Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improved Tabletop-Interaction using nestable circular Tangibles

Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CHI’13, April 27 – May 2, 2013, Paris, France. ACM 978-1-XXXX-XXXX-X/XX/XX. Abstract The multitouch functionality of tabletop computers is often augmented by the use of tangible objects that offer an intuitive and haptic alternative to interaction and manipulation. However, employing tangibles can also lead to less desirable effects, such as occlusion or lack of precision. In this paper we highlight the design and implementation of ring-like tangible objects: TangibleRings. They do not occlude the objects underneath them and also support the detection of touch events inside their perimeter. Additionally, multiple rings may be nested within one another in order to combine ring functionality or produce more complex filters.
Finnish graduating nursing students’ research utilization competence

In nursing, research utilization (RU) is a core competence for evidence-based practice (EBP). During the past fifteen years, a great deal of effort has been expended worldwide in nursing higher education to promote EBP. This study explores graduating nursing students’ RU competence in Finland using a descriptive cross-sectional, long-term survey design with two cohorts of nursing students in 2003 (n = 529) and 2012 (n = 259). Data were collected with a Competence in Research Utilization instrument, and analyzed statistically. In both cohorts, students’ attitudes towards RU were positive, but their knowledge and skills were low to moderate. Students’ RU competence was higher in 2003 compared to 2012. There is a need to develop nursing education strategically, and by seeking suitable pedagogical methods and curriculum contents to support the learning of RU. In higher education, educational cooperation and longitudinal learning outcome evaluations are recommended.
An Investigation into the Recovery of Three-Dimensional Structure from Two-Dimensional Images

This thesis details the implementation and investigation of an algorithm to recover models in 3D from sets of 2D images. Recent attention in this field has switched from investigations into static scenes to dynamic reconstruction of scenes, for applications in creative media amd the biomedical sectors, with particular attention on real time performance. The technique by which model recovery is achieved here is the shapefrom-silhouette method. Past work has focussed largely on the voxel based approach to specifying the visual hull, where this work builds an alternative representation by recovering a polyhedral version of the hull. The implementation creates model scenes in a 3D environment, the images from which are contoured to extract a silhouette. The main pipeline then follows on from work in (17) by constructing optimised data structures which allow the intersections required to recover the visual hull to be done in 2D. Contrary to the voxel based methods which tend to progressively carve away regions of space where the object does not lie, the polyhedral method rather retains information about where the object is in terms of calculated intersections. Despite some problems with creating a robust implementation, some precision is obtained in the recovery of model structures.
Intelligent user interfaces in the living room: usability design for personalized television applications

The purpose of this paper is to present our experience from the design of a personalized television application, and the implications for the design of interactive television applications in general. Personalized advertising is a gentle introduction to interactive television applications through a push paradigm that is closer to the established patterns of television use. While personalization is a practice widely used on the Internet, applying personalization techniques over digital television infrastructures presents significant obstacles, which we address with explicit design moves
Artifacts, Visual Modeling and Constructionism: To Look More Closely, to Watch What Happens

[full article, abstract in English; abstract in Lithuanian] Constructionists operationalize a powerful notion they share with constructivists: individual learning is facilitated by building models of specific ideas, concepts, methods, objects, environments, feelings, dreams, memories and sounds using the learner’s current stock of knowledge. Constructionists do this by building models or artifacts that can be externally manipulated, interrogated by their builder, and verbally shared with others. Constructionists believe that new knowledge is created during these discussions. Constructionism is rich with heuristic methods for both finding and constructing artifacts and for discussing these artifacts privately and publicly. Constructionists argue that both constructing and discussing are necessary for deep sense-making. This paper describes one specific constructionist learning method: visual modeling. It illustrates one educator’s approach, developed in the classroom over a 40-year period. It references the relevant literature; describes its pedagogic approach, materials and outcomes; and it offers a step-by-step example of one student’s thinking process. Finally, it presents – in appropriate narrative form – 15 arguments why the visual component extends the constructionist project and should be integrated into more educational programs.
Thick Visual Cortex in the Early Blind

We investigated the key neurodevelopmental factors that determine cortical thickness, namely synaptogenesis and regression, by analyzing the thickness of the visual cortex in humans with early- and late-onset blindness. The bilateral visual cortices of the early blind were significantly thicker than those of the late blind and the sighted controls, but the latter two groups did not differ significantly. This suggests reduced “pruning” of synapses in the visual cortex, which may be due to a lack of visual experience during a critical developmental period. These findings support the hypothesis that sensory experience is necessary for an appropriate regression and remodeling of neuronal processes and that synaptic regression might be a major determinant of macroscopic anatomical features like cortical thickness.
Issues in transnet packetized voice communication

