Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fx Barriers With Smile Dynamics

Our mandate in this work has been to isolate the features of smile consistent models that are most relevant to the pricing of barrier options. We consider the two classical approaches of stochastic and (parametric) local volatility. Although neither has been particularly successful in practice their differing qualitative features serve our exposition. By constructing approximate static hedges we are able to closely mimic their prices. The only information we require from the models, other than the initial vanilla market to which they are calibrated, is their conditional forward smile along the barrier. This strongly supports the fact that realistic forward smile dynamics are of paramount importance when assessing a model to be used in pricing barrier options. (joint work with Glyn Baker and Reimer Beneder)
Prognostic significance of minimal residual disease in high risk B-ALL: a report from Children's Oncology Group study AALL0232.

Minimal residual disease (MRD) is highly prognostic in pediatric B-precursor acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL). In Children's Oncology Group high-risk B-ALL study AALL0232, we investigated MRD in subjects randomized in a 2 × 2 factorial design to receive either high-dose methotrexate (HD-MTX) or Capizzi methotrexate (C-MTX) during interim maintenance (IM) or prednisone or dexamethasone during induction. Subjects with end-induction MRD ≥0.1% or those with morphologic slow early response were nonrandomly assigned to receive a second IM and delayed intensification phase. MRD was measured by 6-color flow cytometry in 1 of 2 reference labs, with excellent agreement between the two. Subjects with end-induction MRD <0.01% had a 5-year event-free survival (EFS) of 87% ± 1% vs 74% ± 4% for those with MRD 0.01% to 0.1%; increasing MRD amounts was associated with progressively worse outcome. Subjects converting from MRD positive to negative by end consolidation had a relatively favorable 79% ± 5% 5-year disease-free survival vs 39% ± 7% for those with MRD ≥0.01%. Although HD-MTX was superior to C-MTX, MRD retained prognostic significance in both groups (86% ± 2% vs 58% ± 4% for MRD-negative vs positive C-MTX subjects; 88% ± 2% vs 68% ± 4% for HD-MTX subjects). Intensified therapy given to subjects with MRD >0.1% did not improve either 5-year EFS or overall survival (OS). However, these subjects showed an early relapse rate similar to that seen in MRD-negative ones, with EFS/OS curves for patients with 0.1% to 1% MRD crossing those with 0.01% to 0.1% MRD at 3 and 4 years, thus suggesting that the intensified therapy altered the disease course of MRD-positive subjects. Additional interventions targeted at the MRD-positive group may further improve outcome. This trial was registered at www.clinicaltrials. gov as #NCT00075725.
Adaptive MMSE Turbo equalization usign high order modulation : experimental results on underwater acoustic channel

This paper presents some results on adaptive minimu m mean-square error (MMSE) turbo equalization obtained from underwater experiments in the Atlantic ocean. Single-carrier transmission with high-order modulat ions is considered (8-PSK, 16-QAM, 32-QAM and 64-QAM), at a coded bit rate as high as 28800 bps on the underwater acoustic channel. The all-digital receiver performs timing recovery, equalization, interleaving and channel decoding. The results are evaluated in term of bit error rate (BER) and mean square error (MSE). Turbo equalizati on improves the performance of the receiver and allows reliable high order transmissio ns when the signal to noise ratio is sufficient.
Illumination Problems in Computer Augmented Reality

The ability to merge a real video image (RVI) with a computer-generated image (CGI) enhances the usefulness of both. To go beyond "cut and paste" and chroma-keying, and merge the two images successfully, one must solve the problems of common viewing parameters. common visibility and common illumination. The result can be dubbed Computer Augmented Reality (CAR). The solution needs contributions from both computer graphics and computer vision. The problems of common illumination are especially challenging, because they test our understanding and practice of shadow and global illumination computation. In this paper we will describe and illustrate work in our laboratory where the emphasis is on extracting illumination information from real images and computing the common illumination between the real and the computer generated scene.
Relationship between Comprehensive School Readiness Profiles and Longer-Term Academic Growth

Relationship between Comprehensive School Readiness Profiles and Longer-Term Academic Growth Erin Winters Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Elizabeth Sanders, Assistant Professor Educational Psychology Understanding the links between school readiness and child outcomes is essential in helping educators understand crucial early childhood intervention points to help children adjust to their academic environments. Although cognitive indicators once defined school readiness, the prevailing research over the past 15 years indicates that social-emotional indicators play an important role. Whereas prior research has examined shorter-term links between socialemotional indicators and academic achievement, the present study seeks to extend the research to investigate the longer term effects. Using a subsample of data collected in a nationally representative longitudinal dataset (ECLS-K), the present study used latent growth curve modeling that incorporates school membership and complex survey sample weights on data from grades K through 8. Final results showed that the early conceptualization of kindergarten school readiness profiles that are inclusive of social-emotional skills do systematically contribute to longer-term math and reading growth through the end of eighth grade, but primarily this is simply the difference between one “comprehensive positive” profile and the other three profiles. It may be the case that the profiles are simply defining high vs. low risk, without distinction among the high risk profiles.
A method to improve application launch performance in Android devices

