Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clowns to the Left of me, Jokers to the Right Dissecting Data Structures

This paper, submitted as a ‘pearl’, introduces a small but useful generalisation to the ‘derivative’ operation on datatypes underlying Huet’s notion of ‘zipper’ (Huet 1997; McBride 2001; Abbott et al. 2005b), giving a concrete representation to one-hole contexts in data which is in mid-transformation . This operator, ‘dissection’, turns a container-like functor into a bifunctor representing a one-hole context in which elements to the left of the hole are distinguished in type from elements to its right. I present dissection for polynomial functors, although it is certainly more general, preferring to concentrate here on its diverse applications. For a start, map-like operations over the functor and fold-like operations over the recursive data structure it induces can be expressed by tail recursion alone. Moreover, the derivative is readily recovered from the dissection, along with Huet’s navigation operations. A further special case of dissection, ‘division’, captures the notion of leftmost hole, canonically distinguishing values with no elements from those with at least one. By way of a more practical example, division and dissection are exploited to give a relatively efﬁcient generic algorithm for abstracting all occurrences of one term from another in a ﬁrst-order syntax. The source code for the paper is available online 1 and compiles with recent extensions to the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.
Scalable Computation of Regularized Precision Matrices via Stochastic Optimization

We consider the problem of computing a positive definite $p \times p$ inverse covariance matrix aka precision matrix $\theta=(\theta_{ij})$ which optimizes a regularized Gaussian maximum likelihood problem, with the elastic-net regularizer $\sum_{i,j=1}^{p} \lambda (\alpha|\theta_{ij}| + \frac{1}{2}(1- \alpha) \theta_{ij}^2),$ with regularization parameters $\alpha \in [0,1]$ and $\lambda>0$. The associated convex semidefinite optimization problem is notoriously difficult to scale to large problems and has demanded significant attention over the past several years. We propose a new algorithmic framework based on stochastic proximal optimization (on the primal problem) that can be used to obtain near optimal solutions with substantial computational savings over deterministic algorithms. A key challenge of our work stems from the fact that the optimization problem being investigated does not satisfy the usual assumptions required by stochastic gradient methods. Our proposal has (a) computational guarantees and (b) scales well to large problems, even if the solution is not too sparse; thereby, enhancing the scope of regularized maximum likelihood problems to many large-scale problems of contemporary interest. An important aspect of our proposal is to bypass the \emph{deterministic} computation of a matrix inverse by drawing random samples from a suitable multivariate Gaussian distribution.
The Objectives of Corporate Restructuring in Dynamic and Turbulent Markets

Background. The article discusses the problem of making effective restructuring measures, which at times of dynamic and turbulent changes, including those caused by the economic crisis, are considered an important element in achieving and maintaining a strong competitive position. This issue particularly affects Polish enterprises that are forced, beyond competing in local markets, to adapt to the new conditions resulting from the ongoing globalization process. In this article are presented different types of restructuring, both at the micro and macro scale and also the most important stages of restructuring are discussed, bearing in mind that the choice of the type of restructuring strictly determines the scope of the restructuring measures, which the enterprise should apply in order to achieve its target. Apart from that, each restructuring decision should be preceded by a detailed examination of the potential results that will bring this type of action. Research aims. The aim of the research is to identify the approach of Polish companies to the restructuring process. Method. The authors conducted a literature review and a survey among Polish enterprises. The survey was conducted in 2012 among 50 Polish companies. Key findings. The results obtained by the authors of the studies in the field of restructuring directions indicate that the choices made in relation to the restructuring activities should not be limited only to the period of economic downturn and the crisis, but most of all foresee the future. As a result, it is necessary to change the attitude of Polish enterprises to the process of restructuring just in order to be considered in the category of development activities and not remedial.
The effect of speech rhythm and speaking rate on assessment of pronunciation in a second language

Abstract The study explores the effect of deviations from native speech rhythm and rate norms on the assessement of pronunciation mastery of a second language (L2) when the native language of the learner is either rhythmically similar to or different from the target language. Using the concatenative speech synthesis technique, different versions of the same sentence were created in order to produce segmentally and intonationally identical utterances that differed only in rhythmic patterns and/or speaking rate. Speech rhythm and tempo patterns modeled those from the speech of French or German native learners of English at different proficiency levels. Native British English speakers rated the original sentences and the synthesized utterances for accentedness. The analysis shows that (a) differences in speech rhythm and speaking tempo influence the perception of accentedness; (b) idiosyncratic differences in speech rhythm and speech rate are sufficient to differentiate between the proficiency levels of L2 learners; (c) the relative salience of rhythm and rate on perceived accentedness in L2 speech is modulated by the native language of the learners; and (d) intonation facilitates the perception of finer differences in speech rhythm between otherwise identical utterances. These results emphasize the importance of prosodic timing patterns for the perception of speech delivered by L2 learners.
B2L: a case for buffered and bufferless hybrid NoCs

