Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparative Study of Different Wavelet based Image Denoising Methods

The de-noising is a challenging task in the field o f signal and image processing. Any natural image corrupted by gu ssian noise can be de-noised using wavelet method. Wavelet-based image denoising is an important technique in the area of im age noise reduction. Wavelets have their natural ability to r epresent images in a very sparse form which is the foundation of wa velet-based denoising through thresholding. The wavelet de-noising method gives various coefficients arising from discrete wa velet transform then thresholds the coefficients using proper thres holding techniques. This paper explores properties of several threshol ding techniques in wavelets denoising, such as VisuShrin k, SureShrink, BayesShrink.
Server load based prefetching strategy for P2P VoD streaming

In a peer-to-peer (P2P) video-on-demand (VoD) system, a peer can prefetch some movie data for its future needs when it is watching a movie. These prefetched movie data can also offload the servers, which is in the best interest of VoD service providers. To offload the servers effectively, which segment of a movie a peer should prefetch is an important problem. In this paper, we propose a server load based prefetching strategy to solve this problem, which aims at reducing server load. In this strategy, we propose to use the EWMA (Exponentially Weighted Moving Average) server load to determine which segment of a movie a peer should prefetch. Furthermore, we integrate this strategy into our previously proposed P2P VoD scheme. Through simulations, we demonstrate that this strategy can effectively reduce server load.
Financial Stress and Economic Activity Financial Stress and Economic Activity

This paper briefly summarizes the results presented in Claessens, Kose and Terrones (2008a, 2008b) to provide a set of basic stylized facts about the linkages between macroeconomic and financial variables during recessions and episodes of financial stress, including the periods of credit crunches and asset (house and equity) price busts. The analysis employs a comprehensive database of key macroeconomic and financial variables for 21 OECD countries over the 1960-2007 period. The results indicate that recessions following periods of financial stress are often longer and deeper than other recessions are. The paper concludes with a short discussion of the implications of its findings for the current crisis.
EXIT Charts for System Design and Analysis

Near-capacity performance may be achieved with the aid of iterative decoding, where extrinsic soft information is exchanged between the constituent decoders in order to improve the attainable system performance. Extrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) charts constitute a powerful semi-analytical tool used for analysing and designing iteratively decoded systems. In this tutorial, we commence by providing a rudimentary overview of the iterative decoding principle and the concept of soft information exchange. We then elaborate on the concept of EXIT charts using three iteratively decoded prototype systems as design examples. We conclude by illustrating further applications of EXIT charts, including near-capacity designs, the concept of irregular codes and the design of modulation schemes.
New Patterns of Crosscultural Learning in Chinese Higher Education

In the Outline of China’s National Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development (2010-2020) the Chinese government announced its intention of raising the number of inbound international students in the coming ten years. By 2020 the number was targeted to reach 500,000, which would make China the destination country attracting the largest number of international students in Asia (China Association for International Education [CAFSA] 2010). This ambition has resulted in significant changes in international student education in China. In 2010, the number of international students studying in China reached 260,000. They came from five continents, including 194 countries and regions (Ministry of Education [MOE] 2011). A total of 107,432 international students were studying for academic degrees, accounting for about 40 percent of the total of 260,000. In response to the increasing number of international students coming for degree programs, the language of instruction has also changed. China’s universities began to set up academic courses taught in English in 2006, and has gradually expanded the fields of knowledge and the number of students enrolled year by year. In 2008, the first English instruction program for graduate study in education and applied psychology was launched in China. The program is mainly delivered by Chinese faculty who are non-native English speakers in a non-English environment. It is thus an adventure in education, a learning journey that deserves exploration in depth. Here I make an attempt to present some of the issues from the perspective of international students, with a focus on their cross-cultural learning experience. A Case Study of Northern China
Ontogenetic reasoning system for autonomic logistics

Joint Strike Fighter Autonomic Logistics minimize operational and support costs by increasing system reliability, while reducing maintenance requirements to essential levels. Using Prognostics and Health Management, parts and service are ordered or performed only when needed, obviating costly routine scheduled maintenance, and reducing aircraft downtime. Realizing this vision requires communication between the aircraft, industrial contractors and suppliers, and the maintenance and support team. Management of interactions between these entities is challenging, characterized by uncertain information, and conflicting demands for resources. A system is needed to encode the knowledge of maintenance personnel, suggest corrective actions in fault conditions, and learn from previous decisions. Integration with the supply chain would free human resources for more critical decision making tasks. IAC is developing an intelligent software infrastructure to manage these complexities. This ontogenetic reasoning system features an adaptive knowledge base of maintenance information, and autonomous software agents which: (1) analyze on-board sensor and model data, and past behaviors; (2) recommended actions under dynamic and uncertain conditions; (3) manage knowledge base evolution; (4) connect maintenance activities to the supply chain; and (5) perform various communications, security and support functions. This paper presents the architectural design of the system, describes an example application scenario, and concludes with an assessment of the technical challenges in developing such a system using the multi-agent systems approach
Subsecond Induction of α4 Integrin Clustering by Immobilized Chemokines Stimulates Leukocyte Tethering and Rolling on Endothelial Vascular Cell Adhesion Molecule 1 under Flow Conditions

