Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Video Representation via a Continuous Probabilistic Framework

In this work we describe a novel statistical video representation and modeling scheme. Video representation schemes are needed to enable segmenting a video stream into meaningful video-objects, useful for later indexing and retrieval applications. In the proposed methodology, unsupervised clustering via Guassian mixture modeling extracts coherent space-time regions in feature space, and corresponding coherent segments (video-regions) in the video content. A key feature of the system is the analysis of video input as a single entity as opposed to a sequence of separate frames. Space and time are treated uniformly. The extracted space-time regions allow for the detection and recognition of video events. Results of segmenting video content into static vs. dynamic video regions and video content editing are presented.
Fault-tolerant scaleable solar power bus architectures with maximum power tracking

An improved maximum power tracking (MPT) approach with dither signal injection is presented. It incorporates a "shared-bus" current-sharing method that can regulate many paralleled current-mode DC-DC converters. Through simulation, the approach yields nearly uniform current-sharing as well as reliable MPT performance. Utilizing the combined current-sharing and MPT approaches, three proposed architectures provide several advantages: (1) ease of system power expansion, (2) stable current-sharing, and (3) autonomous MPT during loss of output voltage regulation. Both stable amplitude and frequency of array voltage ripple are maintained by the robust MPT control.
Tool-Supported Dataflow Analysis of a Security-Critical Embedded Device

Defence organisations perform information security evaluations to confirm that electronic communications devices are safe to use in security--critical situations. Such evaluations include tracing all possible dataflow paths through the device, but this process is tedious and error--prone, so automated reachability analysis tools are needed to make security evaluations faster and more accurate. Previous research has produced a tool, Sifa, for dataflow analysis of basic digital circuitry, but it cannot analyse dataflow through microprocessors embedded within the circuit since this depends on the software they run. We have developed a static analysis tool that produces Sifa-compatible dataflow graphs from embedded microcontroller programs written in C. In this paper we present a case study which shows how this new capability supports combined hardware and software dataflow analyses of a security-critical communications device.
Long-pin perturbations of the trivial solution for Hele-Shaw corner flows

We consider two-dimensional Hele-Shaw corner flows without effect of the surface tension and with an interface extending to the infinity along one of the walls. Explicit solutions that present a ”long-pin” deformations of the trivial solution are got. Making use of the Polubarinova-Galin approach we derive parametric equations for the moving interface in terms of univalent mappings of a canonical domain. For the right angle we repeat a result by Leo P. Kadanoff.
Automatic Identification of Arabic Dialects

In this work, automatic recognition of Arabic dialects is proposed. An acoustic survey of the proportion of vocalic intervals and the standard deviation of consonantal intervals in nine dialects (Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Golfs Countries and Iraq) is performed using the platform Alize and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). The results show the complexity of the automatic identification of Arabic dialects since. No clear border can be found between the dialects, but a gradual transition between them. They can even vary slightly from one city to another. The existence of this gradual change is easy to understand: it corresponds to a human and social reality, to the contact, friendships forged and affinity in the environment more or less immediate of the individual. This document also raises questions about the classes or macro classes of Arabic dialects noticed from the confusion matrix and the design of the hierarchical tree obtained.
The carbonyl scavenger carnosine ameliorates dyslipidaemia and renal function in Zucker obese rats

The metabolic syndrome is a risk factor that increases the risk for development of renal and vascular complications. This study addresses the effects of chronic administration of the endogenous dipeptide carnosine (β‐alanyl‐L‐histidine, L‐CAR) and of its enantiomer (β‐alanyl‐D‐histidine, D‐CAR) on hyperlipidaemia, hypertension, advanced glycation end products, advanced lipoxidation end products formation and development of nephropathy in the non‐diabetic, Zucker obese rat. The Zucker rats received a daily dose of L‐CAR or D‐CAR (30 mg/kg in drinking water) for 24 weeks. Systolic blood pressure was recorded monthly. At the end of the treatment, plasma levels of triglycerides, total cholesterol, glucose, insulin, creatinine and urinary levels of total protein, albumin and creatinine were measured. Several indices of oxidative/carbonyl stress were also measured in plasma, urine and renal tissue. We found that both L‐ and D‐CAR greatly reduced obese‐related diseases in obese Zucker rat, by significantly restraining the development of dyslipidaemia, hypertension and renal injury, as demonstrated by both urinary parameters and electron microscopy examinations of renal tissue. Because the protective effect elicited by L‐ and D‐CAR was almost superimposable, we conclude that the pharmacological action of L‐CAR is not due to a pro‐histaminic effect (D‐CAR is not a precursor of histidine, since it is stable to peptidic hydrolysis), and prompted us to propose that some of the biological effects can be mediated by a direct carbonyl quenching mechanism.
Novel Modulation Techniques using Isomers as Messenger Molecules for Nano Communication Networks via Diffusion

