Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Realizing the Importance of User Participation and Business Process Reengineering during ERP Implementation

Business Process Reengineering being an essential part of ERP implementation always need to be addressed for Implementation process to be successful. The objective of this research is to explore the importance given to these factors by the top management during ERP implementation. In this regard, a case study was conducted in the Telecom Company where an ERP system has recently been implemented in two phases. Interviews of the top management, team leads and executives were conducted to understand the phenomena under research. The case study findings reflect that both factors such as BPR and user participation were not given due importance on the part of top management at the beginning phase of the project resulted in non integration of end to end processes. The two drawbacks were realized by the top management later on and necessary steps were taken by the top management in the second phase of ERP Implementation. This appeared to be very helpful to decrease user resistance, streamlining business processes and consequently acceptance and ownership of system on part of users.
Domain Adaptation of Polarity Lexicon combining Term Frequency and Bootstrapping

In this paper we study several approaches to adapting a polarity lexicon to a specific domain. On the one hand, the domain adaptation using Term Frequency (TF) and on the other hand, the domain adaptation using pattern matching with a BootStrapping algorithm (BS). Both methods are corpus based and start with the same polarity lexicon, but the first one requires an annotated collection of documents while the second one only needs a corpus where it looks for linguistic patterns. The performance of both methods overcomes the baseline system using the general polarity lexicon iSOL. However, although the TF approach achieves very promising results, the BS strategy does not give as much improvement as we expected. For this reason, we have combined both methods in order to take advantage of the positive aspects of each one. With this new approach the results obtained are even better that those with the systems applied individually. Actually, we have achieved a significant improvement of 11.50% (in terms of accuracy) in the polarity classification of the movie reviews with respect to the results achieved with the general purpose lexicon iSOL.
A Short Scale for Assessing the Big Five Dimensions of Personality: 10 Item Big Five Inventory (BFI-10)

In course of the further establishment of the Five-Factor Model as the predominant model for describing personality there is an increasing demand for assessing the Big Five dimensions of personality in contexts outside the core field of psychology. As in such contexts assessment time is severely limited, established Big Five instruments are generally too lengthy. Especially for such contexts we developed the ultra-short BFI-10 assessing the five dimensions with a total of ten items, respectively an average duration of approximately one minute. The present study validated the BFI-10 based on a large and population representative sample. Results indicate sufficient psychometric properties for the BFI-10 scales and items. In addition, the findings corroborate the construct and criterion validity of the instrument.
Evaluation of Recombinant SAG1 Protein for Detection of Toxoplasma gondii Specific Immunoglobulin M by ELISA Test

Background Toxoplasmosis is a serious disease in immunocompromised patients and pregnant women. Differentiation of acute and chronic infection is a major challenge in serodiagnosis of the disease. Since the aim of this study was to assess the diagnostic utility of recombinant SAG1 (rec-SAG1) for the detection of Toxoplasma-specific IgM antibodies in human sera, by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Methods The purified recombinant protein SAG1 was applied in house ELISA test and the ability of it in binding to specific immunoglobulin M in 30 serum samples of acute infected patients was evaluated. The results obtained by assays with the recombinant SAG1 and standard commercial assays were compared. Results The sensitivity and specificity of in house ELISA compared to a standard commercial ELISA (com-ELISA) were 80% and 90%, respectively. Conclusion It was concluded that the rec-SAG1 could be an alternative marker for detection of anti Toxoplasma-specific IgM and diagnosis of acute infection.
Entropy measures for characterizing digital

In this project, I present an approach to characterize video sequences using entropy measures. In a typical video sequence, sometimes texture reveals structure, in other cases motion does it. In addition, the temporal and spatial extent are variables. The attempt of this work is to build this structure by looking at a given region over a multiplicity of frames and scales. Redundancy, deened in terms of the diierence in per symbol entropy and per symbol block entropy, is an important measure of predictability of spatio-temporal date. In this project, I outline an algorithm for building the aforementioned structure using redundancy measure. This plays a crucial role in characterizing video sequences. 1 Context We are just beginning to make a transition from analog television to digital distribution. The impact of this is a major technological change in the most pervasive medium of all time. This change is not simple. Past work at the Media Lab and MIT has concentrated on exploiting the rush to digital high deenition so that new generations of TV can be scalable, international and universal. The point has been amply demonstrated and is starting to become accepted. On the other hand, the rst digital standards fail to reach these goals. They are narrow, restrictive and cumbersome. Their most important feature is that they will get this revolution in image representation started. MPEG is not the best that can be done, but its worldwide acceptance is in large measure responsible for digital television; and it is becoming used in real systems (Hughes DirecTV for example).
A model management approach for assurance case reuse due to system evolution