Leukocyte recruitment to target tissue is initiated by weak rolling attachments to vessel wall ligands followed by firm integrin-dependent arrest triggered by endothelial chemokines. We show here that immobilized chemokines can augment not only arrest but also earlier integrin-mediated capture (tethering) of lymphocytes on inflamed endothelium. Furthermore, when presented in juxtaposition to vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 (VCAM-1), the endothelial ligand for the integrin very late antigen 4 (VLA-4, alpha4beta1), chemokines rapidly augment reversible lymphocyte tethering and rolling adhesions on VCAM-1. Chemokines potentiate VLA-4 tethering within <0.1 s of contact through Gi protein signaling, the fastest inside-out integrin signaling events reported to date. Although VLA-4 affinity is not altered upon chemokine signaling, subsecond VLA-4 clustering at the leukocyte-substrate contact zone results in enhanced leukocyte avidity to VCAM-1. Endothelial chemokines thus regulate all steps in adhesive cascades that control leukocyte recruitment at specific vascular beds.
Security and privacy for in-vehicle networks

Mobile devices such as smartphones have gained more and more attention from security researchers and malware authors, the latter frequently attacking those platforms and stealing personal information. Vehicle on-board networks, in particular infotainment systems, are increasingly connected with such mobile devices and the internet and will soon make it possible to load and install third party applications. This makes them susceptible to new attacks similar to those which plague mobile phones and personal computers. The breach of privacy is equally sensitive in the vehicular domain. Even worse, broken security is a serious threat to car safety. In this paper, we show how traditional automotive communication systems can be instrumented with taint tracking tools in a security framework that allows to dynamically monitor data flows within and between control units to achieve elevated security and privacy.
On Intrinsic Magnetic Moments in Black Hole Candidates

In previous work, we found that many of the spectral properties of low-mass X-ray binaries, including galactic black hole candidates, could be explained by a magnetic propeller model that requires an intrinsically magnetized central object. Here we describe how the Einstein field equations of general relativity and equipartition magnetic fields permit the existence of highly redshifted, extremely long-lived collapsing radiating objects. We examine the properties of these collapsed objects and discuss characteristics that might lead to their confirmation as the source of black hole candidate phenomena.
Detection of electrical stimulation position in recorded surgery videos of cortical mapping in awake brain surgery

Awake brain surgery is performed for the purpose of preserving brain functions and removing brain tumors as possible when the tumors are in or near the eloquent area like the language area and the motor area. In this surgery, detecting functionally essential cortical areas is important process which is performed with direct electrical stimulation using an electrode by surgeons, and this process is called cortical mapping. Cortical mapping requires sophisticated techniques of surgeons because it needs a lot of experience and knowledge for selecting electrical stimulation position and current intensity. Hence it is needed to extract techniques of expert surgeons by analyzing recorded surgery videos performed by expert surgeons. Surgery videos recoded during operations, however, are not suitable for analysis due to these videos are recorded for postoperative evaluation. Then tagging specific scenes like electrical stimulation has been performed in manual with a lot of labor. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method to automatically detect the position of electrical stimulation in surgery videos of cortical mapping. The proposed method employs the shape characteristics of an electrode, a classifier using Real AdaBoost and a tracking using mean-shift algorithm. We apply the proposed method to three different recorded surgery videos, and experimental results show that our method detects the tip of an electrode with high accuracy.
Influence of the 2006 Indonesian biomass burning aerosols on tropical dynamics studied with the GEOS-5 AGCM

[1] The direct and semidirect effects of aerosols produced by Indonesian biomass burning (BB) during August–November 2006 on tropical dynamics have been examined using NASA's Goddard Earth Observing System, version 5, (GEOS-5) atmospheric general circulation model (AGCM). Simulations were driven by two sets of aerosol forcing fields calculated offline by a separate aerosol transport model, one that included Indonesian BB aerosol emissions and one that did not. In order to separate the influence of the aerosols from internal model variability, the means of two ten-member ensembles were compared. Diabatic heating from BB aerosols increased temperatures over Indonesia between 150 and 400 hPa. The higher temperatures resulted in strong increases in upward grid-scale vertical motion, which increased water vapor and CO over Indonesia. In October, the largest increases in water vapor were found in the midtroposphere (∼25%) while the largest increases in CO occurred just below the tropopause (80 ppbv or ∼50%). Diabatic heating from the Indonesian BB aerosols caused CO to increase by 9% throughout the tropical tropopause layer in November and 5% in the lower stratosphere in December. The results demonstrate that aerosol heating plays an important role in the transport of BB pollution and troposphere-to-stratosphere transport. Changes in vertical motion and cloudiness induced by aerosol heating can also alter the transport and phase of water vapor in the upper troposphere/lower stratosphere.
Simulation Research of Nonbinary LDPC Code Based on Finite Fields

