Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bathymetry sediment thickness and crustal structure from satellite gravity data

Analysis of satellite gravity data offers an opportunity to rapidly evaluate the sedimentary structure of frontier basins. The accurate and evenly distributed measurements of the gravity field determined from satellite orbits contain information about the bathymetry, sediment thickness and crustal structure of the world’s oceans. These data have been used by various authors, e.g., Smith and Sandwell (1994), to predict bathymetry for ocean basins where sediment cover is thin and where crustal structure is well known. In these areas, over a short wavelength band (15-160 km), the gravity field is highly correlated with the bathymetry. Along continental margins, however, the gravity field is complicated by sedimentary basins and changes in crustal structure. The method presented here differs from previous techniques for analysis of satellite gravity data by inverting simultaneously for water, sediment and crustal thickness instead of decomposing spectral bands in the gravity field. The inversion is constrained by interpretations of seismic and other data, and by assumptions about the nature and spatial variability of the interfaces. The seabed, basement and crust/mantle boundaries are defined by a series of triangular facets, whose size varies as the amount of constraining data changes. The sediment/basement boundary and the base of the crust are defined by larger facets than those defining the bathymetry. Conditioning equations smooth the interfaces, make the depths tend towards the input values and ensure that the interfaces do not intersect. In areas of sparse bathymetric and crustal structural control a degree of ambiguity between longwavelength shallow structures and short-wavelength deeper features inevitably remains. This technique has been used to identify the presence and location of several sedimentary basins in an area 1250 by 1000 km west of New Zealand.
Online mentoring to induct junior researchers into scientific literacy practices

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report results from an evaluation of an online abstract mentoring programme to support early career and less experienced human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) researchers improve their chances of acceptance to International HIV/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome Conferences.Design/methodology/approach – An evaluation study was conducted on the impact of this programme over two conferences. Survey questionnaires also gathered data on the perceptions of users and mentors on the value of online mentoring.Findings – Results from the evaluation show that online mentoring increased the motivation and acceptance rate of early career and less experienced researchers, especially from low‐ and middle‐income countries.Research limitations/implications – This study shows that the use of online mentoring at a distance can make access to desirable literacy practices for researchers’ professional development more equitable, and enhance the added value of informal learning in today'.
Evaluating Groundedness in Dialogue Systems: The BEGIN Benchmark

Knowledge-grounded dialogue agents are systems designed to conduct a conversation based on externally provided background information, such as a Wikipedia page. Such dialogue agents, especially those based on neural network language models, often produce responses that sound ﬂuent but are not justiﬁed by the background information. Progress towards addressing this problem requires developing automatic evaluation metrics that can quantify the extent to which responses are grounded in background information. To facilitate evaluation of such metrics, we introduce the Benchmark for Evaluation of Grounded IN-teraction (BEGIN). BEGIN consists of 8113 dialogue turns generated by language-model-based dialogue systems, accompanied by humans annotations specifying the relationship between the system’s response and the background information. These annotations are based on an extension of the natural language inference paradigm. We use the benchmark to demonstrate the effectiveness of adversarially generated data for improving an evaluation metric based on existing natural language inference datasets.
PrIter: a distributed framework for prioritized iterative computations

Iterative computations are pervasive among data analysis applications in the cloud, including Web search, online social network analysis, recommendation systems, and so on. These cloud applications typically involve data sets of massive scale. Fast convergence of the iterative computation on the massive data set is essential for these applications. In this paper, we explore the opportunity for accelerating iterative computations and propose a distributed computing framework, PrIter, which enables fast iterative computation by providing the support of prioritized iteration. Instead of performing computations on all data records without discrimination, PrIter prioritizes the computations that help convergence the most, so that the convergence speed of iterative process is significantly improved. We evaluate PrIter on a local cluster of machines as well as on Amazon EC2 Cloud. The results show that PrIter achieves up to 50x speedup over Hadoop for a series of iterative algorithms.
Clay mineralogical investigations related to nuclear waste disposal