Evolution in software systems is a necessary activity that occurs due to fixing bugs, adding functionality or improving system quality. Systems often need to be shown to comply with regulatory standards. Along with demonstrating compliance, an artifact, called an assurance case, is often produced to show that the system indeed satisfies the property imposed by the standard (e.g., safety, privacy, security, etc.). Since each of the system, the standard, and the assurance case can be presented as a model, we propose the extension and use of traditional model management operators to aid in the reuse of parts of the assurance case when the system undergoes an evolution. Specifically, we present a model management approach that eventually produces a partial evolved assurance case and guidelines to help the assurance engineer in completing it. We demonstrate how our approach works on an automotive subsystem regulated by the ISO 26262 standard.
Insights on the Formulation of Herbal Beverages with Medicinal Claims According with Their Antioxidant Properties

Several herbal beverages claim medicinal benefits due to their antioxidant properties. However, operational factors such as the extracted herbal component, preparation method or concentration levels, might influence their biological activity. To assess this effect, the antioxidant activity of beverages prepared with Camellia sinensis, Aspalathus linearis or Cochlospermum angolensis, used solely or mixed with different fruit, plant or algae extracts, was studied using different formulations (bags, leaves, roots, granulates, powders, liquids) and different preparation methods (infusion, solubilisation or promptly used). The DF50 (dilution factor responsible for 50% of antioxidant activity) values were calculated to compare their antioxidant activity. A linear discriminant analysis was used to categorize the assayed samples according to their antioxidant activity and bioactive molecules profiles. The results indicated that antioxidant activity and antioxidant compounds are significantly affected by formulation and preparation method, but overall the labelled antioxidant benefits were validated. Green tea showed the highest activity, but with different behaviour within each used formulation. The high DF50 values calculated for some products might be used to adjust the dietary dose or formulation, preventing also putative pro-oxidant effects. Hence, the obtained results might be useful to define the formulation of these highly consumed herbal beverages, enhancing their health effects.
Evaluation of Resiliency Solutions for Real-Time Multimedia Streams in a UTRAN Scenario

UMTS, as a third generation mobile communications system, has been developed to offer, in addition to traditional basic services - such as voice telephony, broader data connections and multimedia services. Channel reliability, the most common problem affecting mobile communications, strongly influences such new services and, in particular, the quality of multimedia streams. Nevertheless, current solutions do not foresee resiliency mechanisms suitable for real-time applications. In this paper we evaluate the benefits and effects of some resiliency tools onto the final quality of real-time multimedia streams in a UTRAN scenario: the proposed solutions span from FEC and ARQ to redundant video-information and enhanced packet-queue management. The analysis is performed by means of simulations modeling UTRAN FDD mode, with error events at the PDU level (simulated by means of a hidden Markov model)
Supporting Negotiation Behavior with Haptics-Enabled Human-Computer Interfaces

An active research goal for human-computer interaction is to allow humans to communicate with computers in an intuitive and natural fashion, especially in real-life interaction scenarios. One approach that has been advocated to achieve this has been to build computer systems with human-like qualities and capabilities. In this paper, we present insight on how human-computer interaction can be enriched by employing the computers with behavioral patterns that naturally appear in human-human negotiation scenarios. For this purpose, we introduce a two-party negotiation game specifically built for studying the effectiveness of haptic and audio-visual cues in conveying negotiation related behaviors. The game is centered around a real-time continuous two-party negotiation scenario based on the existing game-theory and negotiation literature. During the game, humans are confronted with a computer opponent, which can display different behaviors, such as concession, competition, and negotiation. Through a user study, we show that the behaviors that are associated with human negotiation can be incorporated into human-computer interaction, and the addition of haptic cues provides a statistically significant increase in the human-recognition accuracy of machine-displayed behaviors. In addition to aspects of conveying these negotiation-related behaviors, we also focus on and report game-theoretical aspects of the overall interaction experience. In particular, we show that, as reported in the game-theory literature, certain negotiation strategies such as tit-for-tat may generate maximum combined utility for the negotiating parties, providing an excellent balance between the energy spent by the user and the combined utility of the negotiating parties.
Grey and White Matter Changes across the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis-Frontotemporal Dementia Continuum