In this paper, we propose three novel modulation techniques, i.e., concentration-based, molecular-type-based, and molecular-ratio-based, using isomers as messenger molecules for nano communication networks via diffusion. To evaluate achievable rate performance, we compare the proposed techniques with conventional insulin-based concepts under practical scenarios. Analytical and numerical results confirm that the proposed modulation techniques using isomers achieve higher data transmission rate performance than the insulin based concepts. We also investigate the tradeoff between messenger sizes and modulation orders and provide guidelines for selecting from among several possible candidates.
Energy-Efficient Databases Using Sweet Spot Frequencies

Database management systems (DBMS) are typically tuned for high performance and scalability. Nevertheless, carbon footprint and energy efficiency are also becoming increasing concerns. Unfortunately, existing studies mainly present theoretical contributions but fall short on proposing practical techniques. These could be used by administrators or query optimizers to increase the energy efficiency of the DBMS. Thus, this paper explores the effect of so-called sweet spots, which are energy-efficient CPU frequencies, on the energy required to execute queries. From our findings, we derive the Sweet Spot Technique, which relies on identifying energy-efficient sweet spots and the optimal number of threads that minimizes energy consumption for a query or an entire database workload. The technique is simple and has a practical implementation leading to energy savings of up to 50% compared to using the nominal frequency and maximum number of threads.
Reviewing Economies of Size in Education.

growing education expenditures over the past several decades have caused researchers and policy makers to seek ways to offset this trend. The hypothesis that larger schools could offer greater quality and breadth of curriculum at lower costs than smaller schools has frequently led to the conclusion that one solution to rising expenditures is to change the size of schools and school districts. For example, Conant concluded that, "an excellent comprehensive high school can be developed in any school district provided the high school enrolls at least 750 students and sufficient funds are available. "1 Whether size economies are available for education services has im-
Facilitating the Transfer Process: The Need for Better Articulation between Two and Four Year Colleges.

ABSTRACT It is generally acknowledged that all parties benefit from efforts to facilitate the process of student transfer from twoto four-year colleges, yet there are very few institutions with formalized transfer articulation agreements. The greatest deterrent to the development of such agreements is the considerable commitment of time and effort that is required to conduct the course-by-course analyses that serve as the foundation for the whole transfer articulation process. While determination of course content and overlap can be done individually on each participating campus, it is vital that personal face-to-face contact be made between representatives of each program. This contact facilitates the exchange of precise information, the adjudication of problems, and the development of a professional network among the participating faculty members. An example of the effectiveness of this process is provided by the State University College at Plattsburgh (SUCP), which decided to formalize its articulation agreements with all of the community colleges in New York State in the mid-1970's. An important aspect of these articulation efforts was the decision to place the articulation agreements in a format that could be easily understood, readily available, and quickly updated. The time and effort involved in initiating this system was great, but once completed very little effort has been required to maintain and update it. Appendices include samples of transfer articulation agreements between SUCP and a community college for particular programs. (EJV)
Withdrawal strategy for human safety based on a virtual force model

The Human-Robot Interaction gets increasingly closer. In consequence, human safety has become a key issue for the success of the symbiosis between humans and robots. When the minimum distance between a human and a robot is too short, it can be naturally considered that the probability of a collision increases. Therefore, we consider that the robot should increase the distance to the human when the human is getting closer. We propose Withdrawal strategy as a method that aims to increase the distance by moving the end-effector not only away from the human but also to a parking position that can be previously assessed to be safer. To withdraw the end-effector, we use a virtual force model consisting of two virtual forces: a repelling force exerted by the human and an attractive force exerted by the parking position. We carry out experiments using a human-sized humanoid robot and five human subjects, and report the task completion time to evaluate the efficiency of the robot when performing a simple task.
A motivational system that drives the development of activity

AI systems built using the classical approach are not autonomous, although they are automatic. Knowledge has been extracted from experts and put into the system explicitly [. ] The resulting systems can solve an infinite set of problems [. ] but these systems can never step outside the boundaries of what was foreseen by the designers because they cannot change their own behavior in a fundamental way. [7]
Loophole: Timing Attacks on Shared Event Loops in Chrome