Even after the introduction of Android Runtime (ART) in the latest release of Android Lollipop, Android Operating System still struggles in areas such as application launch time, especially during sluggish or memory crunch situations. When a new application is launched in a sluggish condition, low memory killer (LMK) gets initiated in order to free some memory by killing the already running applications. The current LMK approach kills application based on how recently it was used. This approach does not consider various other user scenarios such as how frequently the application was launched or how important that application is to user. In our proposed solution, we aim to improve user experience by reducing or removing the delay at memory crunch situations with efficient use of LMK.
Chapter 1 Aggregated Search

Modern search portals such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo! provide access to wide range of search services in addition to Web search. These search services, commonly referred to as verticals, include highly-specialized search engines that focus on a particular type of media (e.g., images, video), search engines that focus on a particular type of search task (e.g., news, local), and applications that return a specific type of information (e.g., weather, stock quotes). In the most general sense, aggregated search is the task of providing integrated access to all these di↵erent vertical search services, and to the core Web search engine, within a common search interface—a single query box and a unified presentation of results. Given a user's query, an aggregated search system must make a number of predictions. As one might expect, not every vertical is relevant to every query. If a user issues the query " nyc pizza restaurant locations " , it is almost certain that the user wants local business information and not images. Thus, an important step for an aggregated search system is to present those verticals most likely to be relevant and to suppress those most likely to be non-relevant. Moreover, queries are often ambiguous in terms of the user's actual intent. For example, if a user issues the query " new york style pizza " (Figure 1.1), it is unclear whether the user wants to find a place to eat (in which case local business results might be relevant) or wants to learn to cook New York style pizza (in which case recipes, how-to videos, and/or images might be relevant). Thus, another important step of an aggregated search engine is to resolve contention between verticals and to present those more likely to be relevant in a more salient way. While aggregated search might seem like a new technology, it has its roots in a fairly mature subfield of information retrieval called federated search, where the goal is to provide automated search across multiple distributed collections or search engines. And, like most methods for federated search, most aggregated search methods approach the task in two subsequent steps: (1) predicting which verticals to present (vertical selection) and (2) predicting where to present them (vertical presentation). Vertical selection refers to the problem of selecting a subset of relevant verticals given a query. One way to 3
From Ethernet to Synchronous Ethernet

This article presents a comprehensive overview on the upcoming migration from the current Ethernet infrastructure towards synchronous Ethernet. It first presents within a synchronization perspective a brief description of the current Ethernet and compares it to the SDH/SONET technology. The intent is to outline the current Ethernet gaps in terms of network synchronization. Secondly, it describes the key additional functional blocks, as specified by the ITU-T (study group 15, question 13), enabling Ethernet to support frequency synchronization (or syntonization) and thus yielding to the standardized synchronous Ethernet. Finally, it points out some possible migration scenarios by putting the stress on both technical difficulties and operational investments foreseen during the implementation phase.
Resonant controller based STATCOM used in wind farms to mitigate power quality issues

Now-a-days renewable energy sources are playing a vital role in global energy systems. Wind energy conversion method is cheaper compared to other conversions such as solar and tidal etc. There are many power quality issues in wind farms such as voltage sag, swell and harmonics arise due to grid, nonlinear load and three phase faults. These voltage fluctuations can be eliminated with the help of advanced reactive power compensation devices such as SVC (Static Var Compensator), STATCOM (Static Synchronous Compensator) and DVR (Dynamic Voltage Restorer). To reduce such power quality issues, it is essential to design, model and analyse the FACTS (Flexible AC Transmission line) device. In this project, STATCOM is used as a compensating device. STATCOM is a static synchronous generator operated as a parallel connection static reactive compensator. It is capable of generating or absorbing real and reactive power. Also, the compensator performance is analysed with the help of Proportional Resonant (PR) controller device. The STATCOM is connected parallel with the transmission line. When fault occurs, it will inject or absorb the reactive power to the line through the transformer according to the voltage requirement. The whole system is simulated through MATLAB/SIMULINK application. The simulation gives the effective influence of STATCOM on the improvement of voltage profile as well as reduction of Harmonics in grid connected Wind Energy Conversion System.
On Cellular Capacity with Base Station Cooperation

