevent the development of morphine tolerance. Rats received 5 μl of i.t. saline, 30 nM antisense, or mismatch ODN twice a day for 5 days (NMDA-induced nociception, NMDA-induced thermal hyperalgesia, NR1 mRNA, and ligand binding studies) or for 3 days (formalin study). For the tolerance study, 5 days of ODNs or saline were followed by 3 days of concurrent administration of ODNs or saline (twice a day) and i.t. morphine (three times a day). Antisense, but not mismatch, results in the reduction of formalin phase 2 flinching by 50%, the spinal cord dorsal horn levels of NMDAR1 mRNA by 30%, and ligand binding by 50%. The i.t. ED50 for NMDA-induced nociceptive behaviors is doubled, and thermal hyperalgesia is blocked by antisense treatment. The effects of antisense on NMDA-induced nociception and thermal hyperalgesia are completely reversed by discontinuing antisense. The coadministration of antisense with increasing doses of i.t. morphine for 3 days attenuates the development of morphine tolerance. These results demonstrate that an in vivo antisense targeting of the NMDAR1 subunit results in antihyperalgesic effects and a partial blockade of spinal morphine tolerance. They provide additional support for the critical role of the NMDA receptor in these forms of spinal nociception and in the development of morphine tolerance and suggest the potential therapeutic utility of this approach.
Beyond the Excluded Volume Effects: Mechanistic Complexity of the Crowded Milieu

Macromolecular crowding is known to affect protein folding, binding of small molecules, interaction with nucleic acids, enzymatic activity, protein-protein interactions, and protein aggregation. Although for a long time it was believed that the major mechanism of the action of crowded environments on structure, folding, thermodynamics, and function of a protein can be described in terms of the excluded volume effects, it is getting clear now that other factors originating from the presence of high concentrations of “inert” macromolecules in crowded solution should definitely be taken into account to draw a more complete picture of a protein in a crowded milieu. This review shows that in addition to the excluded volume effects important players of the crowded environments are viscosity, perturbed diffusion, direct physical interactions between the crowding agents and proteins, soft interactions, and, most importantly, the effects of crowders on solvent properties.
A mobility-based adaptive MAC for supporting real-time applications in multihop ad-hoc networks

This paper presents an analytic model for evaluating the saturation throughput of our QoS-aware MAC protocol that tries to support real-time traffic over multihop mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). A MAC based on the distributed coordination function (DCF) of IEEE 802.11 a/b is mostly prevalent in MANETs, and such scheme has been primarily designed to support elastic data applications. In order to support the transmission of real-time traffic, a polling-based scheme called the point coordination function (PCF) was introduced in IEEE 802.11. However, PCF is normally used in infrastructure-based networks. In our approach, spread spectrum techniques and collision avoidance multiple access protocols are combined to form a new MAC protocol that makes use of the PCF-based operation of IEEE 802.11 for the first time in multihop MANETs. The resulting scheme guarantees priority to real-time traffic, and provides bounded access delays to real-time stations. The analytical and simulation results show the performance improvements of our strategy.
Supersequences, Runs and CD Grammar Systems

The Minimal Run Supersequence problem (MinRS) is the decision version of the problem to nd for a given nite set L of strings over an alphabet and integer k a supersequence of L which has at most k runs. It is shown that MinRS is polynomial time solvable over an alphabet of size 2 and NP-complete over an alphabet of size 3. Moreover, we study the algorithmic complexity of some related problems concerning supersequences with a maximal number of runs and supersequences into which the strings in L can be embedded disjointly. Applications of the derived results to production planning and scheduling theory are given. We then demonstrate that supersequence problems can be a useful tool for investigating the complexity of the Membership problem for grammar systems. As a rst example we give a simple proof for the known fact that the Membership problem for ETOL systems is NP-complete. Then we give results about the Membership problem for CD grammar systems. In particular, we are concerned here with CD grammar systems with two components and where derivations are done in an alternating way.
An HMM Based Named Entity Recognition System for Indian Languages: The JU System at ICON 2013

This paper reports about our work in the ICON 2013 NLP TOOLS CONTEST on Named Entity Recognition. We submitted runs for Bengali, English, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu. A statistical HMM (Hidden Markov Models) based model has been used to implement our system. The system has been trained and tested on the NLP TOOLS CONTEST: ICON 2013 datasets. Our system obtains F-measures of 0.8599, 0.7704, 0.7520, 0.4289, 0.5455, 0.4466, and 0.4003 for Bengali, English, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu respectively.
A MODIFICATION TO JONES' GLOBAL OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM FOR FAST LOCAL CONVERGENCE

The DIRECT algorithm of Jones et al. is a simple and effective Lipschitzian-based global optimization algorithm which does not need the evaluation of gradients. However, the local convergence rate is relatively slow when compared to popular quasi-Newton techniques. By incorporating the judicious use of gradients, modifications are proposed that result in a new algorithm. This new algorithm still covers effectively the design space and eliminates regions which are non-optimal but has the benefit or a fast local convergence rate. A comparison is made using six standard test problems showing that utilization of gradients is beneficial not only for convergence but also during the first few iterations.
Bidirectional instant radiosity

This paper presents a new sampling strategy to achieve interactive global illumination on one commodity computer. The goal is to propose an efficient numerical stochastic scheme which can be well adapted to a fast rendering algorithm. As we want to provide an efficient sampling strategy to handle difficult settings without sacrificing performance in common cases, we developed an extension of Instant Radiosity [Kel97] in the same way bidirectional path tracing is an extension of path or light tracing. Our idea is to build several estimators and to efficiently combine them to find a set of virtual point light sources which are relevant for the areas of the scene seen by the camera. The resulting algorithm is faster than classical solutions to global illumination. Using today graphics hardware, an interactive frame rate and the convergence of the scheme can be easily obtained in scenes with many light sources, glossy materials or difficult visibility problems.
STEP-a: An Algorithmic Approach towards Trust Based Security in Pervasive Computing Environment