A NoC is a critical shared resource among these concurrently-executing applications, significantly affecting system performance, and energy efficiency. In this paper, we propose B2L, a buffered and bufferless hybrid NoC design that can satisfy application's performance requirements, while the system's energy consumption is minimized. This can be achieved by designing a dedicated buffered and bufferless NoC separately, and dynamically control flits from different apps or within the same app to flow across the two networks according to application's requirement and network status.
A Keyword-Set Search System for Peer-to-Peer Networks

The Keyword-Set Search System (KSS) is a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) keyword search system that uses a distributed inverted index. The main challenge in a distributed index and search system is finding the right scheme to partition the index across the nodes in the network. The most obvious scheme would be to partition the index by keyword. A keyword partitioned index requires that the list of index entries for each keyword in a search be retrieved, so all the lists can be joined; only a few nodes need to be contacted, but each sends a potentially large amount of data. In KSS, the index is partitioned by sets of keywords. KSS builds an inverted index that maps each set of keywords to a list of all the documents that contain the words in the keyword-set. When a user issues a query, the keywords in the query are divided into sets of keywords. The document list for each set of keywords is then fetched from the network. The lists are intersected to compute the list of matching documents. The list of index entries for each set of words is smaller than the list of entries for each word. Thus search using KSS results in a smaller query time overhead. Preliminary experiments using traces of real user queries show that the keywordset approach is more efficient than a standard inverted index in terms of communication costs for query. Insert overhead for KSS grows exponentially as the size of the keyword-set used to generate the keys for index entries. The query overhead for the target application (metadata search in a music file sharing system) is reduced to the result of the query as no intermediate lists are transferred across the network for the join operation. Given our assumption that free disk space is plenty, and queries are more frequent than insertions in P2P systems, we believe this is a good tradeoff. Thesis Supervisor: M. Frans Kaashoek Title: Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Seed Priming A Technique

Insufficient seedling emergence and inappropriate stand establishment are the main constraints in areas receiving less rainfall. Management of soil texture and soil structure is a big challenge in semi-arid regions. Poor farmers do not have sufficient resources to meet the requirements of fine seedbed preparation for sowing and they are at more risk as compared to progressive farmers. On the other hand, good establishment increases competitiveness against weeds, increases tolerance to drought periods, increases yields and avoids the time-consuming need for re-sowing that is costly too. It is well accepted fact that priming improves germination, reduces seedling emergence time and improves stand establishment. It is a simple, low-cost, easily performable; on-farm seed priming can, if refined and developed by ensuring the farmer participation, make a good impression on farmers livelihoods enhancing the crop emergence rate, thus increasing rates of crop development, decreasing the total crop duration and getting higher productivity. A lot of work has been done on seed priming and results of these studies indicate well the importance of priming to get a good crop stand and final emergence. On-farm seed priming (Hydro-priming) can significantly be helpful in order to obtain good crop establishment in many crops of tropical region such as sorghum, rice, maize and pigeon pea. Inducing resistance against stresses like drought stress, heat stress etc. is one of the prominent advantages of seed priming in many important field crops.
Varieties of Conscious Experience and the Subjective Awareness of One’s “True” Self

The subjective awareness of one’s true self is considered a fundamental aspect of authenticity. It is theorized to reflect an experienced disconnect between one’s conscious awareness and actual experiences. In this brief review, I describe some of the early theorizing on the construct and the research that this theorizing has inspired. I then review an emerging direction of research specifically focused on the relationship between subjective feelings of being disconnected from one’s true self and tendencies to become mentally detached from present experience (i.e., mindwandering). This work offers new insights into the nature of subjective true self-awareness; it elucidates for the first time how disruptions to people’s ongoing mental connection to present experience relate to the experience of true self-awareness and it invites theorizing about aspects of authenticity in ways that do not require evaluations of a self-concept. I end the review by speculating on how this work might inspire new empirical and theoretical directions in the psychological study of authenticity and feelings of true self-awareness.
A comparison of absolute performance of different correlative and mechanistic species distribution models in an independent area

