Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Automatic Detection of Targets Using Center-Surround Difference and Local Thresholding

This paper proposes a new target detection method in low contrast forward looking infrared (FLIR) images. Automatic detection of small targets in remotely sensed images is a difficult and challenging work. The goal is to find out target locations with low false alarms in a thermal infrared scene of battlefield. The interesting targets are military vehicles such as battle tanks and armored personal carriers in ground-to-ground scenarios. The proposed method consists of three following stages. First, center-surround difference is proposed in order to find salient areas in an input image. Second, local thresholding for a region of interest (ROI) is proposed. The ROI is selected on the basis of a salient region that is the result of first step. Third, the shape of extracted binary images is compared with binary target templates using size and affinity to remove clutters. In the experiments, the proposed method is compared with morphology method using many natural infrared images with high variability. The result demonstrates that our method is superior to the morphological method in terms of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and average computation time.
Fault Tolerance Schemes for Global Load Balancing in X10

Scalability postulates fault tolerance to be efficient. One approach handles permanent node failures at user level. It is supported by Resilient X10, a Partitioned Global Address Space language that throws an exception when a place fails. We consider task pools, which are a widely used pattern for load balancing of irregular applications, and refer to the variant that is implemented in the Global Load Balancing framework GLB of X10. Here, each worker maintains a private pool and supports cooperative work stealing. Victim selection and termination detection follow the lifeline scheme. Tasks may generate new tasks dynamically, are free of side-effects, and their results are combined by reduction. We consider a single worker per node, and assume that failures are rare and uncorrelated. The paper introduces two fault tolerance schemes. Both are based on regular backups of the local task pool contents, which are written to the main memory of another worker and updated in the event of stealing. The first scheme mainly relies on synchronous communication. The second scheme deploys asynchronous communication, and significantly improves on the first scheme efficiency and robustness. Both schemes have been implemented by extending the GLB source code. Experiments were run with the Unbalanced Tree Search (UTS) and Betweenness Centrality benchmarks. For UTS on 128 nodes, for instance, we observed an overhead of about 81% with the synchronous scheme and about 7% with the asynchronous scheme. The protocol overhead for a place failure was negligible.
Serbian EFL teachers and learners' attitudes to peer assessment and the comparison of teacher and peer speaking assessment scores

The present paper is inspired by the scarcity of research into the practical implementation of peer assessment in Serbian EFL classrooms. Hence, the study explores the attitudes of Serbian EFL teachers and learners on peer assessment and compares the results of an assessment experiment in which the teachers and students had the task to assess speaking performance according to the predefined speaking assessment guidelines. The research consisted of three parts. The first part included 112 teachers taking part in the questionnaire, while the second part comprised 130 primary and secondary students filling in the relevant survey. The third experimental part involved 24 students and 15 teachers as evaluators, and 5 students as presenters, i.e. the assessed speakers. The results showed generally positive attitudes towards peer assessment both among teachers and learners, with certain reservations underpinned in the study. The assessment experiment results point to the overall agreement of teacher and learner scores, which emphasizes the importance of peer assessment incorporation as relatively reliable classroom assessment practice.
PART : A Run-Time Library for Tape-Resident Data

Over the last decade, processors have made enormous gains in speed. But increase in the speed of the secondary and tertiar y storage devices could not cope with these gains. The result i s that the secondary and tertiary storage access times domina te execution time of data intensive computations. Therefore, in scientific computations, efficient data access functionality f or data stored in secondary and tertiary storage is a must. In this ex tended abstract, we give an overview of PART, a runtime libra ry that can be used in applications that process tape-resident ata. We present user interface and underlying optimization stra tegy. We also discuss performance improvements provided by the li brary on the High Performance Storage System (HPSS). The preliminary results reveal that the optimizations can impr ove response times by up to 97:2%.
Towards proactive management of technical debt by software metrics

Large software development organizations put enormous amount of effort not only for responding to continuous requests of customers but also for reengineering and refactoring activities to keep their product maintainable. Often rapid and immature feature deliveries over long period of time gradually decrease the product quality, and therefore the refactoring activities become costly and effort-intensive. This situation is described by the concept of “technical debt”, which represents the accumulated rework that organization has to do in order to prevent the slowdown of the development. In this paper we report results of a case study at Ericsson on using software metrics for moving towards proactive management of technical debt. Our observations show that there are four distinguishable maturity phases of quality management over the eight years of development time of two large products: Start-n-stop, Reactive, Systematic, and Proactive quality management. Three sophisticated metrics are applied to help the organizations to move towards Proactive management of technical debt. These metrics are used on a systematic basis to provide information on the areas of the product that have tendency of accumulating technical debt. Software engineers use this information for making decisions on whether or not the pinpointed areas should be refactored.
Comparison of Acceleration Structures for Ray Tracing EM Propogation

