Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Subsurface scattering of synthetic aperture radar signals assessed using ground-penetrating radar

Radar remote sensing techniques are becoming more widely applied in dryland regions, because the lower frequency Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) systems enable significant penetration into the subsurface under very dry conditions, allowing subsurface characteristics to be interpreted. Field experiments at two contrasting sites in the Libyan Fazzān show ground-penetrating radar (GPR) can be used to image the structural characteristics of duricrusts which generate backscatter differences. Site A consists of limited sedimentary layers and is relatively homogeneous in GPR response. Site B has multiple sedimentary layers and significant scatter in the form of multi-scale hyperbolae, from cavities, cracks, rocks and root nodules. Effective penetration depth is greater (> 3 m) at Site B and at the lower frequency. Using the mean instantaneous amplitude, Site B shows a high degree of signal scattering as a result of these different signal characteristics. Site B has a stronger GPR signal return by 42 % at 900 MHz. At 450 MHz this is reduced to 13 %, due to reduced sensitivity to smaller scatterers. At low SAR frequencies, subsurface scattering becomes important in determining backscatter. With increased subsurface complexity, SAR backscatter will increase. Therefore, in dry environments, backscatter models need to incorporate subsurface scattering effects if they are to more closely match SAR observations. sponding author. Email: m.charlton@reading.ac. uk MBCharlton.com Research Notes w.publications. mbcharlton.com/ResearchNotes.html 2 M.B. Charlton and K.White MBCharlton.com Research Note 1 1 May 2008
A self-organising multiple model architecture for motor imitation

Learning by imitation allows humans to easily transfer motor knowledge between individuals. Our research is aimed towards equipping robots with imitative capabilities, so humans can simply show a robot what to do. This will greatly simplify how humans program robots. To achieve imitative behaviour, we have implemented a self-organising connectionist modular architecture on a simulated robot. Motion tracking was used to gather data of human dance movements. When imitating the dance movements, the architecture self-organises the decomposition of movements into submovements, which are controlled by different modules. The modules both collaborate and compete for control during the movement. The trajectory recorded during motion tracking was repeated, revealing recurrent neural activation patterns of the inverse models (i.e., controllers), indicating that the modules specialise on specific parts of the trajectory.
THE EVALUATION OF TRAVELLING TIME

THE LITERATURE OF TRANSPORT ECONOMICS CONTAINS A NUMBER OF CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE QUESTION OF HOW VALUES OF 'REDUCTION OF TRAVELLING TIME' CAN BE DETERMINED. THIS ARTICLE SUMMARIZES SOME OF THE THEORETICAL PROBLEMS INVOLVED AND MAKES SOME COMMENTS ON THE EMPIRICAL DATA. THE THEORETICAL ASPECTS ARE EXAMINED IN TWO STAGES. IN THE FIRST IT IS ASSUMED (1) THAT EVERY INDIVIDUAL CAN APPROXIMATELY ADJUST THE LENGTH OF HIS WORKING WEEK SO AS TO MAXIMIZE HIS SUBJECTIVE WELFARE AND (2) THAT A REDUCTION OF TRAVELLING TIME IS EQUIVALENT TO AN INCREASE IN THE EFFECTIVE TIME AVAILABLE TO HIM FOR EITHER WORK OR LEISURE. THE SECOND STAGE CONSISTS OF DROPPING THESE ASSUMPTIONS AND CONSIDERING THE CONSEQUENCES OF RIGIDITIES IN THE WORKING WEEK AND OF THE POSSIBILITY THAT TRAVELLING TIME MAY ITSELF HAVE A (POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE) UTILITY. SOME COMPLICATIONS IN EMPIRICAL EVALUATIONS LEAD TO THE CONCLUSION THAT RESULTS OF PARTICULAR TESTS CANNOT BE APPLIED WITHOUT QUALIFICATION TO OTHER SITUATIONS. MUCH MORE EMPIRICAL RESEARCH IS NEEDED BEFORE THE RESULTS CAN BE USED IN SOCIAL COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS WITH ANY DEGREE OF CONFIDENCE. /AUTHOR/
Efficiency Evaluation of State Transport Undertakings of India using DEA-NN approach

