Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tourism valuation in Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India: A pre & post tsunami analysis

The Andaman & Nicobar Islands of India are the paragon of beauty and present a landscape with scenic and picturesque extravaganza. The tsunami of December, 2004 completely dislocated the life-style of the islanders and the tourism sector suffered a huge blow. Due to untiring efforts of local administration, the tourism sector not only regained its lost ground after four years of tsunami; the islands registered a higher tourism value in terms of more numbers of domestic and foreign tourists as well as number of tourist spots visited in interior areas. Travel cost methodology (TCM) has been used for discussing the tourism value of the islands from domestic tourists’ view point before and after December, 2004 tsunami.
Research on wireless multi-hop networks: Current state and challenges

Wireless multi-hop networks, in various forms and under various names, are being increasingly used in military and civilian applications. Studying connectivity and capacity of these networks is an important problem. The scaling behavior of connectivity and capacity when the network becomes sufficiently large is of particular interest. In this position paper, we briefly overview recent development and discuss research challenges and opportunities in the area, with a focus on the network connectivity.
COUP-TF1 Antagonizes Nkx2.5-mediated Activation of the Calreticulin Gene during Cardiac Development*

Calreticulin, a Ca2+ binding chaperone of the endoplasmic reticulum, is also highly expressed in the embryonic heart, and knockout of the calreticulin gene is lethal during embryogenesis because of impaired cardiac development. The protein is down-regulated after birth, and elevated expression of calreticulin in newborn hearts is associated with severe cardiac pathology and death. Here we show that the transcription factor Nkx2.5 activates expression of the calreticulin gene in the heart. Binding of chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter-transcription factor 1 to the Nkx2.5 binding site suppresses transcription from the calreticulin promoter. Nkx2.5 and chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter-transcription factor 1 play antagonistic roles in regulating the expression of calreticulin during cardiac development. These studies indicate that cardiac-specific transcription factor Nkx2.5 plays a central role in activating calreticulin expression and that there is a cooperation between chicken ovalbumin upstream promoter-transcription factor 1 and Nkx2.5 at the calreticulin promoter.
Las megaestructuras urbanas del siglo XXI: un ensayo para la identificación y caracterización de las megalópolis

El proceso de metropolitanizacion ha marcado el desarrollo urbano del siglo XX. Sin embargo, especialmente desde 1950, se ha venido produciendo un verdadero cambio de escala en dicho crecimiento: el crecimiento infinito de las periferias metropolitanas, alentado por el proceso de urban sprawl, la urbanizacion creciente de los entornos rurales en los intersticios existentes entre las ciudades, no solo ha venido a enlazar espacialmente sistemas urbanos anteriormente aislados, sino que ha generado nuevos espacios urbanos caracterizados por una creciente complejidad, asi como por la expansion ilimitada del fenomeno urbanizador. Las megalopolis, intuidas a principios del siglo XX por los pensadores precursores del urbanismo contemporaneo, se han hecho realidad. El objetivo de este trabajo consiste en realizar un ensayo para la identificacion y caracterizacion preliminar de las megalopolis en los inicios del siglo XXI. La publicacion reciente por la NASA de la imagen planetaria de las luces nocturnas da la oportunidad para proceder al desarrollo de metodologias de analisis de imagen susceptibles de identificar las mega-estructuras urbanas a escala planetaria.
Experimental results of a vision-based burn scar assessment technique

Proposes a method for the objective assessment of burn scars. The quantitative measures developed in this research provide an objective way to calculate scar elasticity. The approach combines range data and the mechanics and motion dynamics of human tissues. Active contours are employed to locate regions of interest and to find displacements of feature points using automatically established correspondences. Elasticity of the burn scar is then recovered using iterative descent search for the best nonlinear finite element model that approximates stretching behavior of the region containing the burn scar. The results from the skin elasticity experiments illustrate the ability to objectively detect differences in elasticity between normal and abnormal tissue. These estimated differences are correlated against the subjective judgments of physicians which are presently the practice.
Extraordinary longevity in the Soviet Union: fact or artifact?