I cover the current state-of-the-art in acceleration structures for Ray Tracing. I propose a method for testing the pros and cons of various structures as they apply to electro-magnetic wave propogation, specifically finding secondary intersections between an eye ray and the scene geometry. My proposal involves using Galileo, an open source ray tracing engine, to test different structures and time them to compare their strengths at finding secondary intersections. A task list, risks and mitigation plans are proposed and deliverables identified for the project. Keywords— Ray Tracing, EM propogation, Thesis Pro-
Multi-document summarization exploiting frequent itemsets

A summary is a succinct and informative description of a data collection. In the context of multi-document summarization, the selection of the most relevant and not redundant sentences belonging to a collection of textual documents is definitely a challenging task. Frequent itemset mining is a well-established data mining technique to discover correlations among data. Although it has been widely used in transactional data analysis, to the best of our knowledge, its exploitation in document summarization has never been investigated so far. This paper presents a novel multi-document summarizer, namely ItemSum (Itemset-based Summarizer), that is based on an itemset-based model, i.e., a model composed of frequent itemsets, extracted from the document collection. It automatically selects the most representative and not redundant sentences to include in the summary by considering both sentence coverage, with respect to a concise and highly informative itemset-based model, and a sentence relevance score, based on tf-idf statistics. Experimental results, performed on the DUC'04 document collection by means of ROUGE toolkit, show that the proposed approach achieves better performance than a large set of competitors.
Behavioral / Systems / Cognitive Interaction between-Melanocyte-Stimulating Hormone and Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone in the Regulation of Feeding and Hypothalamo-Pituitary-Adrenal Responses

Both central -melanocyte-stimulating hormone and corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) have been implicated in feeding and neuroendocrine mechanisms. The anatomical overlap and functional similarities between these two neurotransmitter systems led to the hypothesis that CRH might act as one of the mediators of the central actions of the melanocortin system. By double-labeling in situ hybridization, a subpopulation of CRH neurons in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN) were shown to contain the melanocortin-4 receptor (MC4R), concentrated in the ventromedial part of the parvicellular PVN (up to 33%). Intracerebroventricular injection of melanocortin agonist MTII to conscious and freely moving rats induced a rapid induction of CRH gene transcription in the PVN. This effect was accompanied by a rise in plasma corticosterone levels in a doseand time-dependent manner, with the maximum response observed 30 min after MTII injection. MTII (0.5 nmol)-induced increase in plasma corticosterone was attenuated by the selective MC4R antagonist HS014 (0.25–1.0 nmol) and nonselective CRH receptor antagonist -helical-CRH9 – 41 (0.125– 0.5 nmol) in a dose-dependent manner. Moreover, the anorectic effect of MTII was evaluated at 1, 2, and 24 hr after intracerebroventricular injection. Approximately half of the inhibitory effect of MTII (0.5 nmol) on food intake was reversed by pretreatment with -helical-CRH9 – 41 at 0.25 and 0.5 nmol doses. Collectively, these results provide evidence that CRH acts as a downstream mediator of melanocortin signaling and contributes to the mechanisms by which the central melanocortin system controls feeding and neuroendocrine responses.
Health communication with parents and teachers and unhealthy behaviours in 15- to 16-year-old Swedes

ABSTRACT Background: Unhealthy behaviours during adolescence constitute a major risk for numerous diseases in adulthood. Aim: To explore the associations between multiple unhealthy behaviours in adolescents and health behaviour information communicated by their parents and teachers, how much the adolescents cared about this information and whether adolescents went to schools with an annual health-themed week or not. Methods: In this cross-sectional study, a self-reported questionnaire was delivered to pupils aged 15 and 16 (n = 492). The results were analysed using Poisson regression. Results: The number of unhealthy behaviours was lower in adolescents whose parents encouraged them to adopt healthy behaviours. Adolescents at schools with an annual health-themed week reported more unhealthy behaviours than other adolescents. In addition, attendance at such schools did not compensate for a lack of health behaviour information communicated by parents. Caring about health behaviour information communicated by parents was associated with fewer unhealthy behaviours. In contrast, the opposite was found when adolescents cared about health information communicated by teachers. Conclusion: It is important for parents to encourage their adolescent children to adopt healthy behaviours because this is particularly effective at lowering the number of unhealthy behaviours in adolescents. It also appears to be important for parents and teachers to develop credibility among adolescents regarding information communicated about health issues. The results also indicate the importance of involving parents in the school health work to influence them to encourage their adolescent children to adopt healthy behaviours.
An Algorithm For Object Removal And Image Completion Using Exemplar-Based Image Inpainting