The encoding and decoding of binary LDPC codes are expanded using characteristics of the Finite Fields concept, a nonbinary LDPC code encoding and decoding method based on the Finite Fields are investigated and the computational complexity of this algorithm is estimated, providing a foundation for the practical applications of this method. Then this algorithm is compared with the binary algorithm. The results show that its performance is superior to the binary BP iterative algorithm. Finally, the effects of the relevant factors such as the number of iterations selected, the structure of the check matrix etc on the algorithm performance were analyzed.
Testing of Web Services: Tools and Experiments

Web services are the element based in SOA (i.e., Service Oriented Architecture) applications that are commonly used in software systems. However the validation problem on quality of web services via testing has to be improved. This paper presents two tools for conformance testing of web services. One tool for unit testing that is implemented by an on-line approach. This tool can be used to test a web service-based and/or an orchestration by simulating its partners. The other focuses on verification of a timed trace with respect to a set of constraints. Specially, we can use this tool to verify on-line or off-line a timed trace. Finally, we show our experiments on a real-life case study, Product Retriever, by combining the two tools.
Phase-Shifter Design Using Phase-Slope Alignment With Grounded Shunt $\lambda/4$  Stubs

This paper presents the theory and a design method for distributed digital phase shifters, where both the phase-error bandwidth and the return-loss bandwidth are considered simultaneously. The proposed topology of each phase bit consists of a transmission-line (TL) branch and a bandpass filter (BPF) branch. The BPF branch uses grounded shunt λ/4 stubs to achieve phase alignment with the insertion phase of the TL branch. By increasing the number of transmission poles of the BPF branch, the return-loss bandwidth can be increased. Analysis of the BPF topology with one, two, and three transmission poles is provided. The design parameters for 22.5° , 45° , 90° , and 180° are provided for bandwidths of 30%, 50%, 67%, and 100%. The relations between phase error, return loss, and maximum achievable phase shift are shown for the three topologies for design purposes. The methodology is also applicable to bandwidths larger than 100%. To validate the method, four separate L-band phase bits (1-2 GHz) are designed and measured. A complete 4-bit phase shifter with single-pole double-throw switches is then designed and measured. The measured rms phase error of the phase shifter is less than 3.6 °, while the return loss is larger than 15 dB from 1.06 to 1.95 GHz for all 16 phase states.
Coactive Learning for Distributed Data Mining

We introduce coactive learning as a distributed learning approach to data mining in networked and distributed databases. The coactive learning algorithms act on independent data sets and cooperate by communicating training information, which is used to guide the algorithms' hypothesis construction. The exchanged training information is limited to examples and responses to examples. It is shown that coactive learning can offer a solution to learning on very large data sets by allowing multiple coacting algorithms to learn in parallel on subsets of the data, even if the subsets are distributed over a network. Coactive learning supports the construction of global concept descriptions even when the individual learning algorithms are provided with training sets having biased class distributions. Finally, the capabilities of coactive learning are demonstrated on artificial noisy domains, and on real world domain data with sparse class representation and unknown attribute values.
Nicotine patches in pregnant smokers: randomised, placebo controlled, multicentre trial of efficacy

