Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Service and the Business Models of Product Firms: An Empirical Analysis of the Software Industry

Some product firms increasingly rely on service revenues as part of their business models. One possible explanation is that they turn to services to generate additional profits when their product industries mature and product revenues and profits decline. We explore this assumption by examining the role of services in the financial performance of firms in the prepackaged software products industry (SIC 7372) from 1990 to 2006. We find a convex, non-linear relationship between a product firm’s fraction of total sales coming from services and its overall operating margins. As expected, firms with a very high level of product sales are most profitable, and rising services is associated with declining profitability. We find, however, that additional services start to have a positive marginal effect on the firm’s overall profits when services reach a majority of a product firm’s sales. We show that traditional industry maturity arguments cannot fully explain our data. It is likely that changes in both strategy and the business environment lead product firms to place more emphasis on services.
Visualisation tools for blind people using multiple modalities

Purpose: There are many problems when blind people need to access visualisations such as graphs and tables. Current speech or raised-paper technology does not provide a good solution. Our approach is to use non-speech sounds and haptics to allow a richer and more flexible form of access to graphs and tables. Method: Two experiments are reported that test out designs for both sound and haptic graph solutions. In the audio case we compare a standard speech interface to one with non-speech sounds added. The haptic experiment compares two different graph designs to see which was the most effective. Results: Our results for the sound graphs showed a significant decrease in subjective workload, reduced time taken to complete tasks and reduced errors as compared to a standard speech interface. For the haptic graphs we again show reductions in workload and some of the problems that can occur when using such graphs. Conclusions: Using non-speech sound and haptics can significantly improve interaction with visualisations such as graphs. This multimodal approach makes the most of the senses our users have to provide access to information in more flexible ways.
A generalizable brain extraction net ( BEN ) for multimodal 1 MRI data from rodents , nonhuman primates , and humans 2 3

3 Ziqi Yu, Xiaoyang Han, Wenjing Xu, Jie Zhang, Carsten Marr, Dinggang Shen, 4 Tingying Peng*, Xiao-Yong Zhang* , Jianfeng Feng 5 6 1 Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Fudan University, 7 Shanghai, 200433, China 8 2 MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience and Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Fudan 9 University, Shanghai 200433, China 10 3 MOE Frontiers Center for Brain Science, Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China 11 4 Institute of AI for Health (AIH), Helmholtz Zentrum München, Ingolstädter Landstraße 1, D12 85764 Neuherberg, Germany 13 5 School of Biomedical Engineering, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai, 201210, China 14 6 Shanghai United Imaging Intelligence Co., Ltd., Shanghai, 200030, China 15 7 Helmholtz AI, Helmholtz Zentrum München, Ingolstädter Landstraße 1, D-85764 Neuherberg, 16 Germany 17 18 19 *Corresponding authors: 20 Xiao-Yong Zhang, PhD, Institute of Science and Technology for Brain-Inspired Intelligence, 21 Fudan University, Shanghai, 200433, China (Phone: +86 21 6564 8379; Fax: +86 21 5566 5563; 22 E-mail: xiaoyong_zhang@fudan.edu.cn) 23 24 Tingying Peng, PhD, Helmholtz AI, Helmholtz Zentrum München, Germany (E-mail: 25 tingying.peng@tum.de) 26 27 28
Evaluation of Virtual Reality Snowplow Simulator Training: Final Report

Each winter, Iowa Department of Transportation (Iowa DOT) maintenance operators are responsible for plowing snow off federal and state roads in Iowa. Drivers typically work long shifts under treacherous conditions. In addition to properly navigating the vehicle, drivers are required to operate several plowing mechanisms simultaneously, such as plow controls and salt spreaders. There is little opportunity for practicing these skills in real-world situations. A virtual reality training program would provide operators with the opportunity to practice these skills under realistic yet safe conditions, as well as provide basic training to novice or less-experienced operators. In order to provide such training to snowplow operators in Iowa, the Iowa DOT purchased a snowplow simulator. The Iowa DOT commissioned a study through Iowa State University designed to (1) assess the use of this simulator as a training tool and (2) examine personality and other characteristics associated with being an experienced snowplow operator. The results of this study suggest that Iowa DOT operators of all ages and levels of experience enjoyed and seemed to benefit from virtual reality snowplow simulator training. Simulator sickness ratings were relatively low, implying that the simulator is appropriate for training a wide range of Iowa DOT operators. Many reported that simulator training was the most useful aspect of training for them.
CREWdb: Optimizing Chromatin Readers, Erasers, and Writers Database using Machine Learning-Based Approach