A new method is proposed for removing large objects from digital images and filling up the hole by using background information in a visually plausible way. This problem tried to guess the leftover region from the remaining part of whole image. Previously, this problem is solved by two different methods „Texture synthesis‟ method to fill large portion of image by using sample textures and „Inpainting‟ technique for filling small gaps in image. This paper presents a robust algorithm that combines these two methods in a single, efficient manner. The main motto of Exemplar-based texture synthesis is to replicate both texture and structure and hence the success of this method is highly dependent on the order in which the feeling proceeds. This method is computationally efficient as we are using block-based sampling process instead of pixel-based one. This method works successfully on both real life and synthetic images. We get good results compare to those obtained by using existing technique.
Chaînes de Markov Triplet

The Hidden Markov Chains (HMC) are widely applied in various problems. This succes is mainly due to the fact that the hidden process can be recovered even in the case of very large set of data. These models have been recetly generalized to ‘Pairwise Markov Chains’ (PMC) model, which admit the same processing power and a better modeling one. The aim of this note is to propose further generalization called Triplet Markov Chains (TMC), in which the distribution of the couple (hidden process, observed process) is the marginal distribution of a Markov chain. Similarly to HMC, we show that posterior marginals are still calculable in Triplets Markov Chains. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition that a TMC is a PMC, which shows that the new model is strictly more general. Furthermore, a link with the Dempster–Shafer fusion is specified. To cite this article: W. Pieczynski, C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I 335 (2002) 275–278.  2002 Académie des sciences/Éditions scientifiques et médicales Elsevier SAS
The emergence of Vibrio pathogens in Europe: ecology, evolution, and pathogenesis (Paris, 11–12th March 2015)

Global change has caused a worldwide increase in reports of Vibrio-associated diseases with ecosystem-wide impacts on humans and marine animals. In Europe, higher prevalence of human infections followed regional climatic trends with outbreaks occurring during episodes of unusually warm weather. Similar patterns were also observed in Vibrio-associated diseases affecting marine organisms such as fish, bivalves and corals. Basic knowledge is still lacking on the ecology and evolutionary biology of these bacteria as well as on their virulence mechanisms. Current limitations in experimental systems to study infection and the lack of diagnostic tools still prevent a better understanding of Vibrio emergence. A major challenge is to foster cooperation between fundamental and applied research in order to investigate the consequences of pathogen emergence in natural Vibrio populations and answer federative questions that meet societal needs. Here we report the proceedings of the first European workshop dedicated to these specific goals of the Vibrio research community by connecting current knowledge to societal issues related to ocean health and food security.
DP RIETI Discussion Paper Series 07-E-035 Debt-Ridden Equilibria-A Simple Theory of Great Depressions-KOBAYASHI

The US Great Depression and Japan's Lost Decade in the 1990s are both characterized as persistent stagnations of economies with debt-ridden corporate sectors subsequent to asset-price collapses. We propose a simple model, in which increases in corporate debt, and/or fluctuations in expectations about the future state of the economy, can account for these episodes. Key ingredients are the assumptions that firms are subject to collateral constraint in borrowing their working capital, or liquidity, for financing the inputs and that firms can hold other firms' stocks as their assets and use them as collateral. That corporate stocks are used as collateral generates the following interaction between stock prices and productive efficiency: higher stock prices loosen the collateral constraint and lead to higher efficiencies in production, which in turn justify higher stock prices. We show that due to this interaction there exists a continuum of steady-state equilibria indexed by the amount of corporate debt: a steady state with a larger debt can be called a debt-ridden equilibrium, since it has more inefficient factor markets, produces less output, and is characterized by lower stock prices. There also exists indeterminacy in the equilibrium paths: since optimizations by agents alone cannot specify the path of the economy, the expectations which are exogenously given are necessary to uniquely pin down the equilibrium path. The model provides the policy implication that debt reduction in the corporate sector at the expense of consumers (or taxpayers) may be welfare-improving when firms are debt-ridden.
Gender role and personality disorders.

Many researchers have hypothesized relationships between personality disorders and gender role (i.e., masculinity and femininity). However, research has not addressed if people who are masculine or feminine more often meet the criteria for personality disorders. The present study examined whether college students (N = 665, 60% women) higher in masculinity or femininity more often exhibited features of the 10 DSM-IV personality disorders. Feminine men exhibited more features of all the personality disorders except antisocial. Dependent traits were associated with higher femininity and lower masculinity. Antisocial traits were associated with masculinity. Both men and women who typically behaved consistent with their gender had more narcissistic and histrionic features, whereas participants who typically behaved unlike their gender had more features of the Cluster A personality disorders.
Suspend-aware Segment Cleaning in Log-structured File System

