Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A method and tool for early design / technology search-space exploration for 3 D ICs

3D integration is the big next step in system integration. It is still an emerging technology though and its implications on die and packages are not fully understood yet. Furthermore, it comes in many different process flavors. Adoption by mainstream designers requires the availability of tools that let them evaluate the cost and benefits of 3D compared to conventional system implementations. In this paper we propose a software-supported framework for system prototyping on 3D ICs. Also, we provide a case study scenario for realizing and evaluating a system implementing MPEG4 encoding on a 3D IC. The results show that 3D integration provides significant improvements among others in delay, power/energy consumption, as well as die area, compared to conventional 2D implementations.
Automatic mura detection system for liquid crystal display panels

In this paper, we propose an automatic inspection system, which can automatically detect four types of muras on an LCD panel: cluster mura, v-band mura, rubbing mura, and light leakage mura. To detect cluster muras, the Laplacian of Gaussian (LOG) filter is used. A multi-resolution approach is proposed to detect cluster muras of different scales. To speed up the processing speed, this multi-resolution approach is actually implemented in the frequency domain. To detect v-band muras, we check the variation tendency of the projected 1-D intensity profile. Then, v-band muras are detected by identifying these portions of the 1-D profile where a large deviation occurs. To detect rubbing muras, we designed a frequency mask to detect distinct components in the frequency domain. To detect light leak muras, we apply image mirroring over the boundary parts and adopt the same LOG filter that has been used in detecting cluster muras. All four types of mura detection are integrated together in an efficient way and simulation results demonstrate that this system is indeed very helpful in detecting mura defects.
MATLAB - based modeling tool for designing, predicting and analyzing grid tied photovoltaic systems

Planning a photovoltaic (PV) system is complex. Many different factors must be taken into account such as site information, module type and inclination of the modules, level of irradiation, choice of the most suitable inverter, etc. To ease the planning process, computer based tools must be utilized. In this paper, a MATLAB-based modeling tool to design, predict and analyze grid - tied PV systems is presented. This software has a user friendly interface which requires a minimum of data in order to present your optimum system and examine its performance in a clear graphical form. The user can explore different combinations and scenarios to meet the proposed design requirements. Simplicity, accuracy and ability to adapt the designed tool to any updates in both site information and system components would probably make it an excellent tool for educational and research purposes.
A tribute to Dick Askey

Richard A. (Dick) Askey1 was born June 4, 1933 in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1961 under the direction of Samuel Bochner. After instructorships at the University of Washington and the University of Chicago he joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1963, where he became full professor in 1968. Since 2003 he is Professor Emeritus at that same institution. Dick received many awards and distinctions during the course of his mathematical career. He was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993 and of the National Academy of Sciences in 1999. Furthermore, he is a Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of SIAM and of the American Mathematical Society. In 1983 he was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Warszawa. In 2012 he received an honorary doctorate from SASTRA University in Kumbakonam, India. Dick Askey’s research interests are Special Functions and Orthogonal Polynomials, and more generally Classical Analysis. His works often touch upon aspects of approximation theory,
Feeling Duped: Emotional, Motivational, and Cognitive Aspects of Being Exploited by Others

Feeling duped is an aversive emotional response to the perception of having been taken advantage of in a interpersonal transaction (primarily those involving economic exchange), partly as a result of one's own decisions. The actual likelihood of being duped, as well as the heightened vigilance for it, should increase as a function of opportunity (e.g., information asymmetry that gives one side a big advantage in knowledge) and motivation (e.g., an exceptionally huge payoff may make it worth defrauding a long-term business partner). Being duped produces an aversive self-conscious emotion with a threat of self-blame. There appears to be stable individual differences in the motivation (called sugrophobia) to avoid being a sucker. High sugrophobes will be vigilant and skeptical of potential deals. Low sugrophobes may not even realize in some instances that they were duped. The aversive reaction to feeling duped stimulates counterfactual ruminations that may intensify sugrophobia but also aids in extracting useful lessons.
A novel hybrid ICI cancellation technique for OFDM optimization