Aberration in heterochromatin and euchromatin states contributes to various disease phenotypes. The transcriptional regulation between these two states is significantly governed by post-translational modifications made by three functional types of chromatin regulators: readers, writers, and erasers. Writers introduce a chemical modification to DNA and histone tails, readers bind the modification to histone tails using specialized domains, and erasers remove the modification introduced by writers. Altered regulation of these chromatin regulators plays a key role in complex diseases such as cancer, neurodevelopmental diseases, myocardial diseases, and embryonic development. Due to the reversible nature of chromatin modifications, we have the opportunity to develop therapeutic approaches targeting chromatin regulators. Currently, a limited amount of chromatin regulators have been identified, and a subset of those identified have been ambiguously classified as multiple chromatin regulator types. Thus, we have applied machine learning-based approaches to predict and classify the functionality of chromatin regulator proteins, optimizing the first comprehensive database of chromatin regulators known as CREWdb. Database URL: Source codes are implemented in Python and are freely available for download at: https://github.com/smollah/CREWdb
Solving Non-Boolean Satisfiability Problems with Stochastic Local Search

Much excitement has been generated by the recent success of stochastic local search procedures at finding satisfying assignments to large formulas. Many of the problems on which these methods have been effective are non-Boolean in that they are most naturally formulated in terms of variables with domain sizes greater than two. To tackle such a problem with a Boolean procedure the problem is first reformulated as an equivalent Boolean problem. This paper introduces and studies the alternative of extending a Boolean stochastic local search procedure to operate directly on non-Boolean problems. It then compares the non-Boolean representation to three Boolean representations and presents experimental evidence that the non-Boolean method is often superior for problems with large domain sizes.
International Journal of Affective Engineering

Protective frame is a feature of experience in which individuals find a situation as protecting them from negative consequences, and enables them to experience positive rather than negative emotions. We examined whether fictionality of stimuli acts as a protective frame. Participants rated their positive and negative emotions induced by fictional or non-fictional film stimuli including fearful or disgusting content, and completed a questionnaire measuring their mood. Results indicated that disgusting-fictional stimulus induced weaker disgust compared to disgusting-non-fictional stimulus, while fictionality showed no such effect on fearful stimuli. Stronger perceived fictionality was associated with stronger interest in the film and urge to continue watching the film. We suggest that fictionality decreases disgust and increases positive emotion towards negative stimuli.
International Journal of Affective Engineering

In this study, we measured the objective and subjective sizes of effective visual fields in game play situations by using a gaze-contingent window method. The peripheral visual field was restricted to an area around the gaze by window masks of various sizes while participants played one of three video games (i.e., car racing, falling block puzzle, and word puzzle). The quantitative relationship between window size and game performance confirmed that the type of video game significantly affected the objective size of the effective visual field. The subjective size of effective visual fields was measured by asking the participants to adjust the window size to the extent they felt their performance would change. The subjective measures of effective visual field were similar to the objective measures for the car racing game and the falling block puzzle game. However, we found that the objective and subjective sizes of effective visual field were not comparable in the word puzzle game. These results suggest that players do not always recognize the size of an effective visual field accurately while playing video games. The present study indicates that the gaze-contingent window method is useful for revealing the spatial characteristics of effective visual fields, and that the method developed for measuring the subjective effective visual field is also applicable for dynamic visual-motor tasks.
Learned Feature Embeddings for Non-line-of-Sight Imaging and Recognition

1.1 Filtered Backprojection Comparisons The first proposed reconstruction method for NLOS reconstruction is filtered backprojection which propagates and aggregates time-resolved intensity measurements back into in the occluded volume, followed by a Laplacian or Laplacian of Gaussian filter [Velten et al. 2012], an approach extended in recent years [Arellano et al. 2017; Jarabo et al. 2017; Laurenzis and Velten 2014]. Although these methods have been evaluated in prior work [Lindell et al. 2019; Liu et al. 2019], for completeness, we provide results from different filtered backprojection variations in Fig. 1. Specifically, we compare the filtered backprojection using Laplacian filtering using the code from [Lindell et al. 2019] and filtered backprojection using Laplacian and LoG filtering [Laurenzis and Velten 2014] using the code from [Liu et al. 2019]. Although the Laplacian-filtered variants both implement the approach from [Velten et al. 2012] we did notice differences in both implementations, and, hence, present all methods for completeness. Consistent with prior work, we find that existing backprojection methods succeed in recovering detail even for complex scenes, but this comes at the cost of compute time. Specifically, backprojection methods have a runtime complexity of O(N 5) with N as the volume resolution. For our experiments, a single transient reconstruction
A 200 MHz 13 mm2 2-D DCT macrocell using sense-amplifying pipeline flip-flop scheme