The authors review previous research on age exaggeration and extraordinary longevity in the Soviet Union and present the results of their own examination of Soviet mortality and census data from 1959 and 1970. According to the authors "the reports of extraordinary longevity in the Soviet Union stem not from fact but from age exaggeration in the census data. Our study decisively demonstrates that the census age distributions at the oldest ages are severely distorted and thus the reported number of centenarians cannot be accepted as accurate. " Producing age-sex distributions of those over 60 the authors find that "a significant proportion of enumerated centenarians had not in fact passed the century mark. Further the results of our analyses employing the Gompertz and Swedish mortality patterns strongly suggest that the true number of centenarians is but a small fraction of that reported. " (EXCERPT)
Background Music Removal Based on Cepstrum Transformation for Popular Singer Identification

One major challenge of identifying singers in popular music recordings lies in how to reduce the interference of background accompaniment in trying to characterize the singer voice. Although a number of studies on automatic Singer IDentification (SID) from acoustic features have been reported, most systems to date, however, do not explicitly deal with the background accompaniment. This study proposes a background accompaniment removal approach for SID by exploiting the underlying relationships between solo singing voices and their accompanied versions in cepstrum. The relationships are characterized by a transformation estimated using a large set of accompanied singing generated by manually mixing solo singing with the accompaniments extracted from Karaoke VCDs. Such a transformation reflects the cepstrum variations of a singing voice before and after it is added with accompaniments. When an unknown accompanied voice is presented to our system, the transformation is performed to convert the cepstrum of the accompanied voice into a solo-voice-like one. Our experiments show that such a background removal approach improves the SID accuracy significantly; even when a test music recording involves sung language not covered in the data for estimating the transformation.
Human influences on rates of phenotypic change in wild animal populations

Human activities can expose populations to dramatic environmental perturbations, which may then precipitate adaptive phenotypic change. We ask whether or not phenotypic changes associated with human‐disturbed (anthropogenic) contexts are greater than those associated with more ‘natural’ contexts. Our meta‐analysis is based on more than 3000 rates of phenotypic change in 68 ‘systems’, each representing a given species in a particular geographical area. We find that rates of phenotypic change are greater in anthropogenic contexts than in natural contexts. This difference may be influenced by phenotypic plasticity — because it was evident for studies of wild‐caught individuals (which integrate both genetic and plastic effects) but not for common‐garden or quantitative genetic studies (which minimize plastic effects). We also find that phenotypic changes in response to disturbance can be remarkably abrupt, perhaps again because of plasticity. In short, humans are an important agent driving phenotypic change in contemporary populations. Although these changes sometimes have a genetic basis, our analyses suggest a particularly important contribution from phenotypic plasticity.
Novel Method using Beacon and Smart Phone for Visually Impaired/Blind People

paper presents novel structure for visually impaired/blind people using beacon and smart phone. The proposed structure is consisted of three parts. In the first part esp8266 module due to ultra-low power consumption, in the second part configurator application to configure these beacon and last part is mobile application to detect these beacons. The aim is to help visually impaired/blind people to knowledge the environment in which they live by. Three tests applied in real environment. The results show good performance for the suggested scheme help the visually impaired/blind people reach the desired devices location successfully without error. In conclusion, beacon and smart phone were a valid and reliable method to help the visually impaired/blind people to know the location of devices that are nearest from him in indoor environment. General Terms Beacon, nearby notification. Keywordssmart phone, visually impaired/blind people, RSSI, esp8266 module and indoor navigation.
A noisy channel model for web service

In this paper, we propose a language I-BPEL to model web services in the environment with channel noise and system instabilities. Each channel is assigned an interval value to indicate the value of noise. We introduce an operational semantics which attached with interval values to indicate the quality of the web service. Based on the syntax and semantics, we define the notion of simulation and investigate some important properties of simulation.
Robust registration of serial cell microscopic images using 3D Hilbert scan search

Microscopic images are quite helpful for us to observe the details of cells because of its high resolution. Furthermore it can benefit biologists and doctors to view the cell structure from any aspect by using a serial images to generate 3D cell structure. However each cell slice is placed at the microscopy respectively, which will bring in the arbitrary rotation and translation among the serial slices. What's more, the sectioning process will destroy the cell structure such as tearing or warping. Therefore we must register the serial slices before rendering the volume data in 3D. In this paper we propose a robust registration algorithm based on an improved 3D Hilbert scam search. Besides we put forward a simple but effective method to remove false matching in consecutive images. Finally we correct the local deformation based on optical-flow theory and adopt multi-resolution method. Our algorithm is tested, on a serial microscopy kidney cell images, and the experimental results show how accurate and robust of our method is.
CUNI at MediaEval 2013 Similar Segments in Social Speech Task

We describe our experiments for the Similar Segments in Social Speech Task at MediaEval 2013 Benchmark. We mainly focus on segmentation of the recordings into shorter passages on which we apply standard retrieval techniques. We experiment with machine-learning-based segmentation employing textual (word n-grams, tag n-grams, letter cases, lexical cohesion, etc.) and prosodic features (silence) and compare the results with those obtained by regular segmentation.
Learning to rank networked entities