In recent years, very important progress was made in both real-time digital computer communication and real-time digital voice communication, due to the growing importance of geographically distributed computation, the growing need for resource sharing, and the need for secure voice communication. The progress in digital voice communication—mainly aimed at low data rate and high fidelity speech communication—has led to various vocoding techniques such as LPC and CVSD. The progress in real-time computer communication—which is mainly aimed at low delays, high bandwidth and high cost-effectiveness—led to technologies such as packet switching, packet-radio, and satellite communication, as well as intercomputer communication protocols. It is the natural result of the progress in both areas that the use of packet switching technology be considered for voice communication. In this paper the issues involved in the application of packet-switching networks to real-time voice communication are identified and explained.
Study of Personality Traits for University Students by Egogram Analysis

Background: Transactional analysis (TA) was developed by Berne and Dusey, and egogram analysis has been performed for long. It has 5 egos including Critical Parent (CP), Nurturing Parent (NP), Adult (A), Free Child (FC) and Adapted Child (AC) and has been utilized in Japan as Tokyo University Egogram (TEG). Authors have continued to educate university students concerning egogram for years. The lecture has been useful and significant for their psychological development in adolescence period. Protocol and Results: Enrolled subjects were 250 university students. They answered TEG questionnaire, calculated and discussed the personality trait. TEG has 29 typical personality pattern which is acceptable in Japan. We analyzed the results of 250 cases. There are six types with higher prevalence in the students than the standard value. They are a) dependent 10.0%, b) hot-tempered 13.2%, c) conflict 6.0%, d) good-hearted 6.8%, e) playboy 4.4%, f) pessimism 6.8%. Discussion and Conclusion: From the point of 5 egos, possible reason for higher ratio was speculated. Some trends were found including low A, CP> NP, AC> FC, in relation to current way of thinking in young generation. This result would become the basic data and would develop further research in this psychological field.
Simulation of the Fuel Cell Thermal Behavior with Unified Parallel C

In this paper, a parallel simulation to analyze the thermal behavior of proton exchange membrane fuel cells (PEMFC), using Unified Parallel C (UPC) is presented. PEMFCs are considered as very promising alternative solution for energy generations in the future for stationary and mobile applications. In particular, they are the most favored fuel cell (FC) type to power electric vehicles of the future as a replacement for the internal combustion engine. The computation model based on the global nodal network method (GNNM) used to describe the thermal behavior presents high scalability and intrinsic parallel characteristics suitable for parallel implementation. The objective of this work is to develop a parallel implementation of GNNM using the Unified Parallel C (UPC) for a cluster of processors according to the distributed shared memory programming paradigm. UPC is an explicit parallel language that provides the facilities for direct user specification of program parallelism and control of data distribution and access to maximize performance. Due to its global address space, UPC simplify the management of ghost zones in large-scale simulations. Simulations results shows that computation time to conduct thermal behavior simulation is drastically reduced compared to sequential simulations and obtained simulation data are highly accurate and precise.
The Toxicity of a Mutant Prion Protein Is Cell-Autonomous, and Can Be Suppressed by Wild-Type Prion Protein on Adjacent Cells

Insight into the normal function of PrPC, and how it can be subverted to produce neurotoxic effects, is provided by PrP molecules carrying deletions encompassing the conserved central region. The most neurotoxic of these mutants, Δ105–125 (called ΔCR), produces a spontaneous neurodegenerative illness when expressed in transgenic mice, and this phenotype can be dose-dependently suppressed by co-expression of wild-type PrP. Whether the toxic activity of ΔCR PrP and the protective activity or wild-type PrP are cell-autonomous, or can be exerted on neighboring cells, is unknown. To investigate this question, we have utilized co-cultures of differentiated neural stem cells derived from mice expressing ΔCR or wild-type PrP. Cells from the two kinds of mice, which are marked by the presence or absence of GFP, are differentiated together to yield neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes. As a surrogate read-out of ΔCR PrP toxicity, we assayed sensitivity of the cells to the cationic antibiotic, Zeocin. In a previous study, we reported that cells expressing ΔCR PrP are hypersensitive to the toxic effects of several cationic antibiotics, an effect that is suppressed by co-expression of wild type PrP, similar to the rescue of the neurodegenerative phenotype observed in transgenic mice. Using this system, we find that while ΔCR-dependent toxicity is cell-autonomous, the rescuing activity of wild-type PrP can be exerted in trans from nearby cells. These results provide important insights into how ΔCR PrP subverts a normal physiological function of PrPC, and the cellular mechanisms underlying the rescuing process.
Temporal Text Mining