The two-dimensional discrete cosine transform (2D DCT) has been widely recognized as a key processing unit for image data compression/decompression. In this paper, the implementation of a 200 MHz 13.3 mm/sup 2/ 8/spl times/8 2-D DCT macrocell capable of HDTV rates, based on a direct realization of the DCT, and using distributed arithmetic is presented. The macrocell, fabricated using 0.8 /spl mu/m base-rule CMOS technology and 0.5 /spl mu/m MOSFET's, performs the DCT processing with 1 sample-(pixel)-per-clock throughput. The fast speed and small area are achieved by a novel sense-amplifying pipeline flip-flop (SA-F/F) circuit technique in combination with nMOS differential logic. The SA-F/F, a class of delay flip-flops, can be used as a differential synchronous sense-amplifier, and can amplify dual-rail inputs with swings lower than 100 mV. A 1.6 ns 20 bit carry skip adder used in the DCT macrocell, which was designed by the same scheme, is also described. The adder is 50% faster and 30% smaller than a conventional CMOS carry look ahead adder, which reduces the macrocell size by 15% compared to a conventional CMOS implementation. >
He who touches the weapon becomes other: a study of participation in armed groups in South Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo

This dissertation is a study of the dynamics of armed mobilization and participation in non-state armed organizations in the province of South Kivu, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It asks one of the fundamental questions of the study of violent conflict: Why do people participate in armed groups? In addressing this central question, it also addresses the inter-related questions of how do people come to participate in armed groups and who participates in these groups. I make three main arguments. First, contemporary armed mobilization is driven by two ‘macro’ factors in rural eastern DRC, the necessity to organize and provide protection to the sociopolities that constitute rural eastern Congo on one side, and the more accumulative dynamics of labour mobilization and control that have long characterized the region and have taken novel forms with the development of an economy of predation. The protective dimension in particular has often been left out in recent accounts that have focused or economic agendas of armed groups. Second, the ‘social architecture’ of armed mobilization in the region has changed to reflect the social implantation of armed organizations in rural eastern Congo, resulting from the novel roles they play in these societies and the adaptation of these societies to their presence. As a result, modes of recruitment and control reflect the multi-faceted influence that these organizations have over rural societies. Third, I argue and show that individual determinants of participation are not time invariant, they evolve over time and reflect the changes in outlook and motivations of participants that results from the social implantation of armed organizations, but also as a result of the process of participation. In order to make these arguments, I use a mixed methods approach that combines a qualitative analysis based on interviews carried out during 9 months of fieldwork in the province of South Kivu, and a quantitative analysis based on original panel data collected through a survey of 1072 individuals and 134 villages of South Kivu.
Corpora for the Conceptualisation and Zoning of Scientific Papers

We present two complementary annotation schemes for sentence based annotation of full scientific papers, CoreSC and AZ-II, which have been applied to primary research articles in chemistry. The AZ scheme is based on the rhetorical structure of a scientific paper and follows the knowledge claims made by the authors. It has been shown to be reliably annotated by independent human coders and has proven useful for various information access tasks. AZ-II is its extended version, which has been successfully applied to chemistry. The CoreSC scheme takes a different view of scientific papers, treating them as the humanly readable representations of scientific investigations. It therefore seeks to retrieve the structure of the investigation from the paper as generic high-level Core Scientific Concepts (CoreSC). CoreSCs have been annotated by 16 chemistry experts over a total of 265 full papers in physical chemistry and biochemistry. We describe the differences and similarities between the two schemes in detail and present the two corpora produced using each scheme. There are 36 shared papers in the corpora, which allows us to quantitatively compare aspects of the annotation schemes. We show the correlation between the two schemes, their strengths and weaknesses and discuss the benefits of combining a rhetorical based analysis of the papers with a content-based one.
Multiresolution analysis of point processes and statistical thresholding for Haar wavelet-based intensity estimation: Supplementary Material

In Theorems 1 and 2, we establish in particular the asymptotic distribution of the modified likelihood ratio statistic R under J-th level homogeneity and L-th level innovation, respectively. These results require that the true but unknown values of the parameters λc and μ pair k under the null hypothesis of each LRT are in the interior of the global parameter space. The boundaries of the parameter spaces when testing J-th level homogeneity and L-th level innovation contain the parameter vectors satisfying λk = 0 and μk = 0 for one or more dyadic translation indexes k ∈ 0, . , 2J−1 and k ∈ 0, . , 2L+1−1, respectively. If λc = 0 under J-th level homogeneity for any resolution level J , then we are in the trivial case where the intensity is the zero function on [0, T ). This would lead us to never observe any event almost surely, thus we can exclude the value λc = 0 from the null parameter space of our likelihood ratio model. From any other data, Theorem 1 can be used provided its other conditions are met. ∗Correspondence should be addressed to E.A. K.C. (e.cohen@imperial.ac.uk).
Understanding consumer trust in Internet shopping: A multidisciplinary approach