Several algorithms have been proposed to learn to rank entities modeled as feature vectors, based on relevance feedback. However, these algorithms do not model network connections or relations between entities. Meanwhile, Pagerank and variants find the stationary distribution of a reasonable but arbitrary Markov walk over a network, but do not learn from relevance feedback. We present a framework for ranking networked entities based on Markov walks with parameterized conductance values associated with the network edges. We propose two flavors of conductance learning problems in our framework. In the first setting, relevance feedback comparing node-pairs hints that the user has one or more hidden preferred communities with large edge conductance, and the algorithm must discover these communities. We present a constrained maximum entropy network flow formulation whose dual can be solved efficiently using a cutting-plane approach and a quasi-Newton optimizer. In the second setting, edges have types, and relevance feedback hints that each edge type has a potentially different conductance, but this is fixed across the whole network. Our algorithm learns the conductances using an approximate Newton method.
Syntaxonomical approach for classification of the Californian serpentine annual grasslands

A preliminary syntaxonomical approach for the serpentine annual grasslands classification is presented. Our proposals include the phytosociological frame for the syntaxonomy of the annual plant communities growing on ultramafic substrata and distributed throughout the territories of the Californian biogeographical region. All the formal phytosociological high units newly proposed are justified and legitimated on the basis of previous reports and our own data. These are collected in a new phytosociological class: V ulpio microstachyos-Hesperolinetea micranthi that includes, so far, one new order: Eriogono luteoli-Hesperolinetalia micranthi and four new alliances: Hesperevaco sparsiflorae-Hemizonion congestae , Hesperolinion clevelandii , Hesperolino micranthi-Navarretion filicaulis and Streptanthion polygaloidis .
Mixed Integer Programming, General Concept Inclusions and Fuzzy Description Logics

Fuzzy Description Logics (fuzzy DLs) have been proposed as a language to describe structured knowledge with vague concepts. In [19], a solution based on Mixed Integer Linear Programming has been proposed to deal with fuzzy DLs under Lukasiewicz semantics in which typical membership functions, such as triangular and trapezoidal functions, can be explicitly represented in the language. A major theoretical and computational limitation so far is the inability to deal with General Concept Inclusions (GCIs), which is an important feature of classical DLs. In this paper, we address this issue and develop a calculus for fuzzy DLs with GCIs under various semantics: classical logic, \Zadeh semantics", and Lukasiewicz logic.
Relay Antenna Selection in MIMO Two-Way Relay Networks Over Nakagami-  $m$ Fading Channels

In this paper, we propose two relay antenna selection (RAS) schemes in multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) two-way relay networks, where an NA-antenna source and an NB-antenna source exchange information via an NR-antenna amplify-and-forward (AF) relay. The proposed RAS schemes maximize the minimum of the two overall end-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) values. In the first RAS scheme, transmit and receive beamforming (BF) is adopted at the two sources using all antennas. In the second RAS scheme, transmit and receive antenna selection (AS) is adopted at the two sources using one antenna. To conduct a performance comparison of the proposed RAS-BF and RAS-AS schemes, we first derive new expressions for the exact outage probability over independent but not necessarily identically distributed Nakagami-m fading channels. We then derive new closed-form lower and upper bounds on the outage probability to offer an efficient computation. We further derive new compact expressions for the asymptotic outage probability to characterize the performance in the high-SNR regime. Notably, we demonstrate that RAS-BF and RAS-AS achieve the full outage diversity order of min{NANRmA, NBNRmB}, where mA and mB denote the Nakagami-m fading parameters between the NA-antenna source and relay and between the NB-antenna source and relay, respectively. Based on asymptotic results, we determine a concise solution for the optimal power allocation among the sources and the relay to maximize the performance under the assumption that both the sources have the same transmit power. To quantify the effect of spatial correlation at the sources, we derive new closed-form expressions for the asymptotic outage probability over correlated Nakagami-m fading channels. The results indicate that the spatial correlation has no impact on the outage diversity order but significantly deteriorates the outage array gain.
Linear Response for Approximate Inference

Belief propagation on cyclic graphs is an efficient algorithm for computing approximate marginal probability distributions over single nodes and neighboring nodes in the graph. In this paper we propose two new algorithms for approximating joint probabilities of arbitrary pairs of nodes and prove a number of desirable properties that these estimates fulfill. The first algorithm is a propagation algorithm which is shown to converge if belief propagation converges to a stable fixed point. The second algorithm is based on matrix inversion. Experiments compare a number of competing methods.
Verifying Bigraphical Models of Architectural Reconfigurations

ARCHERY is an architectural description language for modelling and reasoning about distributed, heterogeneous and dynamically reconfigurable systems. This paper proposes a structural semantics for ARCHERY, and a method for deriving labelled transition systems (LTS) in which states and transitions represent configurations and reconfiguration operations, respectively. Architectures are modelled by bigraphs and their dynamics by parametric reaction rules. The resulting LTSs can be regarded as Kripke frames, appropriate for verifying reconfiguration constraints over architectural patterns expressed in a modal logic. The derivation method proposed here applies the approach in [1] twice, and combines the results of each application to obtain a label representing a reconfiguration operation and its actual parameters. Labels obtained in this way are minimal and yield LTSs in which bisimulation is a congruence.
Mining MicroBlogs : Opportunities and Challenges