Text mining often involves the extraction of keywords with respect to some measure of importance. Weblog data is textual content with a clear and significant temporal aspect. Concepts in this data, therefore, can be described temporally in terms of the patterns present in their time series. This paper describes a system which uses models of time series to rank keywords from a corpus of weblog posts.
Learning with high-dimensional data

: This thesis is divided into three parts. In the first part we introduce a framework that allows us to investigate learning scenarios with restricted access to the data. We use this framework to model high-dimensional learning scenarios as an infinite-dimensional one in which the learning algorithm has only access to some finite-dimensional projections of the data. Finally, we provide a prototypical example of such an infinite-dimensional classification problem in which histograms can achieve polynomial learning rates. In the second part we present some individual results that might by useful for the investigation of kernel-based learning methods using Gaussian kernels in high-or infinite-dimensional learning problems. To be more precise, we present log-covering number bounds for Gaussian reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces on general bounded subsets of the Euclidean space. Unlike previous results in this direction we focus on small explicit constants and their dependence on crucial parameters such as the kernel width as well as the size and dimension of the underlying space. Afterwards, we generalize these bounds to Gaussian kernels defined on special infinite-dimensional compact subsets of the sequence space ℓ 2 . More precisely, the considered domains are given by the image of the unit ℓ ∞ -ball under some diagonal operator. In the third part we contribute some new insights to the compactness properties of diagonal operators from ℓ p to ℓ q for p ̸ = q .
Assessor Differences and User Preferences in Tweet Timeline Generation

In information retrieval evaluation, when presented with an effectiveness difference between two systems, there are three relevant questions one might ask. First, are the differences statistically significant? Second, is the comparison stable with respect to assessor differences? Finally, is the difference actually meaningful to a user? This paper tackles the last two questions about assessor differences and user preferences in the context of the newly-introduced tweet timeline generation task in the TREC 2014 Microblog track, where the system's goal is to construct an informative summary of non-redundant tweets that addresses the user's information need. Central to the evaluation methodology is human-generated semantic clusters of tweets that contain substantively similar information. We show that the evaluation is stable with respect to assessor differences in clustering and that user preferences generally correlate with effectiveness metrics even though users are not explicitly aware of the semantic clustering being performed by the systems. Although our analyses are limited to this particular task, we believe that lessons learned could generalize to other evaluations based on establishing semantic equivalence between information units, such as nugget-based evaluations in question answering and temporal summarization.
Fusilli: Translating the Exploration of a Product Customization Space from Digital to Physical

Fusilli is a natural interface developed for end-users to explore and customize the design of a parametric wrist accessory. The natural interface utilizes bare-hand interactions, designed to enable end-users to control the parameters of wrist accessory, and export designs for additive manufacturing. This paper describes the interaction concept and design details of the interface, as well as a preliminary evaluation of this interface against a control interface utilizing sliders to affect the parameters. This paper concludes with the evaluation results, along with a discussion of the insights uncovered from the user study.
How Does Systematic Risk Impact US Credit Spreads? A Copula Study

It is well known that some relationship between systematic risk and credit risk prevails in financial markets. In our study, S&P 500 stock index return is our market risk proxy whereas credit spreads represent our credit risk proxy as a function of maturity, rating and economic sector. We address the problem of studying the joint distributions and evolutions of S&P 500 return and credit spreads. Graphical and non parametric statistical analysis (i.e.: Kendall’s tau and Spearman’s rho) show that such bivariate distributions are asymmetric with some negative relationship between S&P 500 return and credit spreads. In-deed, credit spreads widen when S&P 500 return decreases or drops under some given level. We investigate then this stylized fact using copula functions to characterize observed dependence structures between S&P 500 return and credit spreads. We focus at least on one parameter copulas and at most on one parameter Archimedean copulas, namely Gumbel, FGM, Frank and Clayton copula functions. Starting from empirical Kendall’s tau observed for each bivariate dependence structure, we induce parameter values for each copula type function belonging to our copulas set. Finally, we exhibit optimal characterizations for such dependence structures and use the optimal selected copulas to achieve a scenario analysis among which stress testing.
PageRank equation and localization in the WWW

We show that the PageRank in a network can be represented as the solution of a differential equation discretized over a directed graph. By exploiting a formal relationship with the time-independent Schrödinger equation it is possible to interpret hub formation and related phenomena as a wave-like localization process in the presence of disorder and trapping potentials. The result opens new perspectives in the physics of networks with interdisciplinary connections and opens the way to the employment of various mathematical techniques to the analysis of self-organization in structured systems. Applications are envisaged in the World-Wide Web, traffic, social and biological networks.
Cost efficiency analysis of scheduled commercial banks: empirical evidence from India

