Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reasoning about fair concurrent programs

We investigate the use of branching time temporal logic to reason about fair programs. Our approach is novel in viewing fairness conditions as an intrinsic part of the computations rather than as a part of the formulas specifying the computations. Our first result is that the branching time logic of fair programs is the same as the branching time logic of probabilistic programs and as the logic of fusionand suffix-closed programs defined by Abrahamson. Next we give decision procedures for the temporal logic of fair programs using a new type of automata on infinite trees. Matching upper and lower bounds for two different versions of branching time temporal logic are established 1. I n t r o d u c t i o n In concurrent programs, there is an inherent nondeterminism due to the fact that, at each moment, the B Address: 600 Mountain ave, Murray Hill, NJ 07974 tAddress: Department K55/801, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120-6099 Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. © 1986 A C M 0-89791-193-8/86/0500/0283 $00.75 next computation step can be done by any enabled process. It is convenient to imagine that this nondeterminism is embedded in a scheduler. This scheduler decides at each moment which process is going to perform the next step. While we want to make as few assumptions as possible about the scheduler, it is nevertheless reasonable to assume that it is not a pathological one. Indeed, almost all distributed protocols can be defeated by a sufficiently "evil" scheduler. Thus, it is usual to assume the scheduler to be fair, i.e., not to "discriminate" against any process. Equivalently, we can restrict our attention to fair computations, computations in which all processes have been scheduled in a fair manner. (Note that we are using here the term fairness generically; it has numerous formalizations (cf. [FK84, LPS81]). ) The issue we address in this paper is the use of temporal logic to reason about fair programs. Temporal logic was introduced by Pnueli [Pn77] and comes in two main variants. In linear temporal logic (LTL) [GPSS80, Pn81], formulas ave interpreted over linear sequences of program states. LTL formulas are constructed using temporal connectives such as next and until. In branching temporal logic (BTL) [BMP81, EC82, EH85, LAB0], on the other hand, formulas are interpreted over tree-like structures which can represent the possible computations of a concurrent or nondeterministic program. Here, we consider the branching version of temporal logic.
On the orbital ( in ) stability of spatially periodic stationary solutions of generalized Korteweg-de Vries equations

In this paper we generalize previous work on the stability of waves for infinite-dimensional Hamiltonian systems to include those cases for which the skew-symmetric operator J is singular. We assume that J restricted to the orthogonal complement of its kernel has a bounded inverse. With this assumption and some further genericity conditions we show that the linear stability of the wave implies its orbital (nonlinear) stability, provided there are no purely imaginary eigenvalues with negative Krein signature. We use our theory to investigate the (in)stability of spatially periodic waves to the generalized KdV equation for various power nonlinearities when the perturbation has the same period as that of the wave. Different solutions of the integrable modified KdV equation are studied analytically in detail, while numerical computations come to our aid for the nonintegrable cases with a fifthand sixth-order nonlinearity. The stability question for KdV has been answered when the period of the perturbation is the same as that of the underlying cnoidal wave. However, up until now the question of the orbital stability of these waves with respect to periodic perturbations whose period is an integer multiple of the wave period was still open, as in this case there are eigenvalues with negative Krein signature, i.e., the wave is not a local minimizer of a constrained energy. By using the integrable structure associated with KdV we are able to show that these energetically unstable waves are indeed orbitally stable.
Visual Tracking Via Sparse Representation With Reliable Structure Constraint

In this letter, we present a novel visual tracking algorithm based on sparse representation. In contrast to just use the target templates and the trivial templates to sparsely represent the target, we propose to further constrain the model with a set of discriminative weight maps. These weight maps contain the reliable structures of the target object. They help the model penalize the trivial template coefficients depending on the reliable structures of the target object. Then, the target object can be well represented by a sparse set of target templates together with a sparse set of target weight maps. We propose a unified objective function to integrate these two sparse representation problems together. This optimization problem can be well solved by the proposed iteration manner and a customized accelerated proximal gradient method. Furthermore, a novel weight map constructing method is proposed based on consistent motion property and forward–backward errors. Plenty of qualitative and quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our method performs favorably against the state-of-the-art methods in a wide range of tracking scenarios.
Visual target tracking for autonomous vehicles with the optimal OOSM solution