This paper is concerned with cellular systems with rate constraints in fading environments. We consider a simple but asymptotically optimal matched filtering/successive interference cancellation (MF-SIC) scheme. We derive several concise and closed-form bounds for the power and spectral efficiencies of various base station cooperation strategies, which provide some useful insights into cellular systems.
Output-based Adaptive Meshing Using Triangular Cut Cells

This report presents a mesh adaptation method for higher-order (p > 1) discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretizations of the two-dimensional, compressible Navier-Stokes equations. The method uses a mesh of triangular elements that are not required to conform to the boundary. This triangular, cut-cell approach permits anisotropic adaptation without the difficulty of constructing meshes that conform to potentially complex geometries. A quadrature technique is presented for accurately integrating on general cut cells. In addition, an output-based error estimator and adaptive method are presented, with emphasis on appropriately accounting for high-order solution spaces in optimizing local mesh anisotropy. Accuracy on cut-cell meshes is demonstrated by comparing solutions to those on standard boundary-conforming meshes. Adaptation results show that, for all test cases considered, p = 2 and p = 3 discretizations meet desired error tolerances using fewer degrees of freedom than p = 1. Furthermore, an initial-mesh dependence study demonstrates that, for sufficiently low error tolerances, the final adapted mesh is relatively insensitive to the starting mesh. An abbreviated version of this report was submitted to the Journal of Computational Physics. Department Of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 (kfid@mit.edu, darmofal@mit.edu).
Object Recognition Using Fourier Descriptors and Genetic Algorithm

This work presents study and experimentation for object recognition when isolated objects are under discussion. The circumstances of similarity transformations, presence of noise, and occlusion have been included as the part of the study. For simplicity, instead of objects, outlines of the objects have been used for the whole process of the recognition. Fourier Descriptors have been used as features of the objects. From the analysis and results using Fourier Descriptors, the following questions arise: What is the optimum number of descriptors to be used? Are these descriptors of equal importance? To answer these questions, the problem of selecting the best descriptors has been formulated as an optimization problem. Genetic Algorithm technique has been mapped and used successfully to have an object recognition system using minimal number of Fourier Descriptors. The proposed method assigns, for each of these descriptors, a weighting factor that reflects the relative importance of that descriptor.
DNSRadar: Outsourcing Malicious Domain Detection Based on Distributed Cache-Footprints

As the domain name system (DNS) plays a critical role in malicious services and number of networks, especially small enterprise networks and home networks that are generally and poorly managed, grows rapidly, it is highly desired to outsource the malicious domain detection service to a thirdparty system that can aggregate information from multiple vantage points to perform detection. To this end, we propose DNSRadar, a system that explores the coexistence of domain cache-footprints distributed in all networks that participate in the outsourcing service. Bootstrapping from a list of prelabeled malicious domains, DNSRadar leverages link analysis techniques to infer maliciousness likelihood of unknown domains based on coexistence information. As DNSRadar only uses the existence of an unknown domain in a network for detection, privacy concerns have been drastically reduced. Both MapReduce and lightweight matrix analysis techniques are employed to implement DNSRadar, making scalability as a built-in feature. Taking advantage of a large number of open recursive DNS servers, we have performed extensive evaluation at scale. Experimental results have demonstrated that DNSRadar can efficiently detect ~90% malicious domains given a low false positive rate of 1%. Of all these detected malicious domains, ~30% are on average 6 days earlier than public DNS reputation services, indicating DNSRadar's great early detection capability.
Hodgkin Lymphoma in a Thymic Cyst: Report of a Case with Multiple Secondary Neoplasms

The presentation of Hodgkin Lymphoma in a thymic cyst is rare. We describe a case in a 9 year-old boy, with a long follow-up course, complicated by two secondary neoplasms and a post bone marrow transplant lymphoproliferative disorder. We also review the literature on such presentations and second malignant neoplasms in childhood.
Sentence boundary detection: a comparison of paradigms for improving MT quality

The reliable detection of sentence boundaries in running text is one of the first important steps in preparing an input document for translation. Although this is often neglected, it is necessary to obtain a translation with a high degree of quality. In this paper, we present a comparison of different paradigms for the detection of sentence boundaries in written text. We compare three different approaches: Directly encoding the knowledge in a program, a rule-based system relying on regular expressions to describe boundaries, and a statistical maximum-entropy learning algorithm to obtain knowledge about boundaries. Using the statistical system, we obtain a recall of 98.14%, classifying boundaries of six types, and using a training corpus of under 10,000 sentences.
Dual wavelength laser diode excitation source for 2D photoacoustic imaging