The suspend feature of the modern smart device practically suppresses the background segment cleaning of the log-structured file system. In this work, we develop Suspend-aware Segment Cleaning for the log-structured file system. We seamlessly integrate the segment cleaning into the suspend module of the smartphone OS so that the log-structured file system can reclaim the free segments without interfering with the foreground user activity. The Suspend-aware Segment Cleaning consists of two key ingredients: (i) Virtual Segment Cleaning and (ii) Utilization-based Segment Cleaning. We implement Suspend-aware Segment Cleaning in commodity smartphone which uses the log-structured file system, F2FS, as its stock file system (Moto G). F2FS with Suspend-aware Segment Cleaning consolidates 6× more segments than stock smartphone does. With Suspend-aware Segment Cleaning, the F2FS consolidates 2× more segments even with suspend mode on than the case where the phone is always on.
On the Error Resiliency of Combinational Logic Cells - Implications for Nano-based Digital Design

With continuous decrease of device geometries in the nanoscale era of digital design, increasing importance is given to the reliability aspect of basic building blocks. In this context, this brief discusses the inherent fault tolerance capability of conventional logic gates before proceeding with the analysis of error immune property of a subset of combinational standard cells present in commercial digital libraries. The analysis has led to the following inferences: (i) Compared to complex-gate implementation, discrete-gate based realization of compound logic functions enables a mean improvement in the error resiliency metric by 68.2%, and (ii) the associated increase in area overhead for discrete-gate realizations as a trade-off for enhanced fault tolerance over complex gate implementations is found to be 51.6% on average.
Multi-sender Broadcast Authentication in Wireless Sensor Networks

Broadcast authentication, a fundamental feature in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), enables users to broadcast to multiple sensor nodes in an authenticated way. Symmetric-key-based μTESLA-like schemes are a popular solution due to their energy efficiency, but most schemes are not scalable (e.g. in terms of the number of senders). On the other hand, several schemes based on public key cryptography (PKC) are proposed to secure the multi-user broadcast in WSNs. However, the computation and communication overheads in the underlying PKC infrastructure restrict its implementation in resource-constrained WSNs. This paper presents an efficient scheme, which supports multi-sender broadcast authentication and allows dynamic addition of new senders. We delay disclosing the keys of the master key chain generated by the base station to authenticate the commitment of each sender's key chain. Considering that senders may be captured and compromised by adversaries in a hostile environment, our scheme also provides a mechanism to revoke the compromised senders' broadcast authentication capability.
Gene selection criterion for discriminant microarray data analysis based on extreme value distributions

An important issue commonly encountered in the analysis of microarray data is to decide which and how many genes should be selected for further studies. For discriminant microarray data analyses based on statistical models, such as the logistic regression model, this gene selection can be accomplished by a comparison of the maximum likelihood of the model given the real data, L(D|M), and the expected maximum likelihood of the model given an ensemble of surrogate data, L(D0|M). Typically, the computational burden for obtaining L(D0|M) is immense, often exceeding the limits of available resources by orders of magnitude. Here, we propose an approach that circumvents such heavy computations by mapping the simulation problem to an extreme value problem, which can be easily solved by numerical simulation. We choose three classification problems from two publicly available microarray datasets to illustrate that approach.
Effects of the Metabotropic Glutamate Receptor Antagonist MCPG on Phosphoinositide Turnover and Synaptic Plasticity in Visual Cortex

The neurotransmitter glutamate, in addition to activating ligand-gated ion channels, also stimulates phosphoinositide (PI) hydrolysis in neurons by activating a group of G-protein-coupled metabotropic glutamate receptors (mGluRs). A role for mGluRs in synaptic plasticity originally was hypothesized based on the observation that the developmental decline in glutamate-stimulated PI turnover is well correlated with the decline in experience-dependent synaptic plasticity in visual cortex. Over the past few years, the compound α-methyl-4-carboxyphenylglycine (MCPG) has been widely used to test the role of PI-coupled mGluRs in a number of types of synaptic plasticity, including long-term potentiation (LTP), long-term depression (LTD), ocular dominance plasticity in visual cortex, and the neural plasticity underlying learning and memory. The conclusions of most of these studies were based on the assumption that MCPG blocks the actions of glutamate at PI-coupled mGluRs in the cerebral cortex. Here we show that this assumption is not valid in visual cortex. Although MCPG does antagonize the actions of the synthetic mGluR agonist 1S,3R-aminocyclopentane-1,3-dicarboxylic acid, it fails to block PI turnover and changes in spike adaptation stimulated by glutamate, the endogenous mGluR ligand. In addition, we find that MCPG fails to block the NMDA receptor-dependent forms of LTP, LTD, and depotentiation in visual cortex.