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), a most promising technique where multi-carrier modulation concept is implemented through splitting the signal into a number of signals, modulating each of these new signals to several orthogonal sub-carriers and combining the data received on the multiple channels at the receiver. Apart from delivering high spectrum efficiency, great channel robustness, immunity to impulse interferences, flexibility and easy equalization, OFDM is severely affected by undesirable effects of frequency offset errors (causes to generate inter carrier interface) due to Doppler shift in receiver frequency and Local oscillator frequency synchronization error. This paper describes some of the important ICI cancellation techniques, like Self Cancellation and Maximum Likelihood, and produces their performance comparative analysis with respect to BER and SNR. A new proposed technique is here by presented to further improve OFDM performance with varying Doppler shift error. The simulation results shows that proposed technique has significant improvements in the error performance and comparative analysis suggest that proposed technique has outperform legacy Self Cancellation and Maximum Likelihood ICI cancellation scheme with huge gain.
Factors associated with self-reported driver sleepiness and incidents in city bus drivers

Driver fatigue has received increased attention during recent years and is now considered to be a major contributor to approximately 15–30% of all crashes. However, little is known about fatigue in city bus drivers. It is hypothesized that city bus drivers suffer from sleepiness, which is due to a combination of working conditions, lack of health and reduced sleep quantity and quality. The overall aim with the current study is to investigate if severe driver sleepiness, as indicated by subjective reports of having to fight sleep while driving, is a problem for city based bus drivers in Sweden and if so, to identify the determinants related to working conditions, health and sleep which contribute towards this. The results indicate that driver sleepiness is a problem for city bus drivers, with 19% having to fight to stay awake while driving the bus 2–3 times each week or more and nearly half experiencing this at least 2–4 times per month. In conclusion, severe sleepiness, as indicated by having to fight sleep during driving, was common among the city bus drivers. Severe sleepiness correlated with fatigue related safety risks, such as near crashes.
A platform for the development of location-based mobile applications with privacy protection

Network operators gradually open their interfaces to formerly hidden services which fosters the development of a new class of mobile applications that take into account context information such as the users location. However, this development also raises problems. Especially the lack of protection of privacy in location-based services. In this work we propose a service architecture that is aimed at overcoming some of the shortages of currently existing context-aware applications that make use of network providers services. It makes use of a novel privacy enhancing mechanism that is based on the notion of pseudonyms that are applicable even on mobile devices with restrictions regarding resources like memory or processing power. Due to the flexibility of the privacy enhancing mechanism many different kinds of applications are conceivable. The most important aspect in this respect is the highly postulated pay-as-you-go model. To illustrate our approach we demonstrate a transport ticket application that is extended by location-tracking functionality and discuss a management module which allows 3rd party application developers to test complex interaction patterns even for a huge number of notional users prior to the realization of full mobile applications and by confirming obligatory requirements regarding data and privacy protection legislation.
Conciertos educativos y selección académica y social del alumnado

En este articulo se lleva a cabo una valoracion del sistema de conciertos educativos desde la perspectiva de su contribucion efectiva a la igualacion de las oportunidades de seleccion de centro escolar por parte de las familias. Tomando como marco teorico las aportaciones realizadas por los estudiosos de los efectos de las politicas de fomento de la libertad de eleccion de escuela, y a partir de una encuesta realizada a estudiantes de segundo curso de bachillerato en el curso 2001-2002 en las comunidades autonomas de Aragon, Asturias y Extremadura, el trabajo realizado permite concluir que los conciertos educativos en su diseno actual no han facilitado la integracion socioeconomica de los alumnos de los centros publicos y concertados de ensenanza secundaria. El analisis de los factores que determinan la eleccion de un centro concertado, realizado en la ultima seccion del articulo mediante la especificacion de un modelo probit, permite ademas apreciar una relacion significativa entre el nivel academico y socioeconomico y la eleccion de centro privado concertado, indicando que la segregacion intersectorial encontrada en el trabajo puede ser atribuida en parte al patron de eleccion de los usuarios del sistema educativo.
Classification based on Document Structure

The web is a huge repository of information and there is a need for categorizing web documents to facilitate the search and retrieval of pages. Existing algorithms rely solely on the text content of the web pages for classification. However, the web has a lot of information contained in structure, images, video etc present in the document. In this paper, we propose a method for automatic classification of web pages into a few broad categories based on the structure of the web document and the characteristics of images present in it.
Modulation of phagosome-lysosome fusion in mouse macrophages

A previously described fluorescence assay has been used to characterize factors that modulate phagosome-lysosome (P-L) fusion in mouse macrophages. Fusion was not affected by enzymatic modification or by concanavalin A cross-linking of the plasma membrane or by coating the phagocytic particle with concanavalin A or immune serum. Pretreatment of cells with 10-5-10-4 M colchicine, or treatment immediately after ingestion with 1-10 microgram/ml cytochalasin did not alter P-L fusion; implying that the cytoskeleton does not control fusion in a rate- limiting way. Fusion was strikingly elevated in 5-h cultures of activated macrophages from immune-boosted mice. A lower enhancement was seen in cells activated by proteose-peptone, a nonspecific inflammatory agent.
Multimedia management and query processing issues in distributed digital libraries: a HERMES perspective