The economy of any nation depends on the structure and functioning of its various sectors. Transport sector is one of the vital sectors for the financial system of any developing country. All other sectors are dependent on it either directly or indirectly. Thus improving the efficiency of this sector has become a major concern for the operators and the policy makers. The present paper presents an amalgamation of the two non-parametric techniques, Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Neural Networks (NNs) to compute the efficiency scores of State Transport Undertakings of India. DEA is used to compute the efficiency scores of 27 DMUs. These scores are used to train a neural network model, namely the BPN model. The algorithm is developed and used for predicting the efficiency scores of other units of the data set. The results obtained are comparable and it has been shown that this approach helps in improving the discriminatory power of DEA.
Culturally-Relevant Persuasive Technology

Persuasive technology (PT) has been defined by B. J. Fogg as "any interactive computing system designed to change peoples attitudes or behaviors". The kinds of attitudes people hold, and the behaviours they exhibit, are influenced by culture, so cultural beliefs play a large role in persuasion. The cross-cultural psychology literature has demonstrated the power of culture on attitude change. To date, however, there has been limited persuasive technology research outside of countries characterised as having individualist culture, where individualism describes cultures in which society members have a primarily individual identity. Little research has explicitly investigated the relationship between persuasive technology and culture. In this thesis, we investigated the hypothesis that persuasive technology is more effective when it reflects the culture of its intended target audience. Firstly, we established a set of effective, culturally-relevant persuasive technology strategies, almost all of which are targeted at use in tools for collectivist audiences. The strategies are based on a combination of findings from the cross-cultural psychology literature focused on the dimensions of individualism and collectivism, an analysis of existing PT strategies, and qualitative insights. Secondly, we developed a culturally-relevant PT prototype based on several of our strategies, in the form of two versions of a game titled Smoke? about smoking cessation. One version of Smoke? was designed to be more persuasive for a NZ European player audience, while the other was designed to be more persuasive for a Maori player audience. We conducted focus groups with potential players, the insights of which guided how we applied several of our culturally-relevant PT strategies in the design of the two game versions. Finally, we evaluated both game versions on individualist, and collectivist test players, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The results of our evaluation support our hypothesis. Not only did both sets of players engage with, and use the culturally-relevant interface elements of the game designed for their culture, they also demonstrated that the culturally-relevant game versions had increased their anti-smoking beliefs.
Dopamine Modulation of Ih Improves Temporal Fidelity of Spike Propagation in an Unmyelinated Axon

We studied how conduction delays of action potentials in an unmyelinated axon depended on the history of activity and how this dependence was changed by the neuromodulator dopamine (DA). The pyloric dilator axons of the stomatogastric nervous system in the lobster, Homarus americanus, exhibited substantial activity-dependent hyperpolarization and changes in spike shape during repetitive activation. The conduction delays varied by several milliseconds per centimeter, and, during activation with realistic burst patterns or Poisson-like patterns, changes in delay occurred over multiple timescales. The mean delay increased, whereas the resting membrane potential hyperpolarized with a time constant of several minutes. Concomitantly with the mean delay, the variability of delay also increased. The variability of delay was not a linear or monotonic function of instantaneous spike frequency or spike shape parameters, and the relationship between these parameters changed with the increase in mean delay. Hyperpolarization was counteracted by a hyperpolarization-activated inward current (Ih), and the magnitude of Ih critically determined the temporal fidelity of spike propagation. Pharmacological block of Ih increased the change in delay and the variability of delay, and increasing Ih by application of DA diminished both. Consequently, the temporal fidelity of pattern propagation was substantially improved in DA. Standard measurements of changes in excitability or delay with paired stimuli or tonic stimulation failed to capture the dynamics of spike conduction. These results indicate that spike conduction can be extremely sensitive to the history of axonal activity and to the presence of neuromodulators, with potentially important consequences for temporal coding.
Virtual Roommates in multiple shared spaces