Abstract To investigate the comparative abilities of six different bioclimatic models in an independent area, utilizing the distribution of eight different species available at a global scale and in Australia. Global scale and Australia. We tested a variety of bioclimatic models for eight different plant species employing five discriminatory correlative species distribution models (SDMs) including Generalized Linear Model (GLM), MaxEnt, Random Forest (RF), Boosted Regression Tree (BRT), Bioclim, together with CLIMEX (CL) as a mechanistic niche model. These models were fitted using a training dataset of available global data, but with the exclusion of Australian locations. The capabilities of these techniques in projecting suitable climate, based on independent records for these species in Australia, were compared. Thus, Australia is not used to calibrate the models and therefore it is as an independent area regarding geographic locations. To assess and compare performance, we utilized the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves (AUC), true skill statistic (TSS), and fractional predicted areas for all SDMs. In addition, we assessed satisfactory agreements between the outputs of the six different bioclimatic models, for all eight species in Australia. The modeling method impacted on potential distribution predictions under current climate. However, the utilization of sensitivity and the fractional predicted areas showed that GLM, MaxEnt, Bioclim, and CL had the highest sensitivity for Australian climate conditions. Bioclim calculated the highest fractional predicted area of an independent area, while RF and BRT were poor. For many applications, it is difficult to decide which bioclimatic model to use. This research shows that variable results are obtained using different SDMs in an independent area. This research also shows that the SDMs produce different results for different species; for example, Bioclim may not be good for one species but works better for other species. Also, when projecting a “large” number of species into novel environments or in an independent area, the selection of the “best” model/technique is often less reliable than an ensemble modeling approach. In addition, it is vital to understand the accuracy of SDMs' predictions. Further, while TSS, together with fractional predicted areas, are appropriate tools for the measurement of accuracy between model results, particularly when undertaking projections on an independent area, AUC has been proved not to be. Our study highlights that each one of these models (CL, Bioclim, GLM, MaxEnt, BRT, and RF) provides slightly different results on projections and that it may be safer to use an ensemble of models.
Minimum variance block-based nonnegative matrix factorization algorithm for hyperspectral unmixing

In this paper, we present a new minimum variance constrained nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm using the block principal pivoting optimization strategy for hyperspectral unmixing, named MVBPP. The proposed approach has two advantages. One is that the BPP-based NMF algorithm has shown good convergence property and better computational speed than other NMF ones. The other is that the proposed approach does not need the existence assumption of pure pixel of each endmember in the scene. Experimental results on highly mixed synthetic data confirm the accuracy of the developed algorithm.
Computational demands for laser/tissue interaction modeling

As a consequence of the needs to solve expensive simulations that include time dependent partial differential equations solutions in short time intervals, laser/tissue interaction modelling has a high, implicit and natural computational demand. Another kind of demand that must be considered is for graphical representation and exploratory analysis of the results. For the first problem, we have used the simulation case of light generation on a semiconductor laser, to derive a novel scheme to solve the computational problem using parallel computers. The solution gets high efficiency and scales well in a message-passing parallel architecture. For graphical demands and in order to make the modelling task easier and less expensive, we have developed a library of functions that can be used to build high quality graphical interfaces.
Idefix insulator activity can be modulated by nearby regulatory elements

Insulators play important roles in controlling gene activity and maintaining regulatory independence between neighbouring genes. In this article, we show that the enhancer-blocking activity of the insulator present within the LTR retrotransposon Idefix can be abolished if two copies of the region containing the insulator—specifically, the long terminal repeat (LTR)—are fused to the retrotransposon's 5′ untranslated region (5′ UTR). The presence of this combination of two [LTR-5′ UTR] modules is a prerequisite for the loss of enhancer-blocking activity. We further show that the 5′ UTR causes flanking genomic sequences to be displaced to the nuclear periphery, which is not observed when two insulators are present by themselves. This study thus provides a functional link between insulators and independent genomic modules, which may cooperate to allow the specific regulation of defined genomic loci via nuclear repositioning. It further illustrates the complexity of genomic regulation within a chromatic environment with multiple functional elements.
Plasma lipid transfer proteins.