Multimedia applications accessing large amounts of data require efficient browsing and searching mechanisms to extract relevant information. The system has to preselect items of interest from the database. Additionally, it has to support continuous presentation of time-dependent media. Browsing system components for multimedia data management are proposed that are developed within the HERMES project. They offer conceptual, content based access to videos. Our retrieval engine calculates relevance values for the results of a conceptual query by feature aggregation on video shot granularity. An intelligent client buffer strategy uses the relevance values from retrieval as presentation support. It prefers to keep those shots in the cache which have a high relevance value.
A miner for malware detection based on API function calls and their arguments

Since signature based methods cannot identify sophisticated malware quickly and effectively, research is moving toward using samples' runtime behavior. But these methods are often slow and have lower detection rate and are not usually used in antivirus software. In this article we introduce a scalable method that relies on utilizing features other than traditional API calls to obtain higher accuracies. Two feature categories including API names and a combination of API names and their input arguments were extracted to investigate their effect in identifying and distinguishing malware and benign applications. Feature selection techniques are then applied to reduce the number of features and enhance the analysis time. Various classifiers were then utilized along with 10-fold cross validation approach to achieve an accuracy of 98.4% with a false positive rate less than two percent in best case. The small number of extracted features in the proposed technique and the high accuracy achieved makes it an appropriate approach to be used in industrial applications.
Hierarchical Protein Classification based on Gene Ontology and Decision Trees

Proteins are the most important cell parts, therefore, knowing their exact function is of a great significance. However, the function of large amount of proteins is still unknown. In addition, today, biologists persist on hierarchical organization the living world, and thus in protein databases also. There are many protein classification algorithms proposed determining the protein function, but, only a few of them take into consideration these hierarchical structures. The Gene Ontology (GO) is a protein and gene database structured as a controlled hierarchical vocabulary of terms to describe protein functions. This paper introduces a new hierarchical multi-label protein classifier that uses the relationships among the GO terms. First, protein descriptors are extracted from the structural coordinates stored in the Protein Data Bank (PDB) files. Then, a modified C4.5 algorithm is applied to select the most appropriate descriptor features for protein classification based on the GO hierarchy. An evaluation of this approach is presented, and the results show that the hierarchical structure of GO is important for improving the accuracy of the classification problem at higher levels.
Iaald Afita Wcca2008 World Conference on Agricultural Information and It Lesson Learned for Ontology Construction with Thai Rice Case Study

Ontology plays a critical role in knowledge creation and knowledge management process. It helps make knowledge acquisition and retrieval process significantly more intelligent. The Thai AGRIS Centre, the agriculture knowledge service center of Thailand, has constructed ontology prototype for plant production using rice production issue as a test case. Our results showed that retrieval output from ontology query method delivered Recall value 3 folds as high as the Recall value delivered by the conventional query method. It is therefore advisable that experts or information specialist in each specific knowledge domain should collaboratively start developing their respective ontology in order to help increase efficiency of knowledge acquisition and retrieval process of their respective knowledge community. There are some lessons learned that we would like to share and we hope that they can be tips for those who want to speed up their ontology development process. The guidelines are as followed: Firstly, try to identify the purpose and scope of your ontology unambiguously; secondly, find out existing principles and knowledge base available in that knowledge domain for conceptualizing concept and relation; thirdly, try not to reinvent the wheel by studying and reuse existing ontology; fourthly, defines and categorizes concepts and relations in a clear hierarchically order and define relationship between concept as specific as require; fifthly, make consistency for term representing concept; sixthly; develop guideline and criteria for each ontology construction; seventhly; create multilingual ontology to enable knowledge sharing worldwide; eighthly; use expert approach to build a new ontology and use semi-automatic approach to update it; and finally evaluation should be done from the intended users point of view.
Policy-Relevant Exchange Rate Pass-Through to U.S. Import Prices