Abstract Mineralogical and geotechnical investigations on the possible use of compacted bentonite as a buffer material in nuclear waste repositories are reported. The swelling capacity is highly dependent on the density of the compacted bentonite. Swelling pressures >30 MPa were measured for dry densities of ~2.0 g/cm3. Added iron or magnetite powder up to 20 wt% had no influence on the swelling capacity. Compacted mixtures of 20 wt% ground set cement and bentonite showed higher swelling pressures but lower swelling strain capability than compacted bentonite alone. Steam lowered the swelling pressure of compacted bentonite to ~60% of the original value. The influence was, however, reversible by ultrasonic treatment. The thermal conductivity of saturated compacted bentonite at a density of 2.0-2.1 g/cm3 is ~1.35-1.45 W/m°K. The volumetric heat capacity ranges from 3.1 × 106 to 3.4 × 106 J/m3oK. The saturated hydraulic conductivity of the compacted bentonite is <10-12 m/s. The apparent diffusion coefficients for various ions in compacted bentonite for water contents in the range of 20 to 25 wt% are: K+: 5 × 10-11, Cs+: 6 × 10-12, Sr2+:3 × 10-11,UO22+: <10-13, Th4+: <10-13, Fe2+: 4 × 10-11,Fe3+:4 × 10-11, Cl-: 1 × 10-10, and I- : 1 × 10-10 m2/s. The ‘breakthrough time’ for an apparent diffusion coefficient of 10-11 m2/s in compacted bentonite 1 m thick was estimated to be ~3000 years. The mineralogical longevity was investigated on natural K-bentonites from Kinnekulle, Sweden, and Montana, USA. Although these materials have undergone considerable changes during diagenesis and contain various amounts of mixed-layer illite-smectite, they still have a substantial swelling and adsorption capacity. The investigations demonstrate that although the properties of bentonite are negatively influenced to a certain extent by heat, hot steam, iron and cement, compacted bentonite is still the best choice to act as a buffer material in a nuclear waste repository.
Tools for Interdisciplinary Design of Pervasive Computing

Purpose – To be successful, pervasive computing requires a balance of computing, design, and business requirements to be considered throughout the design process. Achieving this synthesis requires a level of interdisciplinary design that is not present in current pervasive design tools. To understand the state of the art and provide insight to future tool designers, the purpose of this paper is to present a survey of design tools for pervasive computing and consider their ability to be used in interdisciplinary design.Design/methodology/approach – The authors have performed a survey of tools covering many areas within pervasive computing and have evaluated the abilities of each tool with established metrics for pervasive design tools.Findings – While the paper has found many design tools are available for constructive pervasive applications, few are suitable through all phases of the design cycle or useful across all the intended application domains of pervasive computing.Originality/value – This survey p.
An Evaluation on Practical Batch Bayesian Sampling Algorithms for Online Adaptive Traffic Experimentation

To speed up online testing, adaptive traffic experimentation through multi-armed bandit algorithms is rising as an essential complementary alternative to the fixed horizon A/B testing. Based on recent research on best arm identification and statistical inference with adaptively collected data, this paper derives and evaluates four Bayesian batch bandit algorithms ( NB-TS , WB-TS , NB-TTTS , WB-TTTS ), which are combinations of two ways of weighting batches ( N aive Batch and W eighted Batch) and two Bayesian sampling strategies ( T hompson S ampling and T op-T wo T hompson S ampling) to adaptively determine traffic allocation. These derived Bayesian sampling algorithms are practically based on summary batch statistics of a reward metric for pilot experiments, where one of the combination WB-TTTS in this paper seems to be newly discussed. The comprehensive evaluation on the four Bayesian sampling algorithms covers trustworthiness, sensitivity and regret of a testing methodology. Moreover, the evaluation includes 4 real-world eBay experiments and 40 reproducible synthetic experiments to reveal the learnings, which covers both stationary and non-stationary situations. Our evaluation reveals that, (a) There exist false positives inflation with equivalent best arms, while seldom discussed in literatures; (b) To control false positives, connections between convergence of posterior optimal probabilities and neutral posterior reshaping are discovered; (c) WB-TTTS shows competitive recall, higher precision, and robustness against non-stationary trend; (d) NB-TS outperforms on minimizing regret trials except on precision and robustness; (e) WB-TTTS is a promising alternative if regret of A/B Testing is affordable, otherwise NB-TS is still a powerful choice with regret consideration for pilot experiments. CCS Concepts: • General and reference → Experimentation ; • Mathematics of computing → Bayesian computation .
A stratigraphic link across 1100 km of the Antarctic Ice sheet between the Vostok ice‐core site and Titan Dome (near South Pole)

Isochronous internal ice‐sheet layering, measured from airborne 60 MHz radar, was traced between Lake Vostok and the Titan Ice Dome (100 km from South Pole Station), Antarctica. Three layers were selected between Ridge B and Titan Dome, and between Ridge B and Lake Vostok. This layering can be used to correlate the existing Vostok ice core across 1100 km of the ice sheet interior. Our correlation is also matched to the new EPICA ice‐core site, by using an existing radar link between Vostok and Dome C stations. Thus, three East Antarctic ice domes are linked stratigraphically for the first time through internal ice‐sheet radar layering. Our results indicate that the basal layers of ice at Titan Dome are around 165,000 years old suggesting that this location and, by inference, the South Pole Station, are prime sites for a high‐resolution ice core from the last glacial‐interglacial cycle.
A Rejection Mechanism in 2D Bounded Confidence Provides More Conformity