Augmented Reality applications have already become a part of everyday life, bringing virtual 3D objects into real life scenes. In this paper, we introduce “Virtual Roommates”, a system that employs AR techniques to share people's presence, projected from remote locations. Virtual Roommates is a feature-based mapping between loosely linked spaces. It allows to overlay multiple physical and virtual scenes and populate them with physical or virtual characters. As the name implies, the Virtual Roommates concept provides continuous ambient presence for multiple disparate groups, similar to people sharing living conditions, but without the boundaries of real space.
Human languages order information efficiently

Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these differences, human languages might constitute different `solutions' to common pressures of language use. Using Monte Carlo simulations over data from five languages, we find that their word orders are efficient for processing in terms of both dependency length and local lexical probability. This suggests that biases originating in how the brain understands language strongly constrain how human languages change over generations.
Video Anomaly Identification

This article describes a family of unsupervised approaches to video anomaly detection based on statistical activity analysis. Approaches based on activity analysis provide intriguing possibilities for region-of-interest (ROI) processing since relevant activities and their locations are detected prior to higher-level processing such as object tracking, tagging, and classification. This strategy is essential for scalability of video analysis to cluttered environments with a multitude of objects and activities. Activity analysis approaches typically do not involve object tracking, and yet they inherently account for spatiotemporal dependencies. They are robust to clutter arising from multiple activities and contamination arising from poor background subtraction or occlusions. They can sometimes also be employed for fusing activities from multiple cameras. We illustrate successful application of activity analysis to anomaly detection in various scenarios, including the detection of abandoned objects, crowds of people, and illegal U-turns.
Tracking Conflicting Accesses Efficiently for Software Record and Replay

Record and replay, which records a multithreaded program’s execution in one run and reproduces it deterministically in a second run, is useful for program debugging, fault detection and analysis. The key challenge in multithreaded record and replay is ensuring that conflicting, cross-thread accesses to shared variables are properly detected, recorded and reproduced. Numerous solutions have been proposed in both hardware and software to track these cross-thread accesses, but to date all general-purpose software solutions suffer from high overhead or have serious limitations. This paper introduces ROCTET, an approach for performing softwareonly deterministic record and replay. ROCTET is built on top of a novel dynamic analysis infrastructure, OCTET, which can detect at low overhead any cross-thread dependences during execution by exploiting the fact that most accesses, even of shared objects, are not part of cross-thread dependences. We implement OCTET and ROCTET in a JVM and show they add low overhead for several multithreaded applications. We also show that our implementation of ROCTET can successfully replay recorded executions when it can successfully control or ignore extraneous sources of nondeterminism in the VM, libraries, and system.
Differential Space-Time Modulation for Modified V-BLAST System

This paper proposes a differential en/decoding scheme for the modified Vertical-Bell Labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) system, where each spatially multiplexed data stream is intentionally inserted with delay offset. The proposed scheme can use only one receive antenna to detect the transmitted signals, whereas neither the transmitter nor the receiver knows the channel state information (CSI). Simulation results show that the bit error rate (BER) performance is nonidentical when different delay offsets are applied. The optimum delay offset for two transmit antennas system, for example, is about 0.6 TS (where Ts denotes symbol period) when the system achieves better performance.
Bayesian inference on dependence in multivariate longitudinal data