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze and evaluate cost efficiency (CE) scores of Indian Scheduled Commercial Banks (SCBs) in India over a period of 22 years, i.e. 1991–1992 to 2012–2013. Design/methodology/approach Data envelopment analysis (DEA) – a non-parametric approach is used to calculate efficiency scores of banks. Further the efficiency scores are decomposed into technical and allocative efficiency. The differences in the efficiency scores across ownership as well as across reformatory and post-reformatory era are examined by applying Panel Tobit Regression. Findings The paper also identifies the reason for cost inefficiency among Indian banks. In addition, the nature of their return to scale of all SCBs has also been evaluated. The results of the paper depict that Indian SCBs have never achieved full CE score of 1 in any of the years of study. The dominant reason identified behind cost inefficiency is allocative inefficiency. Surprisingly, the results also highlight that SCBs exhibit higher CE scores in reformatory era as compared to the post-reformatory era. Originality/value With specific reference to India, even lesser literature is found on CE. Indian banking sector has witnessed many changes on account of liberalization, privatization and globalization (LPG). Before banks adapted to the new environment, the global financial crisis acted as a fuel to fire affecting the performance of banks. Thus, a reassessment over a longer period would help to know a wholistic view of the issue of cost inefficiency, which has always been a troubling factor for Indian banks.
Online Petri net based algorithm for planning and controlling mobile robots

The paper presents a procedure for planning and controlling a team of identical mobile robots such that a set of target regions are reached. We consider a partitioned environment cluttered with a set of obstacles that randomly change their positions. Our approach abstracts both the control capabilities of robots and the information on obstacle locations into probabilistic discrete Petri net models, and it uses an online algorithm for planning and adjusting the sequences of regions the robots should traverse. At each iteration of the online algorithm we solve a linear programming problem that optimizes the robot paths by weighting the probabilities of following a sequence of partition regions and the steady-state probabilities of encountering obstacles along the resulted sequences. The approach is implemented as a fully automated Matlab package.
Predicting Academic Performance in an Introductory College-Level IS Course

This study describes a model to predict academic performance in an introductory college-level information systems course. We base the model on one developed by Eskew and Faley (1988) to predict grades in accounting classes. We collected data from students in four sections of an introductory college-level IS class at a single university. Motivation and GPA predict performance. Prior related courses do not predict performance. Unexpectedly, SAT predicts performance for male students but not for female students. We discuss these findings and suggest what faculty members can do to improve performance in the class.
Emptiness Of Alternating Parity Tree Automata Using Games With Imperfect Information

We focus on the emptiness problem for alternating parity tree automata. The usual technique to tackle this problem first removes alternation, going to non-determinism, and then checks emptiness by reduction to a two-player perfect-information parity game. In this note, we give an alternative roadmap to this problem by providing a direct reduction to the emptiness problem to solving an imperfect-information two-player parity game. Key-words: Alternating Tree Automata; Emptiness; Imperfect Information Games; Positional Determinacy Le problème du vide pour les automates d’arbres alternant à parité via des jeux à information imparfaite Résumé : Nous considérons le problème du test du vide pour les automates d’arbres alternants à parité. La méthode usuelle pour résoudre ce problème, commence par supprimer l’alternance ce qui conduit à un automate non-déterministe dont le vide est ensuite testé par réduction à un jeux de parité à information parfaite. Dans cette note, nous proposons une approche alternative pour ce problème, en proposant une réduction directe du problème du vide à un jeu de parité à information imparfaite. Mots clés : Automates d’arbres alternants; test du vide; jeux à information imparfaite; déterminaison positionnelle * IRISA Université de Rennes 1 ** LIAFA (Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7 & CNRS) c ©IRISA – Campus de Beaulieu – 35042 Rennes Cedex – France – +33 2 99 84 71 00 – www.irisa. fr 2 S. Pinchinat & O. Serre
Cyclic Perturbation: Protecting Confldentiality While Preserving Data Utility in Tabular Data

When disseminating data on individuals, information organizations must balance the interests of data users in better access and the interests of data providers in confldentiality. Cyclic perturbation is a new method for protecting sensitive data in categorical tables. In the disseminated data product, the true table values are altered in a way that preserves the table’s marginal totals. Further, the method requires publicly announcing details of the procedure, so that a user can determine not only the range of values that a table cell may have had in the original table, but also the exact posterior distribution over those possible values, given the user’s prior probabilities over a relatively small set of possible true tables. This permits Bayesian analysis of the published table. Cyclic perturbation is compared with the standard alternatives of cell suppression and controlled rounding, on the basis of disclosure risk and data utility.