In this paper, an algorithm is proposed for the vision-based object identification and tracking by autonomous vehicles. In order to estimate the velocity of the tracked object, this algorithm fuses information captured by the vehicle's onboard sensors such as cameras and inertial motion sensors to determine the velocity and position of the object of interest in the world coordinate. However in this multiple sensor fusion based tracking system, the measurements from the same target can arrive out of sequence. This is called the "out-of-sequence" measurement (OOSM) problem. In this paper the 1-step-lag OOSM solution from Bar-Shalom is implemented to solve the problem. The target tracking performance with the OOSM solution is demonstrated through experimental results.
Cell BE BLAST Design Overview

IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) [8] is an novel computing platform that provides a unique set of design challenges and opportunities to developers. Based around multi-core architecture with two distinct types of processing cores, the Cell BE supports high levels of processor and data level parallelism. To explore part of the application design space for the Cell BE, we are developing an implementation of the BLAST sequence search algorithm. Our implementation is designed to take advantage of the different levels of parallelism on the Cell BE and utilize the processors data flow resources optimize data throughput over the lifetime of a query. In this report, we supply background information on the Cell BE and the BLAST algorithm and give a high-level overview of our design strategy for implementing BLAST on the Cell BE.
Identificação de necessidades de intervenção psicológica: um estudo-piloto no ensino superior português

Este estudo analisa as necessidades de intervencao psicologica dos estudantes da Faculdade de Ciencias Humanas da Universidade Catolica Portuguesa. Participaram 157 alunos, avaliados nas suas preocupacoes e necessidades pessoais, de carreira e de aprendizagem, bem como nas preferencias relativas ao apoio, por meio do questionario de identificacao de necessidades de intervencao psicologica. Os resultados indicam necessidade de apoio nas areas: (i) controlo de ansiedade e nervosismo, (ii) medo de falhar, (iii) estrategias de procura de emprego, (iv) escolha de uma carreira e (v) competencias de gestao do tempo. Verifica-se uma preferencia, no apoio pretendido, pelas modalidades de aconselhamento individual e cursos breves. Registram-se diferencas em funcao do sexo, da media no curso, da regularidade de contato com a familia e dos niveis de satisfacao academica e satisfacao global com a vida. Retiram-se implicacoes para a disponibilizacao de sistemas, estrategias e atividades de apoio psicologico que possam responder as preocupacoes dos estudantes.
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology a Novel Approach for an Accurate Human Identification through Iris Recognition Using Bitplane Slicing and Normalisation Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology

Unlike other biometrics such as fingerprints and face, the distinct aspect of iris comes from randomly distributed features. This leads to its high reliability for personal identification and at the same time, the difficulty in effectively representing such details in an image. Iris recognition illustrates work in computer vision, pattern recognition, and the man-machine interface. The purpose is real-time, high confidence recognition of a person's identity by mathematical analysis of the random patterns that are visible within the iris of an eye from some distance. Iris is a protected internal organ whose random texture is stable throughout life, it can serve as a kind of living password that one need not remember but one always carries along. Because the randomness of iris patterns has very high dimensionality, recognition decisions are made with confidence levels high enough to support rapid and reliable exhaustive searches through national-sized databases. Iris recognition has shown to be very accurate for human identification. This paper proposes a technique for iris pattern extraction utilizing the least significant bit-plane through binary morphology applied to the bit-plane and by evaluating the standard deviation of the image intensity along the vertical and horizontal axis, the pupillary boundary of the iris is determined. The limbic boundary is identified by adaptive thresholding method. Because the extraction approach restricts localization techniques to evaluating only bit-planes and standard deviations, iris pattern extraction is dependent on circular edge detection. The iris normalization was invariant for translation, rotation and scale after mapping into polar coordinates. Experiment and results show that the proposed method has an encouraging performance, shows 98.7% localization and normalization success and reduces the system operation time. The proposed method involves Bit plane slicing, Standard deviation windows, Adaptive thresholding, Normalization modules. 1.INTRODUCTION Biometrics is the science of measuring physical properties of living beings. It is a collection of automated methods to recognize an individual person based upon a physiological or behavioral characteristics. The characteristics measured are face, fingerprints, hand geometry, handwriting, iris, retinal, vein, voice etc. In present technology scenario biometric technologies are becoming the foundation of an extensive array of highly secure identification and personal verification solutions. As the level of security breaches and transaction fraud increases, the need for highly secure identification and personal verification technologies is becoming apparent. Biometrics involves using the different parts of the body, such as the fingerprint or the eye, as a password or form of identification. …
Perception for UAV: Vision-Based Navigation and Environment Modeling.