This chapter investigates whether and how micro-messaging technologies such as Twitter messages can be harnessed to obtain valuable information. The interesting characteristics of micro-blogging services, such as being user oriented, provide opportunities for different applications to use the content of these sites to their advantage. However, the same characteristics become the weakness of these sites when it comes to data modeling and analysis of the messages. These sites contains very large amount of unstructured, noisy with false or missing data which make the task of data mining difficult. This chapter first reviews some of the potential applications of the micro-messaging services and then provides some insight into different challenges faced by data mining applications. Later in the chapter, characteristics of a real-data collected from the Twitter are analysed. At the end of chapter, application of micro-blogging services is shown by three different case studies.
Parameterization of rainfall microstructure for radar meteorology and hydrology

A comprehensive general framework for the description and analysis of the microstructure of rainfall is presented. The microstructure of rainfall is parameterized in terms of the raindrop size distribution, which determines both the macroscopic physical properties of rainfall relevant for radar meteorology and hydrology and their relationships. To demonstrate that the definitions of rainfall related variables naturally lead to power law relationships, a rainfall parameterization based on the exponential raindrop size distribution is presented. The importance of the distinction between the properties of raindrops present in a volume of air and those of raindrops arriving at a surface is emphasized. A general formulation for the raindrop size distribution as a scaling law is derived, based on the ubiquitous power law relationships between rainfall related variables. The scaling law formulation is independent of any a priori assumption regarding the functional form of the raindrop size distribution and unifies all previously published parameterizations. It allows a separation of the effects of changes in the shape of the raindrop size distribution from those of changes in the rain rate. The values of the scaling exponents indicate whether it is the raindrop concentration or the characteristic raindrop size which controls the variability of the raindrop size distribution. The gap between the scaling law and traditional parameterizations is bridged by providing explicit expressions for the scaling law for all analytical distributions proposed in the literature. The scaling law formulation is verified experimentally using mean raindrop size distributions for various climatic settings (based on two classical parameterizations) and raw raindrop size distributions from The Netherlands. For the mean distributions the scaling procedure yields excellent results, for the raw distributions a residual amount of scatter about the mean curves remains, indicating that rain rate alone cannot explain all observed variability. As an example of the application of the scaling law, a new method for establishing power law radar reflectivity--rain rate relationships is derived. The method is applied to the mentioned mean and raw distributions. The large inter-event variability of the coefficients indicates that climatological radar reflectivity--rain rate relationships will be of little practical use. The Poisson homogeneity hypothesis, a fundamental assumption in radar meteorology, is tested on an extraordinary stationary time series of raindrop size distributions. The arrival rate fluctuations of the raindrops which contribute most to rain rate and radar reflectivity are found to behave according to Poisson statistics. Finally, perspectives for future research are presented.
Etude diagnostique de la variabilité de la salinité de surface de l'Océan Pacifique. Apport des données SMOS

La salinite est un parametre essentiel de l'ocean car elle impacte les processus oceaniques de la sous-meso echelle a l'echelle du bassin et interannuelle. Son role a ete souligne dans la dynamique du phenomene El Nino ainsi que dans le deplacement de masses d'eaux telles que les eaux intermediaires subtropicales et les eaux profondes. Elle est consideree comme une Variable Climatique Essentielle par l'Organisation Meteorologique Mondiale. La distribution du sel dans l'ocean est le resultat d'un equilibre subtil entre le forcage de surface (evaporation, precipitation et ruissellement), l'advection horizontale de sel et les echanges avec la sub-surface (entrainement et melange), chacun de ces termes etant d'egale importance. Meme si ces processus sont connus de facon qualitative, quantifier l'effet de chacun d'entre eux est toujours une question ouverte. Cette these a pour but de : a) quantifier les mecanismes responsables de la variabilite de la salinite de surface dans l'Ocean Pacifique tropical (principalement aux echelles saisonnieres et interannuelles), b) decrire et evaluer les processus a l'origine des variations de salinite de surface pendant l'evenement La Nina de 2010-2011 et c) analyser la formation et la variabilite du noyau de maximum de sel de l'Ocean Pacifique subtropical (aux memes echelles de temps). Differents jeux de donnees sont utilises conjointement : des observations de salinite in situ (bateaux marchands, profileurs Argo. . . ), des donnees de salinite de surface derivees du nouveau satellite SMOS et d'autres produits issus de mesures satellitaires (precipitations, evaporation et courants de surface) ainsi qu'une simulation specifique d'un modele force.