We investigate three possible sources of downward bias that could affect standard estimates of exchange rate pass-through to import prices over policy-relevant horizons: improper lag selection, selection biases in the entry of items in the basket of prices, and selection biases in their exit. We first show that standard lag length selection criteria may, under certain model assumptions, lead one to underpredict pass-through over the medium run. We argue that the risks of overfitting the regression by adding extra lags are likely small relative to the potential benefits. Second, we investigate the bias induced by entry into a price index of items that are less responsive to recent exchange rate movements than items already in the index. We show that the size of this bias is sensitive to the speed at which pass-through occurs, and present a method for eliminating much of this bias over typical policy horizons. Finally, we examine the censoring of price changes through exits from the index. We argue that this source of downward bias is especially diffi cult to control for in standard pass-through regressions and its importance is sensitive to the underlying data-generating process. ∗Email addresses: etienne.gagnon@frb.gov, benjamin.r. mandel@frb.gov, robert.j.vigfusson@frb.gov. †This research was conducted with restricted access to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the BLS, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, or of any person associated with the Federal Reserve System.
Modeling of non-uniform heat dissipation and prediction of hot spots in power transistors

-In this work a heat generation model induced by current crowding is proposed. This model, in turn, is applied to the thermal calculation of typical multi-finger emitter structures of BJTs. The internal temperature distribution obtained from this model provides clear indication of the existence of hot spots in base-emitter contact region. The characteristics of the location and the magnitude of hot spots are also presented in this paper. Various pertinent effects due to the non-uniform heat dissipation are discussed. The result of this study serves to locate potential hot spots, which must be considered to prevent thermal breakdown of power BJTs as well as other types of power devices. © 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
Recognising Influences on Attitudes to Knowledge Sharing in a Research Establishment: An Interpretivist Investigation

Knowledge sharing in organizations is influenced by several interconnecting factors, but there is little written on the individual perspective of those involved in sharing. An interpretivist, action research methodology was used to help members of a research organization determine what knowledge means for them and the knowledge sharing issues they face. Their shared Appreciations were that although they believed “knowledge-as-practice” was an essential aspect of their work, it was undervalued by the organization’s clients and fund-holders, causing difficulties for the maintenance of knowledge capability, and influencing organizational subcultures. These included a “you should know” subculture and a risk-averse subculture, where staff perceive that there is a tendency to assign blame rather than to accept and learn from errors. An officially mandated culture of knowledge sharing is subverted by these subcultures, affecting individuals’ motivation to share their tacit knowledge, their self-efficacy and consequent sharing behaviours.
Female sex is associated with increased mortality and morbidity early, but not late, after coronary artery bypass grafting.

OBJECTIVE To describe mortality and morbidity during a period of 2 years after coronary artery bypass grafting in relation to gender. DESIGN Prospective follow-up study. SETTING Two regional cardiothoracic centres which performed all the coronary artery bypass operations in western Sweden at the time. SUBJECTS A total of 2129 (1727 (81%) men and 402 (19%) women) consecutive patients undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery between June 1988 and June 1991 without concomitant procedures. RESULTS Females were older and more frequently had a history of hypertension, diabetes mellitus, congestive heart failure, renal dysfunction and obesity. In a multivariate analysis, taking account of age, history of cardiovascular diseases and renal dysfunction, female sex appeared as a significant independent predictor of mortality during the 30 days after coronary artery bypass grafting (P < 0.05), but not thereafter. Various postoperative complications including neurological deficit, hydro- and pneumo-thorax, perioperative myocardial damage and the need for assist devices and prolonged reperfusion were more common in females than males. CONCLUSION Females run an increased risk of early death and the development of postoperative complications after coronary artery bypass surgery as compared with males. Late mortality does not appear to be influenced by gender and the long-term benefit of the coronary artery bypass graft operation is similar in men and women.
Vision-Based Perceptive Framework for Fish Motion

It is an intuitive and efficient method to monitor the water quality using the biological characteristics of aquatic organisms. The paper studies a vision-based perceptive framework for fish motion, of which some modules are studied, such as video data capture, moving object detection and multiple object tracking and so on. A multi-object tracking using particle filter with interacting observing model is proposed, and some related kinematical data, i.e., velocity and acceleration, are defined and analyzed to represent the real-time fish activity. The experimental results show that it is efficient and accurate.
How do visual angle and physical screen size affect presence and emotional responses of game players?

This study examines specifically the effects of these two properties of large displays on presence and emotional responses, using physiological as well as subjective methods. The results indicate that the larger visual angle offered by a large display produces higher subjective assessment of spatial presence, engagement, emotional arousal and valence, and greater galvanic skin response than for a small visual angle; and that the larger visual angle causes greater acceleration or deceleration in heart rate in response, respectively, to arousing or attention-requiring events than a smaller visual angle. However, physically larger screen size produces higher subjective assessment of emotional arousal, engagement, and presence, but it does not show a significant effect on physiological response.