This paper explores the dynamics of attitude change in two dimensions resulting from social interaction. We add a rejection mechanism into the 2D bounded confidence (BC) model proposed by Deffuant et al. (2001). Individuals are characterized by two-dimensional continuous attitudes, each associated with an uncertainty u, supposed constant in this first study. Individuals interact through random pairs. If their attitudes are closer than u on both dimensions, or further than u on both dimensions, or closer than u on one dimension and not further than u + δ u on the other dimension, then the rules of the BC model apply. But if their attitudes are closer than u on one dimension and further than u + δ u on the other dimension, then the individuals are in a dissonant state. They tend to solve this problem by shifting away their close attitudes. The model shows metastable clusters, which maintain themselves through opposite influences of competitor clusters. Our analysis and first experiments support the hypothesis that, for a large range of uncertainty values, the number of clusters grows linearly with the inverse of the uncertainty, whereas this growth is quadratic in the BC model.
Evolution of the total ozone field during the breakdown of the Antarctic circumpolar vortex

Nine years of total ozone measurements from the TOMS on Nimbus 7 are used to study the evolution of the Southern Hemisphere total ozone field during the breakdown of the Antarctic circumpolar vortex. The TOMS data provide detailed maps of the morphology of the ozone field and reliable estimates of the vertically integrated meridional transport of ozone during the springtime period when the breakdown occurs (September, October, November). In estimating the ozone transport, chemical effects, including those thought to be responsible for the Antarctic ozone hole, are neglected. This approximation appears to be valid for time scales of a few days to a week. On this time scale, local ozone changes are primarily due to transport. Planetary-scale waves, especially zonal wave numbers 1 and 2 dominate the eddy variance and ozone transport. Wave number 1 is quasistationary, while wave number 2 is eastward moving with a period of about 10 days.
Interpretation of the nitrogen isotopic signal variations in the Mauritanian upwelling with a 2D physical‐biogeochemical model

A physical‐biogeochemical model is used to simulate the evolution of the δ15N signal during the last glacial‐interglacial transition in sedimentary cores offshore from the Mauritanian upwelling. The biological model is a classical nitrogen‐based trophic chain model, which also computes the nitrogen isotope fractionation. The 2D physical primitive equation model simulates the coastal upwelling circulation and is applied for different sea level scenarios. The effect of the sea level rise, inducing the shelf immersion, seems to be a main factor explaining the organic nitrogen flux and isotopic signal variations along the last deglaciation. This effect is modulated by an upwelling seasonality that may have been much longer at the Last Glacial Maximum, around 10–11 months instead of 4–5 months at present. Between 15 and 5.5 kyr ago, 60% of the sedimentary δ15N variations could be explained by this local shelf immersion effect. This reconstruction also reproduces the strong isotopic fall occurring between 5.5 kyr and the present.
Network Calculus: A Theory of Deterministic Queuing Systems for the Internet

Network Calculus. - Application of Network Calculus to the Internet. - Basic Min-plus and Max-plus Calculus. - Min-plus and Max-plus System Theory. - Optimal Multimedia Smoothing. - FIFO Systems and Aggregate Scheduling. - Adaptive and Packet Scale Rate Guarantees. - Time Varying Shapers. - Systems with Losses.
Pursuing Self-determined Responses to Climate Change in the Cook Islands: Exploring the Interface between Government Organisational Directive and Local Community Engagement with Climate Change Adaptation