Event-driven programming (EDP) is the prevalent paradigm for graphical user interfaces, web clients, and it is rapidly gaining importance for server-side and network programming. Central components of EDP are event loops, which act as FIFO queues that are used by processes to store and dispatch messages received from other processes. In this paper we demonstrate that shared event loops are vulnerable to side-channel attacks, where a spy process monitors the loop usage pattern of other processes by enqueueing events and measuring the time it takes for them to be dispatched. Specifically, we exhibit attacks against the two central event loops in Google’s Chrome web browser: that of the I/O thread of the host process, which multiplexes all network events and user actions, and that of the main thread of the renderer processes, which handles rendering and Javascript tasks. For each of these loops, we show how the usage pattern can be monitored with high resolution and low overhead, and how this can be abused for malicious purposes, such as web page identification, user behavior detection, and covert communication.
Identifying and segmenting human-motion for mobile robot navigation using alignment errors

This paper presents a new human-motion identification and segmentation algorithm, for mobile robot platforms. The algorithm is based on computing the alignment error between pairs of object images acquired from a moving platform. Pairs of images generating relatively small alignment errors are used to estimate the fundamental frequency of the object's motion. A decision criterion is then used to test the significance of the estimated frequency and to classify the object's motion. To verify the validity of the proposed approach, experimental results are shown on different classes of objects
Privacy concerns in sharing personal consumption data through online applications

As online eco-feedback social applications are being increasingly used around the world for motivating citizens to become more energy-aware, privacy concerns in terms of sharing personal electricity consumption data among online contacts are rising. Through Social Electricity, an online application offering personal energy management through a social and collaborative environment, we study the privacy concerns of the users in two case studies, in Cyprus and Singapore. For the Cyprus case, we present an analysis of results gathered through a large questionnaire-based survey combined with mini focus group studies. For the Singapore case, we analyze the findings collected through a students' semester exercise. This paper provides interesting insights about the overall acceptance and tolerance levels of users of eco-feedback social applications.
Blind phase synchronization for multiple-antenna systems

Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems are very sensitive to carrier phase offset. In this paper, challenges regarding the provision of phase offset in orthogonal space time block codes (STBC) coded MIMO systems over Rayleigh fading channels are addressed. We develop a novel robust phase offsets estimation algorithm for MIMO systems based on STBC codes. Simulation results prove that the proposed phase offsets synchronizer provides accurate estimation.
Biodiversity Sampling Using a Global Acoustic Approach: Contrasting Sites with Microendemics in New Caledonia

New Caledonia is a Pacific island with a unique biodiversity showing an extreme microendemism. Many species distributions observed on this island are extremely restricted, localized to mountains or rivers making biodiversity evaluation and conservation a difficult task. A rapid biodiversity assessment method based on acoustics was recently proposed. This method could help to document the unique spatial structure observed in New Caledonia. Here, this method was applied in an attempt to reveal differences among three mountain sites (Mandjélia, Koghis and Aoupinié) with similar ecological features and species richness level, but with high beta diversity according to different microendemic assemblages. In each site, several local acoustic communities were sampled with audio recorders. An automatic acoustic sampling was run on these three sites for a period of 82 successive days. Acoustic properties of animal communities were analysed without any species identification. A frequency spectral complexity index (NP) was used as an estimate of the level of acoustic activity and a frequency spectral dissimilarity index (Df) assessed acoustic differences between pairs of recordings. As expected, the index NP did not reveal significant differences in the acoustic activity level between the three sites. However, the acoustic variability estimated by the index Df, could first be explained by changes in the acoustic communities along the 24-hour cycle and second by acoustic dissimilarities between the three sites. The results support the hypothesis that global acoustic analyses can detect acoustic differences between sites with similar species richness and similar ecological context, but with different species assemblages. This study also demonstrates that global acoustic methods applied at broad spatial and temporal scales could help to assess local biodiversity in the challenging context of microendemism. The method could be deployed over large areas, and could help to compare different sites and determine conservation priorities.
A Survey of Context Classfication for Intelligent Systems Research for Ambient Intelligence

ISyRAmI (Intelligent Systems Research for Ambient Intelligence) proposed by IST [1] is an Artificial Intelligence oriented methodology and architecture for the development of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) systems. The ISyRAmI architecture considers the following four modules: Data/Information/Knowledge acquisition; Data/Information/Knowledge storage, conversion, and handling; Intelligent Reasoning; and Decision Support/Intelligent Actuation. Also, Dr. Hoon Ko had presented about ISyRAmI SF, which was involved security model to ISyRAmI in ICWMC2009 [2], ISyRAmI is consists of four modules, that is context allocator, context analyzer, context collector and context detector. Because there are various and many contexts in Ambient Intelligence Environment, contexts are needed to classify according to a characteristic and a purpose. Therefore, we studied contexts classification that will be generated from ISyRAmI.
Reconstruction of large-scale structures and acoustic radiation from a turbulent M = 0 . 9 jet using the proper orthogonal decomposition

The Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) uses data to generate an optimal set of basis functions that represent the " energy " of the data, defined by a user-selected norm. This basis is optimal in the sense that a finite number of these modes represent more of the energy than any other set of orthogonal modes. The POD can be seen, on one hand, as a way to define energetic structures in a flow, essentially a generalization of the traditional Fourier-based spectrum to treat data that is inhomogeneous in one or more coordinate directions. But the POD modes are perhaps more useful in quantitatively modeling the dynamics of the flow, via Galerkin projection of the governing equations onto a relatively small number of modes in order to generate a reduced-order model. Here we document the three-dimensional POD modes, based on a varitey of norms, of a round, subsonic, turbulent jet (with Mach number 0.9 and Reynolds number 3600) that was recently computed with well-validated DNS[1]. Of special interest is the three-dimensional structure of the POD modes that involve all near field quantities (velocities and thermodynamic variables), which has not been possible to measure directly. Instead, experiments have concentrated either on slices of the jet (normal to the flow direction) in which the streamwise velocity alone is used to compute the POD modes (e.g. [2]), or pressure measurements along the streamwise direction at a position just outside the jet (e.g. [3]). We investigate the connection between energetic structures (defined with POD) in the near field and the far-field radiated sound. An intriguing question is whether an appropriate norm can be defined that would efficiently represent the sound producing dynamics of the flow, and a long term goal of the present work is to
Plasticity of hydrogen bond networks regulates mechanochemistry of cell adhesion complexes

Significance Selectins and integrins are receptor proteins on cell surfaces responsible for adhesion to extracellular biomolecules, a critical component of physiological processes like white blood cell localization at sites of inflammation. The bonds which the receptors form with their targets are regulated by mechanical forces (for example due to blood flow). The bond lifetimes before rupture increase with force before decreasing. Based on crystal structures of selectin and integrin, we created a general analytic theory which for the first time, to our knowledge, relates microscopic structural rearrangements at the receptor–ligand interface to macroscopic bond lifetimes. We quantitatively explain experimental data from diverse systems spanning four decades of lifetime scales, and also predict the outcome of mutations in specific residues. Mechanical forces acting on cell adhesion receptor proteins regulate a range of cellular functions by formation and rupture of noncovalent interactions with ligands. Typically, force decreases the lifetimes of intact complexes (“slip bonds”), making the discovery that these lifetimes can also be prolonged (“catch bonds”) a surprise. We created a microscopic analytic theory by incorporating the structures of selectin and integrin receptors into a conceptual framework based on the theory of stochastic equations, which quantitatively explains a wide range of experimental data (including catch bonds at low forces and slip bonds at high forces). Catch bonds arise due to force-induced remodeling of hydrogen bond networks, a finding that also accounts for unbinding in structurally unrelated integrin–fibronectin and actomyosin complexes. For the selectin family, remodeling of hydrogen bond networks drives an allosteric transition resulting in the formation of the maximum number of hydrogen bonds determined only by the structure of the receptor and independent of the ligand. A similar transition allows us to predict the increase in the number of hydrogen bonds in a particular allosteric state of α5β1 integrin–fibronectin complex, a conformation which is yet to be crystallized. We also make a testable prediction that a single point mutation (Tyr51Phe) in the ligand associated with selectin should dramatically alter the nature of the catch bond compared with the wild type. Our work suggests that nature uses a ductile network of hydrogen bonds to engineer function over a broad range of forces.
International Shocks on Australia - the Japanese Effect

Although Australia has an equivalently large trading relationship with Japan and the US, current macro models often incorporate only US variables in the external sector of Australia. This paper explores the consequences of including both US and Japanese effects in the international sector of a SVAR model of Australia. The results indicate the significance of the Japanese effects. Excluding Japan results in an overstatement of the impact of US based shocks on the Australian economy. When Japan is included, US based shocks remain dominant in explaining Australian outcomes, but the responses are moderated compared with a model incorporating only a US based external sector. This has important implications for domestic policy responses to international shocks. Without the influence of Japan, domestic monetary policy will over-react to a US based shock.