The importance of trust in building and maintaining consumer relationships in the online environment is widely accepted in the Information Systems literature. A key challenge for researchers is to identify antecedent variables that engender consumer trust in Internet shopping. This paper adopts a multidisciplinary approach and develops an integrative model of consumer trust in Internet shopping through synthesizing the three diverse trust literatures. The social psychological perspective guides us to include perceived trustworthiness of Internet merchants as the key determinant of consumer trust in Internet shopping. The sociological view-point suggests the inclusion of legal framework and third-party recognition in the research model. The views of personality theorists postulate a direct effect of propensity to trust on consumer trust in Internet shopping. The results of this study provide strong support for the research model and research hypotheses, and the high explanatory power illustrates the complementarity of the three streams of research on trust. This paper contributes to the conceptual and empirical understanding of consumer trust in Internet shopping. Implications of this study are noteworthy for both researchers and practitioners.
Discrete-Time Modeling of NFV Accelerators that Exploit Batched Processing

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is among the latest network revolutions, promising increased flexibility and avoiding network ossification. At the same time, all-software NFV implementations on commodity hardware raise performance issues when comparing to ASIC solutions. To address these issues, numerous software acceleration frameworks for packet processing have been proposed in the last few years. One central mechanism of many of these frameworks is the use of batching techniques , where packets are processed in groups as opposed to individually. This is required to provide high-speed capabilities by minimizing framework overhead, reducing interrupt pressure, and leveraging instruction-level cache hits. Several such system implementations have been proposed and experimentally benchmarked in the past. However, the scientific community has so far only to a limited extent attempted to model the system dynamics of modern NFV routers exploiting batching acceleration. In this article, we propose a simple, generic model for this type of batching-based systems that can be applied to predict all relevant key performance indicators. In particular, we extend our previous work and formulate the calculation of the queue size as well as waiting time distributions in addition to the batch size distribution and the packet loss probability. Furthermore, we introduce the waiting time distribution as a relevant QoS parameter and perform an in-depth parameter study, widening the set of investigated variables as well as the range of values. Finally, we contrast the model prediction with experimental results gathered in a high-speed testbed including an NFV router, showing that the model not only correctly captures system performance under simple conditions, but also in more realistic scenarios in which traffic is processed by a mixture of functions.
Stance Detection with a Multi-Target Adversarial Atention Network

QINGYING SUN, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huaiyin Normal University, China XUEFENG XI, School of Electronic & Information Engineering, Suzhou University of Science and Technology, China JIAJUN SUN, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huaiyin Normal University, China ZHONGQING WANG, Natural Language Processing Lab, Soochow University, China HUIYAN XU, School of Computer Science and Technology, Huaiyin Normal University, China
A review of the use of psychophysiological methods in game research

This article reviews the psychophysiological method in game research. Psychophysiological measurements provide an objective, continuous, real-time, noninvasive, precise and sensitive way to assess the game experience. However, the best results require controlled experiments with careful monitoring of variables, large enough sample sizes and expertise in electrical signal processing. We briefly explain the theory behind the method and present the most useful measures: electromyography (EMG), electrodermal activity (EDA), electroencephalography (EEG) and cardiac measures. We review previous studies that have used psychophysiological measures in game research and illustrate some future directions. Our article covers several research lines using the psychophysiological method in game studies, and offers a comprehensive list of references for those interested in the field.
Near-field optical microscopy toward its applications for biological studies

Near-field scanning optical microscopy (NSOM) is a super-resolution optical microscopy based on nanometrically small near-field light at a metallic tip. It can be combined with various types of optical measurement techniques, including Raman spectroscopy, infrared absorption spectroscopy, and photoluminescence measurements, which provides unique analytical capabilities to a variety of scientific fields. In particular, to understand nanoscale details of advance materials and physical phenomena, NSOM has been often adopted in the fields of material science and physical chemistry. However, owing to the recent critical developments showing the great potential for biological studies, NSOM has also recently gained much attention in the biological field. In this article, we introduce recent developments made in NSOM, aiming at biological applications. The drastic improvement in the imaging speed has shown a promising application of NSOM for super-resolution optical observation of biological dynamics. Furthermore, stable imaging and broadband imaging were made possible owing to the advanced technologies, which provide a unique imaging method to the biological field. As NSOM has not been well exploited in biological studies to date, several rooms need to be explored to determine its distinct advantages. We discuss the possibility and perspective of NSOM for biological applications. This review article is an extended version of the Japanese article, Development of Near-field Scanning Optical Microscopy toward Its Application for Biological Studies, published in SEIBUTSU BUTSURI Vol. 62, p. 128–130 (2022).