-- To secure computing in pervasive environment, an adaptive algorithmic approach for access control (based on human notion of trust) is proposed. The proposed model provides support to calculate direct trust in situations when the requesting entity has a past experience with the service. It encompasses the ability to reason human cognitive behavior and has the capability to adjust in accordance with behavioral pattern changes. An adaptive policy based management is proposed to handle strategic malicious behavior. The defense mechanism incorporated by proposed model against strategic attack is also demonstrated. Finally we have compared our model with existing evolutionary models in this field.
DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT OF AN ADAPTIVE INTEGRATED DRIVER-VEHICLE INTERFACE: OVERVIEW OF THE AIDE PROJECT

Abstract This paper presents the sub-project 3 of the AIDE (Adaptive Integrated Driver-vehicle Interface) Integrated Project; AIDE is a pan European project co-funded by the European Commission, coordinated by Volvo Technology and managed by a core group with the participation of both the industry (Bosch, CRF, PSA, and BMW) and the academia (ICCS, TNO, Joint Research Centre). The main objective of the SP3 and the paper is the design and development of an innovative adaptive integrated human-machine interface for driver assistance, information and nomad systems. To address this objective different modules are described which monitor in real time the driver, the environment and the vehicle and to which the HMI is adapted. The information data flow, the communications and the interaction is ensured by a dedicated centralized module, namely the Interaction and Communication Assistant (ICA), which is considered as the main innovation and is described in details in the paper.
A Perfect Storm? President Obama, The Great Recession, And Community Colleges

Abstract Purpose President Obama positions community colleges as a linchpin of federal policy on education and training for citizens adversely affected by the recession. Chief among recommended reforms is the notion of career pathways that enable students, especially non-traditional age adults, to participate in postsecondary education directed at employment. Design/methodology/approach This paper reviews the literature on career pathway reforms to describe these programs and the students who enroll in them. It also presents evidence from two third-party evaluations of federal grants supporting career pathway implementation. Findings Results suggest career pathway programs are spreading throughout the United States through unprecedented levels of federal funding. Adult learners are a primary target group, but more data are needed to determine on a deeper level who these students are and whether they are being well served. Originality/value This paper offers new information to help readers consider whether President Obama’s agenda will achieve its goals and positively impact college completion and economic recovery.
HEaRS: A Hierarchical Energy-Aware Resource Scheduler for Virtualized Data Centers

With the increasing popularity of Internet-based cloud services, energy efficiency in large-scale Internet data centers has become important not only to curtail energy costs and alleviate environmental concern, but also because such systems can quickly reach the limits of power available to them. This paper investigates to what extent and how energy usage improvements through consolidation can benefit from taking into account the environmental influences and effects seen in data center systems. Toward that end, we present experimental results obtained in a fully instrumented, small scale data center and then use these results to propose a hierarchical energy-aware resource scheduler (HEaRS) for cluster workload placement and server provisioning, also considers the physical environment in which data center systems operate. Specifically, at the rack level, HEaRS tries to maintain a `thermal balance' across the rack to avoid hot spots and reduce cooling costs. At the chassis level, HEaRS utilizes the proportional plus integral controller to achieve a balance in the levels of usage of electrical current between the two power domains in the chassis, which helps the chassis reach its most energy efficient state. Finally, at server level, HEaRS can employ known methods like dynamic voltage and frequency scaling or core idling to reduce power consumption. This results in a hierarchical set of controllers that jointly, implement holistic solutions to energy-aware resource scheduling for an entire rack, and this hierarchical solution can then be further extended to entire data centers. Our initial experiment result show opportunities for gains, with up to 16\% in energy usage compared to methods that are not aware of the physical environment and up to 15\% improvements in application performance.
Controlling applets' behavior in a browser

We discuss methods of protecting Java enabled Web browsers against malicious applets. Malicious applets involve denial of service, invasion of privacy and annoyance. Since system modification by applets is generally impossible because of the Java security concept, denial of service is of major concern. Invasion of privacy may be caused by applets staying resident in the browser and collecting information about a user. Annoyance may, for example, be caused by advertisement applets that constantly appear on a Web site frequently visited by the user. A general solution to confront such attacks is to have some mechanism within the browser to monitor applets' activities. This mechanism should enable manual or automatic stopping of malicious applets. To illustrate it we present a special applet, called AppletGuard, that allows the user to observe and control the applets in the browser and, based on an applet's properties, stop or suspend the applet, or just warn the user that something dangerous might be going on.
An Efficient, QoS-Aware I/O Scheduler for Solid State Drive

Flash-based solid-state drive has been proved to be a competitive alternative to mechanical disk for its high performance and low power consumption. But SSD still suffers from relatively high price and low density, which calls for consolidating device resource to bring down the cost of deploying expensive dedicated flash-based storage systems for specific applications. Within such environment, applications may compete for storage service and interfere with each other. Therefore, storage service providers must ensure performance isolation. However, current research mainly focuses on performance guarantees on mechanical disk. In this paper, we present a 2-level scheduling framework where the higher level targets performance isolation through distinguishing the cost of read and write operations in SSD, and the lower level builds channel-based queues for SSD to exploit the inherent parallelism of SSD. Synthetic and real workloads are used in our evaluation to demonstrate the effectiveness of our 2-level scheduling framework, and the results show it outperforms other I/O schedulers at both aspects of performance isolation and I/O efficiency.