In many applications, it is of interest to assess the dependence structure in multivariate longitudinal data. Discovering such dependence is challenging due to the dimensionality involved. By concatenating the random effects from component models for each response, dependence within and across longitudinal responses can be characterized through a large random effects covariance matrix. Motivated by the common problems in estimating this matrix, especially the off-diagonal elements, we propose a Bayesian approach that relies on shrinkage priors for parameters in a modified Cholesky decomposition. Without adjustment, such priors and previous related approaches are order-dependent and tend to shrink strongly toward an ARtype structure. We propose moment-matching (MM) priors to mitigate such problems. Efficient Gibbs samplers are developed for posterior computation. The methods are illustrated through simulated examples and are applied to a longitudinal epidemiologic study of hormones and oxidative stress.
Cross-Domain Product Classification with Deep Learning

In our final project, we took on the challenge of cross-domain classification–the adaptation of a model suitable for one domain to one or more different domains with identical features. Specifically, we developed a cross-domain classification schema to predict product categories in tweets and eBay reviews based on user reviews from Amazon. We first developed a set of classical machine learning classifiers that performed reasonably well on our principal data set of Amazon products and then applied the same classifiers to predict product categories from Twitter tweets and eBay reviews. We then developed Deep Learning models to approach to our cross-domain classification problem and compared performance. In what follows, we walk step by step through the procedure, illustrate our results, then discuss future work. We show that while Deep Learning definitively helps models work out-of-domain, considerable work needs to be done to create a context-free model of language that can work across domains.
Throughput Efficiency of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks with Node Classification Strategy

In this paper an analytical conclusion is present on the adjustment for the various transmission overheads, in order to upgrade bandwidth efficiency. The ad hoc network environment applications mostly have a lone sender, one or multiple end receivers and of course a number of intermediate nodes. The whole transmission scenarios can thus make it possible to classify nodes on the basis of various transmission states. The sender node has thus a prime impact on the performance of the whole transmission. Here we improve the sender performance dynamically which makes a ripple effect (improvement) on the overall transmission performance. Taking in consideration the aggregate throughput as the performance indicator across the nodes for bandwidth efficiency evaluation. It is taken into account the various overheads like minimum contention window etc. which lead to bandwidth deficiency in the ad hoc scenario. The results are being generated for the throughput across the nodes by reducing contention window, which help us to analyze the efficiency ratio of the various nodes for the current standard. The results are generated at various standard bandwidths and hence provide the insight about the distributed variation of throughput with respect to bandwidth. Our analysis is based on existing IEEE-802.11b standard. Finally we propose our conclusion by analytical description of the efficiency of the proposed solution at various standard bandwidths.
Behaviour and communication change in reducing HIV: is Uganda unique?

The clearest example of declines in HIV prevalence and changes in sexual behaviour comes from Uganda. Are there lessons to learn for other countries or is Uganda unique? In this paper, we assess the epidemiological and behavioural data on Uganda comparatively to other African countries and then analyse data from other populations where HIV has declined. In Uganda, HIV prevalence declined from 21% to 9.8% from 1991–1998, there was a reduction in non-regular sexual partners by 65% and greater levels of communication about AIDS and people with AIDS through social networks, unlike the comparison countries. There is evidence of a basic population level response initiated at community level, to avoid risk, reduce risk behaviours and care for people with AIDS. The basic elements—a continuum of communication, behaviour change and care—were integrated at community level. They were also strongly supported by distinctive Ugandan policies from the 1980s. We identify a similar, early behaviour and communication response in other situations where HIV has declined: Thailand, Zambia and the US Gay community. In Thailand, visits to sex workers decreased by 55% and non-regular partners declined from 28% to 15% (1990–1993): as important as the ‘100% condom use policy’. Similarly, in Zambia and Ethiopia risk behaviour has decreased and analysis of Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) rates among Gay populations in the USA shows a decline from as early as 1985 in White Gay populations, with later declines in Hispanic and Black Gay populations. These responses preceded and exceeded HIV prevention. However, where they were built on by distinctive HIV policies, HIV prevention has been scaled and led to national level declines in HIV. It is not easy to transfer the lessons of these successes. They require real social and political capital in addition to financial capital. Nevertheless, similar characteristics are present in community responses in Africa, Asia and USA, and even in fragmented signs of HIV declines in other African cities. Only in a few situations has this behaviour and communication process been recognised, mobilised and built on by HIV prevention policy. Where this has occurred, HIV prevention success has been greater than biomedical approaches or methods introduced from outside. It represents a social vaccine for HIV from Africa, and is available now.
Intégration commerciale et recentralisation budgétaire au Brésil