Objective To determine the efficacy of 16 hour nicotine patches among pregnant smokers, with the dose individually adjusted according to saliva cotinine levels (potential range 10-30 mg/day). Design Randomised, double blind, placebo controlled, parallel group, multicentre trial (Study of Nicotine Patch in Pregnancy, SNIPP) between October 2007 and January 2013. Setting 23 maternity wards in France. Participants 476 pregnant smokers aged more than 18 years and between 12 and 20 weeks’ gestation, who smoked at least five cigarettes a day. After exclusions, 402 women were randomised: 203 to nicotine patches and 199 to placebo patches. Data were available on 192 live births in each group. Interventions Nicotine and identical placebo patches were administered from quit day up to the time of delivery. Doses were adjusted to saliva cotinine levels when smoking to yield a substitution rate of 100%. Participants were assessed monthly and received behavioural smoking cessation support. Main outcome measures The primary outcomes were complete abstinence (self report confirmed by carbon monoxide level in expired air ≤8 ppm) from quit date to delivery, and birth weight. The secondary outcomes were point prevalence of abstinence, time to lapse (a few puffs) or relapse, and delivery and birth characteristics. All data were analysed on an intention to treat basis. Results Complete abstinence was achieved by 5.5% (n=11) of women in the nicotine patch group and 5.1% (n=10) in the placebo patch group (odds ratio 1.08, 95% confidence interval 0.45 to 2.60). The median time to the first cigarette smoked after target quit day was 15 days in both groups (interquartile range 13-18 in the nicotine patch group, 13-20 in the placebo patch group). The point prevalence abstinence ranged from 8% to 12.5% in the nicotine patch group and 8% to 9.5% in the placebo patch group without statistically significant differences. The nicotine substitution rate did not differ from 100%, and the self reported median compliance rate was 85% (interquartile range 56-99%) in the nicotine patch group and 83% (56-95%) in the placebo patch group, assessed at 1016 visits. The mean birth weight was 3065 g (SE 44 g) in the nicotine patch group and 3015 g (SE 44 g) in the placebo patch group (P=0.41). Diastolic blood pressure was significantly higher in the nicotine patch group than in the placebo patch group. The frequency of serious adverse events was similar between the groups, although more non-serious adverse reactions, mainly of skin, occurred in the nicotine patch group. Conclusion The nicotine patch did not increase either smoking cessation rates or birth weights despite adjustment of nicotine dose to match levels attained when smoking, and higher than usual doses. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT00507975.
Consecutive Support: Better Be Close!

We propose a new measure of support (the number of occur- rences of a pattern), in which instances are more important if they occur with a certain frequency and close after each other in the stream of trans- actions. We will explain this new consecutive support and discuss how patterns can be found faster by pruning the search space, for instance using so-called parent support recalculation. Both consecutiveness and the notion of hypercliques are incorporated into the Eclat algorithm. Synthetic examples show how interesting phenomena can now be discov- ered in the datasets. The new measure can be applied in many areas, ranging from bio-informatics to trade, supermarkets, and even law en- forcement. E.g., in bio-informatics it is important to find patterns con- tained in many individuals, where patterns close together in one chro- mosome are more significant.
Studying the User Experience with a Multimodal Pedestrian Navigation Assistant

The widespread usage of mobile devices together with their computational capabilities enables the implementation of novel interaction techniques to improve user performance in traditional mobile applications. Navigation assistance is an important area in the mobile domain, and probably Google Maps is the most popular example. This type of applications is highly demanding for userâs attention, especially in the visual channel. Tactile and auditory feedback have been studied as alternatives to visual feedback for navigation assistance to reduce this dependency. However, there is still room for improvement and more research is needed to understand, for example, how the three feedback modalities complement each other, especially with the appearance of new technology such as smart watches and new displays such as Google Glass. The goal of our work is to study how the users perceives multimodal feedback when their route is augmented with directional cues. Our results show that tactile guidance cues produced the worst user performance, both objectively and subjectively. Participants reported that vibration patterns were hard to decode. However, tactile feedback was an unobtrusive technique to inform participants when to look to the mobile screen or listen to the spoken directions. The results show that combining feedback modalities produces good user performance.
Modeling household and community transmission of Ebola virus disease: Epidemic growth, spatial dynamics and insights for epidemic control

The mechanisms behind the sub-exponential growth dynamics of the West Africa Ebola virus disease epidemic could be related to improved control of the epidemic and the result of reduced disease transmission in spatially constrained contact structures. An individual-based, stochastic network model is used to model immediate and delayed epidemic control in the context of social contact networks and investigate the extent to which the relative role of these factors may be determined during an outbreak. We find that in general, epidemics quickly establish a dynamic equilibrium of infections in the form of a wave of fixed size and speed traveling through the contact network. Both greater epidemic control and limited community mixing decrease the size of an infectious wave. However, for a fixed wave size, epidemic control (in contrast with limited community mixing) results in lower community saturation and a wave that moves more quickly through the contact network. We also found that the level of epidemic control has a disproportionately greater reductive effect on larger waves, so that a small wave requires nearly as much epidemic control as a larger wave to end an epidemic.
An Examination of Push and Pull Motivation of tourist Visit Tourist Attraction in Lembang

This study aims to identify the travel motivation of tourists visiting tourist attractions in Lembang. Motivation is a basic of tourists travel that is influenced by the push and pull motivation. The push motivation is a factor that comes from within the tourists, while the pull motivation comes from the characteristics of the destination. The method used is non-probability sampling. Used also accidental sampling. The questionnaires were distributed to tourists who are visiting tourism attraction in Lembang. A total of 333 respondents were used for further analysis. An exploratory factor analysis was carried out to identify new factors of push and pull motivation. The results show that there are four new factors of push motivation and three new factors of pull motivation of tourists visited Lembang. This result suggests that local tourism authority should consider the motivation factors to attract more tourists visit to Lembang.