Nowadays, cameras and other exteroceptive sensors are on board of a large variety of automatic platforms, such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), space exploration probes and missiles. However, apart from this latter application, they are mostly used as payload and not to pilot the vehicle itself. In this paper, we focus on the use of computer vision for UAV perception to navigate through the environment and model it. This function is typically needed at low altitude in unknown or GPS-denied conditions. The measurements from exteroceptive sensors can then be processed to obtain information about the motion of the UAV, or the 3D structure of the environment. Our contribution is presented starting with the vision-based closed control loop, where image-based navigation is integrated to UAV control. Then, we focus on proper motion estimation techniques, like mapless relative terrain navigation or map-based GPS alternatives. Eventually, environment mapping solutions are proposed. In most cases, real image sequences coming from an aircraft or a hand-held sensor are used for validation. Our research underlines the need for new co-designed 3D sensors and massivelyparallel computation technologies to go further in vision-based UAV navigation.
Contrast sensitivity is enhanced by expansive nonlinear processing in the LGN

The firing rates of neurons in the central visual pathway vary with stimulus strength, but not necessarily in a linear manner. In the contrast domain, the neural response function for cells in the primary visual cortex is characterized by expansive and compressive nonlinearities at low and high contrasts, respectively. A compressive nonlinearity at high contrast is also found for early visual pathway neurons in the LGN. This mechanism affects processing in the visual cortex. A fundamentally related issue is the possibility of an expansive nonlinearity at low contrast in LGN. To examine this possibility, we have obtained contrast-response data for a population of LGN neurons. We find for most cells that the best fit function requires an expansive component. Additionally, we have measured the responses of LGN neurons to m-sequence white noise and examine the static relationship between a linear prediction and actual spike rate. We find that this static relationship is well-fit by an expansive nonlinear power law with average exponent of 1.58. These results demonstrate that neurons in early visual pathways exhibit expansive nonlinear responses at low contrasts. While this thalamic expansive nonlinearity has been largely ignored in models of early visual processing, it may have important consequences because it potentially affects the interpretation of a variety of visual functions.
Acceptability and feasibility of introducing the WHO focused antenatal care package in Ghana.

The Government of Ghana has adopted the WHO focused antenatal care (ANC) package in a move to improve access quality and continuity of ANC services to pregnant women. As part of these efforts the Government has exempted fees for ANC clients. The main objective of this study undertaken by Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research in collaboration with the Ghana Health Service (GHS) FRONTIERS and with USAID funding was to examine the extent to which adaptation of the package influenced quality of care received by pregnant women and its acceptability to both providers and clients. The study used a policy analysis and a situation analysis in ten intervention clinics in which the package had been introduced and four comparison clinics. Data were collected through key informant interviews focused group discussions client exit interviews client card reviews observations of provider-client interactions and review of facility records. (excerpt)
Lean Product Development: Nothing New Under the Sun?

The concept of lean product development has attracted the attention of many scholars since its inception in the 1990s derived from practices at Toyota Motor Company. Key to this approach to new product development (NPD) are a few methods derived from lean production as well as longer established practices such as concurrent engineering. This makes one wonder whether lean product development is a new practice, a new method or an encapsulation of already existing methods at the time; this quest for the roots and tenets of lean product development, also in comparison with other methods for NPD, is the focus of this paper. This journey takes this propositional paper not only to the roots of lean product development and the context of its era of conception, but also to what this concept adds to other extant methods for NPD. In particular, this comparison draws out that other methods are trying to achieve the same objectives: the creation of products and services with value to the customer, the reduction of time-to-market and the efficient use of resources. This inference implies that managers of new product (and service) development can choose from a wider pallet of methods and approaches to enhance the performance of RD hence, this paper sets out a research agenda based on the deliberations and gaps that have been uncovered in the discourse.
Nonvolatile Magnetic Flip-Flop for Standby-Power-Free SoCs

This paper presents a new nonvolatile magnetic flip-flop (MFF) for standby-power-critical applications. An MFF primitive cell for design libraries has been developed using 150 nm, 1.5 V CMOS and 240 nm MRAM processes. It has advantages over other nonvolatile flip-flops in high-speed store operations without endurance limitations. It also has high design compatibility with conventional CMOS LSI designs because it does not include any additional power lines and special transistors. A toggle frequency of 3.5 GHz was achieved by a SPICE simulation, which is comparable to that of a normal CMOS DFF in the same generation. The maximum frequency in a store operation was also estimated to be 500 MHz with 1-ns current width for the data backup. An MFF test chip, which includes 16-stage 8-bit shift register using MFFs, was fabricated with these processes. A 333 MHz store operation was measured without failed bits. The functional performance was sufficiently high to demonstrate the potential of MFFs, which helps to reduce the power dissipation of systems on chips (SoCs) dramatically.
Force Feedback Gesture Controlled Physical Modelling Synthesis