The plasma lipid transfer proteins mediate the transfer and exchange of phospholipids and neutral lipids between the plasma lipoproteins. The cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) and the phospholipid transfer protein (PLTP) are members of the lipid transfer/lipopolysaccharide binding gene family. The CETP contains binding sites for cholesteryl ester and triglycerides and probably acts by a carrier-mediated mechanism. The CETP mediates catabolism of HDL cholesteryl esters, with secondary decreases in HDL size and protein content. The CETP plays a central role in reverse cholesterol transport i.e. the centripetal movement of cholesterol from the periphery back to the liver. CETP gene expression is upregulated in response to increased dietary cholesterol or endogenous hypercholesterolemia. Although CETP reduces HDL levels, its role in reverse cholesterol transport suggests a dominant anti-atherogenic action in vivo.
Rapid Processing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Imagery for Disaster Management

SUMMARY The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in civilian applications has increased greatly over the last few years. Especially for small area coverage, such a system has the advantages of being more flexible, rapid, efficient, and weath er independent when compared to standard airborne aerial surveys. Of high interest is their application in the acquisition of aerial imagery for post-disaster assessment where accessibility to current and accurate spatial information is critical for the effective response to a crisis by the relevant agencies. This use of UAVs calls for near-real time processin g of the images to create orthophoto mosaics. However, many commercial systems are incapable of performing automatic image matching on UAV imagery due to the high variability present in the image scenes. This paper presents a method for the automatic generation of o rthophoto mosaics using Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) approach for the automatic keypoint detection and matching problem. The proposed workflow makes use of efficient and robust algorithms to achieve a method that will meet the needs of the near real-ti me requirements. The results of this paper demonstrate a suitable ap proach to the automated processing of UAV images and further promote the applicability of this technology to the acquisition of geospatial data for natural hazard and disaster man agement.
SNJoin – A Scalable Join in Sensor-Network PhenomenaBases

A phenomenon appears in a sensor network when a group of senso r continuously generate a similar behavior over a period of time. PhenomenaBases (or datab ases of phenomena) are equipped with Phenomena Detection and Tracking (PDT) techniques that continuously run in the background of a sen sor database system to detect and track phenomena. The proce ss f phenomena detection and tracking depends mainly on a multi-way join operator which is at the co re of PDT techniques to report similar sensor readings. With the increase in the sensor network siz e and to address periods of heavy loads, the join operator and, consequently, query processing in the Ph nomenaBase face several challenges. In this paper, we present a new join operator for PhenomenaBase s calledSNJointhat is specially-designed for dynamically-configured large-scale sensor networks wi th d stributed processing capabilities. In particular, SNJoin introduces a new concept of join called vari able-arity join that is best suited for PhenomenaBases. Variable-arity join reduces the number of pro bes that would have been necessary in a multi-way join. SNJoin allows the join to be performed at the sensor level and integrates query processing with relevance feedback to prune further the sensors to b e probed to those only that are relevant to
Evaluation approaches of information systems service quality

This paper has built a new evaluation approach (called SQ-Atten) based on summary and comparative study of the four traditional service quality assessment instruments. SQ-Atten has a new term attention, which has similar function with zone of tolerance (ZOT). It can analyze the users' satisfaction using the score of attention and performance, and has less difficult than that of ZOT in collecting data. It has data predictive ability and richer data than SERVPERF. Also, it measures the same 44 items as SERVQUAL, but has higher data reliability because of without measuring expectation and difference operation.
TCP/IP protocol utilisation in process of dynamic control of robotic cell according industry 4.0 concept

Communication and possibilities of flexible manufacturing systems control through a variety of communication protocols are described in this article. The main core of the article is to design robotic cells control by using the standard Ethernet (non-RT) while maintaining safety and quality of production, and the system is able to dynamically respond to changes in the production process. The core of the practical part is to design communication via the TCP/IP and socket technology, robot software design and the result of trials performed under real conditions in a heterogeneous environment of the production line with multiple types of robots and conveyor belt.
Move&flick: design and evaluation of a single-finger and eyes-free kana-character entry method on touch screens

We introduce a Japanese Kana-character entry method on touch screens for visually impaired people. Our proposal, "Move&Flick," allows the user to move a single finger in any of eight directions twice without lifting the finger on the screen to select a character; lifting the finger decides the character. The method uses radial areas with dead zones to detect each of the eight movement directions. An experiment shows that the dead zones and voice feedback let the user acquire proper finger directions in an easy learning process. The method also has an algorithm to correctly detect the change point from the first movement direction to the second movement direction. We evaluate Move&Flick in an experiment with visually impaired subjects and confirm that Move&Flick works well.
Real-time transmission experiments for the FDMA-PON conceived within FABULOUS european project

The FABULOUS EU project proposes a solution for NG-PON2 based on a WDM FDM/FDMA approach, and aims at realizing a fully integrated silicon-photonics ONU. The effectiveness of the architecture is being proven with discrete components, and in this paper we report about the preliminary results achieved with real-time traffic transmission.