There is increasing evidence that amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) lie on a clinical, pathological and genetic continuum with patients of one disease exhibiting features of the other. Nevertheless, to date, the underlying grey matter and white matter changes across the ALS-FTD disease continuum have not been explored. In this study fifty-three participants with ALS (n = 10), ALS-FTD (n = 10) and behavioural variant FTD (bvFTD; n = 15) as well as controls (n = 18), underwent detailed clinical assessment plus structural imaging using voxel-based morphometry (VBM) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) analysis of magnetic resonance brain imaging to examine grey and white matter differences and commonalities across the continuum. Importantly, patient groups were matched for age, education, gender and disease duration. VBM and DTI results showed that changes in the ALS group were confined mainly to the motor cortex and anterior cingulate as well as their underlying white matter tracts. ALS-FTD and bvFTD showed widespread grey matter and white matter changes involving frontal and temporal lobes. Extensive prefrontal cortex changes emerged as a marker for bvFTD compared to other subtypes, while ALS-FTD could be distinguished from ALS by additional temporal lobe grey and white matter changes. Finally, ALS could be mainly distinguished from the other two groups by corticospinal tract degeneration. The present study shows for the first time that FTD and ALS overlap in anterior cingulate, motor cortex and related white matter tract changes across the whole continuum. Nevertheless, frontal and temporal atrophy as well as corticospinal tract degeneration emerged as marker for subtype classification, which will inform future diagnosis and target disease management across the continuum.
Eyewitness susceptibility to co-witness misinformation is influenced by co-witness confidence and own self-confidence

ABSTRACT If an eyewitness is exposed to a co-witness statement that incorrectly blames an innocent bystander for a crime, the eyewitness can be influenced by this statement and also blame the innocent bystander for the crime. This effect is known as blame conformity. In two studies, we examined whether or not this effect is influenced by the degree of confidence a co-witness expresses in her incorrect statement (Study 1) and an eyewitness’s own level of self-confidence (Study 2). Participant eyewitnesses first watched a crime video featuring a perpetrator and an innocent bystander, then read a co-witness statement about the crime that either correctly blamed the perpetrator, incorrectly blamed the innocent bystander, or blamed nobody (a control condition). They were then asked who committed the crime. In Study 1, participants who read an incorrect statement were at increased risk of engaging in blame conformity when the co-witness expressed a high level of confidence, compared to a low level of confidence, in the accuracy of her statement. In Study 2, participants who were lowest in self-confidence were at increased risk of engaging in blame conformity. The theoretical underpinnings of these effects are considered.
Facelikeness matters: A parametric multipart object set to understand the role of spatial configuration in visual recognition

ABSTRACT There is a view that faces and objects are processed by different brain mechanisms. Different factors may modulate the extent to which face mechanisms are used for objects. To distinguish these factors, we present a new parametric multipart three-dimensional object set that provides researchers with a rich degree of control of important features for visual recognition such as individual parts and the spatial configuration of those parts. All other properties being equal, we demonstrate that perceived facelikeness in terms of spatial configuration facilitated performance at matching individual exemplars of the new object set across viewpoint changes (Experiment 1). Importantly, facelikeness did not affect perceptual discriminability (Experiment 2) or similarity (Experiment 3). Our findings suggest that perceptual resemblance to faces based on spatial configuration of parts is important for visual recognition even after equating physical and perceptual similarity. Furthermore, the large parametrically controlled object set and the standardized procedures to generate additional exemplars will provide the research community with invaluable tools to further understand visual recognition and visual learning.
Exploration of the Feasibility of Polar Drive on the LMJ

The Laser MegaJoule (LMJ), a laser system being constructed in France, is very similar to the U.S. National Ignition Facility (NIF) and is also designed to operate using an indirect drive configuration. However, it is desirable that the LMJ, like the NIF, have the capability to operate using direct drive, despite its less favorable geometry. Currently two types of direct drive experiments are planned for the NIF: initial implosions of hydrogen-filled glass targets with low energy (≤ 1.0 MJ) to produce neutrons to test diagnostics, and later implosions of cryogenic targets with higher energy (1.5 MJ) to obtain breakeven. These experiments employ a method known as polar drive in which beams are repointed toward the equator. The possibility of doing these experiments on the LMJ has been explored using the two-dimensional simulation code SAGE. Optimum designs for both experiments were created by adjusting parameters including the beam defocus distance and the beam pointings, and by using a new asymmetric beam shape. The levels of uniformity obtained are comparable to those expected for the NIF, proving that polar drive is feasible on the LMJ.
RELEVANCE OF GROOVED NMOSFETS IN ULTRA DEEP SUBMICRON REGION IN LOW POWER APPLICATIONS