A physical modelling music synthesis system known as 'Cymatic' is described that enables 'virtual instruments' to be controlled in real-time via a force-feedback joystick and a force-feedback mouse. These serve to provide the user with gestural controllers whilst in addition giving tactile feedback to the user. Cymatic virtual instruments are set up via a graphical user interface in a manner that is highly intuitive. Users design and play these virtual instruments by interacting directly with their physical shape and structure in terms of the physical. properties of basic objects such as strings, membranes and solids which can be interconnected to form complex structures. The virtual instrument can be excited at any point mass by the following: bowing, plucking, striking, sine/square/sawtooth/random waveform, or an external sound source. Virtual microphones can be placed at any point masses to deliver the acoustic output. This paper describes the underlying structure and principles upon which Cymatic is based, and illustrates its acoustic output.
Mechanisms and developments of magnetic source MRI

Magnetic source MRI (msMRI) has been developed recently for direct detections of neuronal magnetic fields to map brain activity. However, whether MRI can be used for direct detection of neuronal activity is a matter of debate. Controversial theoretical and experimental results have been reported. In this work, theoretical modeling and experimental validation have been presented to demonstrate that the neuronal current signal is in the detectable range and could be detected by MRI. In the theoretical modeling section, we present an improved current-dipole model to compute magnetic field generated by neural firing and to calculate MRI signal changes resulting from the neuronal magnetic field. Neuronal magnetic field were estimated based on a synchronized activity of multiple neurons. Our results show that neuronal magnetic field can potentially generate up to a few percent changes in MRI magnitude signals. Phases of MRI signal tend to be destructively added and are insensitive to neuronal magnetic field in the activated region when the distribution of the activated dendrites is symmetrical. Our modeling implies that direct MRI detection of neuronal activity is possible. In the experimental validation section, a rapid median nerve stimulation paradigm has been used to detect the neuronal activity. The experiments were performed on six normal human participants to investigate the temporal specificity of the effect, as well as interand intra-subject reproducibility. Significant activation of contra-lateral primary sensory cortex (S1) was detected 80ms after stimulation onset (corresponding to the P80 evoked potential peak). The 80 ms latency S1 activation was observed over 3 independent sessions for one subject and for all 6 participants. The magnitude of the signal change was 0.2% 0.3%. Coinciding with our expectations, no S1 activation was
Determining Optimal Levels of Nitrogen Fertilizer Using Random Parameter Models

The parameters of yield response functions can vary by year. Past studies usually assume yield functions are nonstochastic or “limited” stochastic. In this study, we estimate rye–ryegrass yield functions in which all parameters are random. The three functional forms considered are the linear response plateau, the quadratic, and the Spillman-Mitscherlich. Nonstochastic yield models are rejected in favor of stochastic parameter models. Quadratic functional forms fit the data poorly. Optimal nitrogen application recommendations are calculated for the linear response plateau and Spillman-Mitscherlich. The stochastic models lead to smaller recommended levels of nitrogen, but the economic benefits of using fully stochastic crop yield functions are small because expected profit functions are relatively flat for the stochastic yield functions. Stochastic crop yield functions provide a way of incorporating production, uncertainty into input decisions.
The Study of Wireless Mesh Network Routing Algorithm Based on Interference Model

On the basis of interference model, the article puts forward a self-adapting routing strategy of Wireless Mesh Network, which can significantly improve the efficiency of the routing by choosing a minimum interference path. Due to regularly-distributed self-adapting adjustment and load balance, the routing can adapt to the dynamic network environment. The simulation shows that IBAR can significantly improve the throughput performance compared with the traditional AODV and HWMP protocols.
Verbal memory span, visual memory span, and their correlations with cognitive tasks

Immediate memory spans of 82 students were measured through the recallof digit sequences and dot-in-matrix patterns. The reliabilities of both spans were very high, while the correlation between the spans was low (r=.209). In addition, the same subjectswere given eight kinds of cognitive tasks (Word Relation, Maze, Addition, Shape Series, Anagram, Space Relation, Number Series, and Mental Rotation) selected from intelligence tests. The two spans were correlated with the performance of each task in different degrees. Results of the factor analysis showed that the digit span had a high loading value on the" verbal" factor, while the span with dot patterns loaded the" visuospatial" factor. It is suggested that the ca-