Le retour du Bresil a la democratie s’est accompagne d’une ouverture aux echanges au niveau multilateral(OMC) et regional (Mercosur). Simultanement, la constitution de 1988 affirmait une volonte forte de decentralisation fiscale. Vingt ans plus tard, le bilan de l’integration commerciale regionale du Bresil reste relativement faible et le plan Real de 1994 a conduit a une recentralisation budgetaire sans pour autant s’attaquer aux inefficacites fiscales. Notre communication a pour but d’isoler et d’analyser les liens entre, d’une part, l’integration commerciale du Bresil, et, d’autre part, ce mouvement de recentralisation fiscale. Il examine les distorsions creees par la « TVA » bresilienne, l’ICMS, percu par les Etats federes sur les flux de commerce interne et externe. L’article conclut que, contrairement a ce qui a pu etre observe dans d’autres pays, l’ouverture du Bresil s’est traduite par l’expansion des depenses budgetaires et une tendance a la recentralisation des recettes fiscales. Pour autant, cette evolution ne peut etre expliquee comme le resultat d’un effet de compensation des effets inegalitaires de l’ouverture.
Markers of cardiovascular risk are not changed by increased whole-grain intake: the WHOLEheart study, a randomised, controlled dietary intervention

Recommendations for whole-grain (WG) intake are based on observational studies showing that higher WG consumption is associated with reduced CVD risk. No large-scale, randomised, controlled dietary intervention studies have investigated the effects on CVD risk markers of substituting WG in place of refined grains in the diets of non-WG consumers. A total of 316 participants (aged 18–65 years; BMI>25 kg/m2) consuming < 30 g WG/d were randomly assigned to three groups: control (no dietary change), intervention 1 (60 g WG/d for 16 weeks) and intervention 2 (60 g WG/d for 8 weeks followed by 120 g WG/d for 8 weeks). Markers of CVD risk, measured at 0 (baseline), 8 and 16 weeks, were: BMI, percentage body fat, waist circumference; fasting plasma lipid profile, glucose and insulin; and indicators of inflammatory, coagulation, and endothelial function. Differences between study groups were compared using a random intercepts model with time and WG intake as factors. Although reported WG intake was significantly increased among intervention groups, and demonstrated good participant compliance, there were no significant differences in any markers of CVD risk between groups. A period of 4 months may be insufficient to change the lifelong disease trajectory associated with CVD. The lack of impact of increasing WG consumption on CVD risk markers implies that public health messages may need to be clarified to consider the source of WG and/or other diet and lifestyle factors linked to the benefits of whole-grain consumption seen in observational studies.
Impacts of Exchange Rate Volatility on the U.S. Cotton Exports

A structural time series approach utilizing the state space model is used to analyze the impact of exchange rate volatility on the bilateral U.S. cotton exports to major export destinations. An EGARCH (Exponential Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity) model with normal and non-normal errors is used to estimate the volatility of exchange rate. Monthly data from 1995 to 2006 is utilized for the analysis. The results indicate a negative relationship between exchange rate volatility and U.S. cotton exports for most countries. The stochastic process governing the U.S. cotton exports to different countries is found to be permanent as well as transitory. The results support the view that the impact of exchange rate volatility can be better understood by analyzing markets separately.
Probabilistic Dialog Management

Modeling user interfaces as dialogs provides a conceptual framework to address global coherence and efficiency of interactions. While non-probabilistic approaches provide convincing results and transparent dialog behavior, probabilistic techniques can help to account for inherent uncertainties in user input. In this paper, we present three patterns for probabilistic dialog management or support thereof.