To manage the increasing static leakage in low power applications, solutions for leakage reduction are sought at the device design and process technology levels. In this paper, 90nm, 70nm and 50 nm groovedgate nMOS devices are simulated using Silvaco device simulator. By changing the corner angle and adjusting few structural parameters, static leakage reduction is achieved in grooved nMOSFETS in ultralow power applications. The simulation results show that leakage contributing currents like the subthreshold current, punchthrough current and tunneling leakage current are reduced. The oxide thickness can be increased without increase in the gate induced drain leakage current, and ON-OFF current ratio is improved and maintained constant even in the deep submicron region. This study can be helpful for low power applications as the static leakage is reduced drastically, as well as be applicable to high speed devices as the ON current is maintained at a constant value. The results are compared with those of corresponding conventional planar devices to bring out the achievements of this work .
Consensus in synchronous systems: a concise guided tour

This paper considers consensus protocols for synchronous systems where processes can commit crash failures, omission failures or Byzantine failures. It presents and revisits consensus protocols coping with such failures in an increasing order of difficulty. The paper can be seen as a short tutorial whose aim is to make the reader familiar with synchrony assumptions, different definitions of the consensus problem, and a hierarchy of process failure models. An important concern of the paper lies in simplicity. In addition to the survey flavor of the paper, several results that are presented are new, among which the ones concerning the omission failure model.
Analysis and inhibition of dysregulated pathways in a mouse model of the motoneuron disease Spinal Muscular Atrophy

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a frequent neurodegenerative disease, is caused by reduced levels of functional survival of motoneuron (SMN) protein. SMN is involved in multiple pathways, including RNA metabolism and splicing as well as motoneuron development and function. Here we provide evidence for a major contribution of the Rho-kinase (ROCK) pathway in SMA pathogenesis. Using an in vivo protein interaction system based on SUMOylation of proteins, we found that SMN is directly interacting with profilin2a. Profilin2a binds to a stretch of proline residues in SMN, which is heavily impaired by a novel SMN2 missense mutation (S230L) derived from a SMA patient. In different SMA models, we identified differential phosphorylation of the ROCK-downstream targets cofilin, myosin-light chain phosphatase and profilin2a. We suggest that hyper-phosphorylation of profilin2a is the molecular link between SMN and the ROCK pathway repressing neurite outgrowth in neuronal cells. Finally, we found a neuron-specific increase in the F-/G-actin ratio that further support the role of actin dynamics in SMA pathogenesis.
Improving Segmentation Boundaries with Nonparametric Image Parsing

Semantic segmentation, or segmenting all the objects in an image is one of the core problems of computer vision. In order to achieve an object-level semantic segmentation, we propose to label image regions and to improve the segmentation result based on these labels. We build upon the recent super parsing approach, which is a nonparametric solution to the image labelling problem. We propose to initialize the segmentation with SLICO super pixels because SLICO is able to produce accurate boundaries and offers control over size, shape and compactness of the super pixels. These super pixels are labelled with super parsing but an optimization step is required for the large number of small super pixels. We formulate a Conditional Random Field (CRF) using a novel pair wise cost depending on local features and computed in a nonparametric estimation. This results in stronger semantic contextual constraints. We evaluate our improvements to the super parsing approach using segmentation evaluation measures as well as the per-pixel rate and average per-class rate in a labelling evaluation. We demonstrate the success of our modified approach on the SIFT Flow dataset.
Randomized Retinal Ganglion Cell Axon Routing at the Optic Chiasm of GAP-43-Deficient Mice: Association with Midline Recrossing and Lack of Normal Ipsilateral Axon Turning

During mammalian development, retinal ganglion cell (RGC) axons from nasal retina cross the optic chiasm midline, whereas temporal retina axons do not and grow ipsilaterally, resulting in a projection of part of the visual world onto one side of the brain while the remaining part is represented on the opposite side. Previous studies have shown that RGC axons in GAP-43-deficient mice initially fail to grow from the optic chiasm to form optic tracts and are delayed temporarily in the midline region. Here we show that this delayed RGC axon exit from the chiasm is characterized by abnormal randomized axon routing into the ipsilateral and contralateral optic tracts, leading to duplicated representations of the visual world in both sides of the brain. Within the chiasm, individual contralaterally projecting axons grow in unusual semicircular trajectories, and the normal ipsilateral turning of ventral temporal axons is absent. These effects on both axon populations suggest that GAP-43 does not mediate pathfinding specifically for one or the other axon population but is more consistent with a model in which the initial pathfinding defect at the chiasm/tract transition zone leads to axons backing up into the chiasm, resulting in circular trajectories and eventual random axon exit into one or the other optic tract. Unusual RGC axon trajectories include chiasm midline recrossing similar to abnormal CNS midline recrossing in invertebrate “roundabout” mutants andDrosophila with altered calmodulin function. This resemblance and the fact that GAP-43 also has been proposed to regulate calmodulin availability raise the possibility that calmodulin function is involved in CNS midline axon guidance in both vertebrates and invertebrates.