Photoacoustic methods can be used to make spatially resolved spectroscopic measurements of blood oxygenation when using a multiwavelength excitation source, such as an OPO system. Since these excitation sources are usually expensive and bulky, an alternative is to use laser diodes. A fibre coupled laser diode excitation system has been developed, providing two wavelengths, 850 and 905nm, each composed of 6 high peak power pulsed laser diodes. The system provided variable pulse durations (65-500ns) and repetition rates of up to 5KHz. The pulse energies delivered by the excitation system at 905nm and 850nm were measured to be 120&mgr;J and 80&mgr;J respectively for a 200ns pulse duration. To demonstrate the utility of the system, the excitation source was combined with an ultrasound detector to form a probe for in vivo single point measurements of superficial blood vessels. Changes in blood oxygenation and volume in the finger tip were monitored while making venous and arterial occlusions. To demonstrate the imaging capability of the excitation system, 2D photoacoustic images of a physiologically realistic phantom were obtained for a range of pulse durations using a cylindrical scanning system. The phantom was composed of cylindrical absorbing elements (&mgr;a=1mm^{-1}) of 2.7mm diameter, immersed in a 1% intralipid solution (&mgr;s=1mm^{-1}). This study demonstrated the potential use of laser diodes as an excitation source for photoacoustic imaging of superficial vascular structures.
Technology-related transformations of imaginary body boundaries: Psychopathology of the everyday excessive Internet and mobile phone use

Background. In line with the approach of Larkin et al. (2006), we consider technological dependence in the context of the interaction between personality, environment, and culture. objective. The aim of this study is to discover technology-related changes in psychological needs and boundaries that could mediate the relationship between psychopathological symptoms and indicators of excessive use of info-communication technologies (ICT). The application of the Body Function Regulation Model to the use of ICT suggests that technology-related changes in the system of an individual’s needs and psychological boundaries mediate the relationship between a sense of poor psychological well-being and the risk of technology dependence. Design. The study of a normative sample (N = 275) using two technologies–mobile phones and the Internet–was performed. Results and Discussion. We demonstrated that the relationship between the general level of psychopathological symptoms and excessive use of technology (subjective dependence and inability to refrain from use of mobile phones and the Internet) is indeed mediated by the perception of their indispensability for extension of psychological boundaries, and (for the Internet) its use in image-making.
Spectacle Coverage and Spectacles Use among Elderly Population in Residential Care in the South Indian State of Andhra Pradesh

Background. There is limited research conducted on uncorrected refractive errors, presbyopia, and spectacles use among the elderly population in residential care in developing countries such as India. We conducted a cross-sectional study among elderly in residential care to assess the spectacle coverage and spectacles usage in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Methods. All 524 residents in the 26 “homes for aged” institutions in the district were enumerated. Eye examination was performed that included visual acuity (VA) assessment for distant and near vision. A questionnaire was used to collect information on spectacles use. Results. 494/524 individuals were examined, 78% were women, and 72% had no education. The mean age of participants was 70 years. The spectacle coverage for refractive errors was 35.1% and 23.9% for presbyopia. The prevalence of current use and past use of spectacles was 38.5% (95% CI: 34.2–42.8; n = 190) and 17.2% (95% CI: 13.9–42.8), respectively. Conclusions. There is low spectacle coverage for both refractive errors and presbyopia among elderly individuals in residential care in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Appropriate service delivery systems should be developed to reach out this vulnerable group of seniors on a priority basis.
Towards a Modular 32 x 32 Pixel Stimulator for Retinal Prosthesis

Future retinal prosthesis requires more stimulation sites to restore vision to the level of independent mobility, large print reading and facial recognition. This paper presents a modular design of a 1024 pixel retinal stimulator. The individual module consists of 64 drivers, chosen to optimize the system. The circuit design and the layout of the 64-driver module are presented. The chip is currently under fabrication in 0.35-mum CMOS. The digital controller block for the chip is currently being designed and will be integrated with this driver chip in the future
First Hops of the 3 D Bow Leg

We have constructed several hopping machines using a new type of resilient, flexible leg that we call the “Bow Leg. ” The Bow Leg (patent pending) comprises a curved leaf spring, foot, freely pivoting hip, and the “Bow String” that holds the leg in compression. The leg spring is used for multiple purposes: as the leg structure, as the elastic element to store and release ground collision momentum, and as an energy accumulator to store thrust actuation energy during flight. This design features high energy efficiency and low-power actuation, and it has enabled the development of hopping robots that carry all power on-board. This paper focusses on the design of the one-legged 3D Bow Leg hopping machine currently under development. Specific issues include three-freedom control of the flexible leg using tension elements. The prototype is a work-in-progress that has demonstrated short hopping sequences on level ground under remote control.