Small island communities are considered to be amongst the most ‘at-risk’ populations in the world to the impacts of climate change. Global, regional and national entities have framed the plight of Pacific communities through climate change discourses. This study contributes to an emerging line of inquiry that investigates how applying the concepts of ‘vulnerability’ and ‘resilience’ to frame communities might contribute to community empowerment, or marginalisation. Focused on the institutional setting of the ‘Strengthening the Resilience of our Islands and our Communities to Climate Change Programme’ (SRIC Programme), this thesis explores the engagement between government organisations of the Cook Islands and communities of Aitutaki to form adaptation responses to climate change. Qualitative methodologies coupled with Pasifika methodologies provide a culturally responsive approach to the research. This approach accommodated local narratives and indigenous knowledges throughout the study. The findings from semi-structured interviews suggest that Cook Islands government organisations increasingly frame Aitutaki communities through the concept of ‘resilience’. Interviews with community representatives suggest that Aitutaki communities use indigenous knowledges to make sense of changes in their local environment, without always understanding the science-based notions of climate change. Engagement approaches such as ‘knowledge sharing’, could offer a pathway to increasing community autonomy and confidence in climate change discussions, whilst also contributing to enhancing socio-ecological resilience. To maintain a ‘critical’ political ecology approach, governmentality theory was used to explain how power relations might be embedded in resilience discourse. Insight is offered into how the government-community relationship could enable ‘technologies of government’ as the SRIC Programme progresses. It is suggested that the social conditions of Aitutaki communities could pose sites of resistance to governmentality. Recently implemented, the SRIC Programme demonstrates potential for supporting self-determined responses to climate change and enhancing socio-ecological resilience in Aitutaki.
Independent Vector Extraction for Fast Joint Blind Source Separation and Dereverberation

We address a blind source separation (BSS) problem in a noisy reverberant environment in which the number of microphones <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$</tex-math></inline-formula> is greater than the number of sources of interest, and the other noise components can be approximated as stationary and Gaussian distributed. Conventional BSS algorithms for the optimization of a multi-input multi-output convolutional beamformer have suffered from a huge computational cost when <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$M$</tex-math></inline-formula> is large. We here propose a computationally efficient method that integrates a weighted prediction error (WPE) dereverberation method and a fast BSS method called independent vector extraction (IVE), which has been developed for less reverberant environments. We show that, given the power spectrum for each source, the optimization problem of the new method can be reduced to that of IVE by exploiting the stationary condition, which makes the optimization easy to handle and computationally efficient. An experiment of speech signal separation shows that, compared to a conventional method that integrates WPE and independent vector analysis, our proposed method achieves much faster convergence while maintaining its separation performance.
ALEGO: Towards Cost-Aware Architecture and Integration Co-Design for Chiplet-based Spatial Accelerators

—Advanced packaging offers a new design paradigm in the post-Moore era, where many smaller chiplets could be assembled into a large system to achieve extreme scalability and cost reduction. Recently proposed chiplet-based DNN accelerators demonstrate its effectiveness but fail to explore the tradeoffs between PPA and the fabrication cost. Speciﬁcally, we should explore both the architectural design space for individual chiplets and different integration options to assemble these chiplets. More advanced (and costly) packaging technology can enhance connectivity, but may meanwhile reduce the budget on chiplets. In this paper, we propose ALEGO, an architecture-and-integration co-design approach for chiplet-based spatial accelerators. Based on a heterogeneous integration paradigm, ALEGO can optimize each chiplet design for different workloads to achieve better efﬁciency. The co-design is enabled by using uniform architecture and integration encoding and a systematic design space exploration ﬂow. We develop an architecture modeling framework and an ML-based approach to optimize the design parameters. Experiments demonstrate that ALEGO achieves 24%, 16%, or 23% improvement in latency, energy, and cost, respectively compared with the best of separate architecture or integration optimization.
Semi-supervised learning by disagreement

In real-world applications, assigning labels to examples usually requires human effort and therefore, labeled training examples are expensive; unlabeled training examples, however, are cheap and abundant. As a consequence, semi-supervised learning which attempts to exploit unlabeled data to help improve learning performance has become a very hot topic in machine learning and data mining. In this talk, I will introduce some of our research advances in disagreement-based semi-supervised learning, a paradigm covers a broad range of algorithms and has been successfully applied to many real tasks such as statistical parsing, noun phrase identification, image retrieval, etc.
An Exploratory Study on Buyers' Participation in Reputation Systems

Online reputation systems have been found to be an effective way to ensure honest behavior from the seller in consumer to consumer (C2C) e-commerce. At the same time, reputation systems have also been regarded as an important platform where large-scale of word-of mouth behavior and evaluations of the purchase experience could be communicated. There are altogether two components in online reputation systems: ratings and textual feedback. Thus, reputation systems are often considered to be constituted of buyers’ quantitative scoring and qualitative feedback which offers an important reference to other buyers when deciding whether or not to buy from a seller. The aim of this study is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the antecedents and motivation of buyers’ participation in the C2C reputation system after each transaction. Due to a lack of related research, interviews with online buyers have been first conducted to help to decide the research scope and identify the main antecedents. Satisfaction and conflict handling styles have a significant impact on willingness to submit a positive rating. The study also confirms that willingness to submit textual feedback could be investigated through WOM behaviour and online contribution.