Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A formal statistical test for the number of factors in the approximate factor models

In this paper we study i.i. d. sequences of n 1 vectors Xt; t = 1; :::; T such that, for each t; Xt has an approximate factor structure with correlated Gaussian idiosyncratic terms. We develop a test of the null of r factors vs. the alternative that the number of factors is larger than k but smaller than kmax+1; where kmax is an a priori maximum number of factors. Our test statistic is equal to the ratio of k+1 kmax+1 to kmax+1 kmax+2; where i is the i-th largest eigenvalue of the sample covariance matrix 1 T PT t=1XtX 0 t:We describe the asymptotic distribution of the test statistic as n and T go to in nity proportionally as a function of the Tracy-Widom distribution. We tabulate the critical values of the test corresponding to k and kmax relevant for nancial and macroeconomic applications. As an application, we test di¤erent hypotheses about the number of factors in arbitrage pricing theory. We reject the nulls of no or a single factor against alternatives of more than one factors by the test of 5%-level. We cannot reject the null of 5 factors by the 5%-level test.
STARS - A Ubiquitous Computing Platform for Computer Augmented Tabletop Games

In this video presentation we demonstrate the STARS platform for realizing computer augmented tabletop games within a smart Roomware® environment. STARS dynamically couples multiple types of interaction devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) or headsets with an interactive game table. STARS augmented tabletop games provide a number of feat ures like dynamic game boards or private communication channels that go beyond traditional tabletop games, but at the same time preserve the human centered interaction dynamics which makes playing board games a joyful group experience.
Knowledge and Information Systems REGULAR PAPER

Information service plays a key role in grid system, handles resource discovery and management process. Employing existing information service architectures suffers from poor scalability, long search response time, and large traffic overhead. In this paper, we propose a service club mechanism, called SClub, for efficient service discovery. In S-Club, an overlay based on existing Grid Information Service (GIS) mesh network of CROWN is built, so that GISs are organized as service clubs. Each club serves for a certain type of service while each GIS may join one or more clubs. S-Club is adopted in our CROWN Grid and the performance of S-Club is evaluated by comprehensive simulations. The results show that S-Club scheme significantly improves search performance and outperforms existing approaches.
Multiobjective Bayesian Optimization for Active Load Modulation in a Broadband 20-W GaN Doherty Power Amplifier Design

This paper proposes a multiobjective Bayesian optimization strategy to deal with the complex matching problem of designing a broadband 20-W gallium nitride Doherty power amplifier (DPA). Applying the proposed method, the DPA’s matching networks are optimized to align the desired and the realized impedance trajectories both at saturation and power backoff from 1.5 to 2.4 GHz. By combining a programming environment with the commercial electronic design automation (EDA) software, the optimization process is implemented automatically. Comparison designs reveal that the proposed method outperforms the built-in optimizer of the commercial EDA software for broadband DPA designs. When tested with a single-carrier 20 MHz long-term evolution signal, the measured results show that the DPA achieves an average efficiency of 45.3%–53.6% at 7 dB backoff across the band, with the adjacent channel power ratio levels better than −45.6 dBc after using digital predistortion.
Direct Code Access in Self-Organizing Neural Networks for Reinforcement Learning

TD-FALCON is a self-organizing neural network that incorporates Temporal Difference (TD) methods for reinforcement learning. Despite the advantages of fast and stable learning, TD-FALCON still relies on an iterative process to evaluate each available action in a decision cycle. To remove this deficiency, this paper presents a direct code access procedure whereby TD-FALCON conducts instantaneous searches for cognitive nodes that match with the current states and at the same time providemaximal reward values. Our comparative experiments show that TD-FALCON with direct code access produces comparable performance with the original TD-FALCON while improving significantly in computation efficiency and network complexity.
Transforming trees into hedges and parsing with “hedgebank” grammars

Finite-state chunking and tagging methods are very fast for annotating nonhierarchical syntactic information, and are often applied in applications that do not require full syntactic analyses. Scenarios such as incremental machine translation may benefit from some degree of hierarchical syntactic analysis without requiring fully connected parses. We introduce hedge parsing as an approach to recovering constituents of length up to some maximum span L. This approach improves efficiency by bounding constituent size, and allows for efficient segmentation strategies prior to parsing. Unlike shallow parsing methods, hedge parsing yields internal hierarchical structure of phrases within its span bound. We present the approach and some initial experiments on different inference strategies.
Slack: A New Performance Metric for Parallel Programs

Critical Path Profiling is a technique that provides guidance to help programmers try to improve the running time of their program. However, Critical Path Profiling provides only an upper bound estimate of the improvement possible in a parallel program execution. In this paper, we present a new metric, called Slack , to complement Critical Path and provide additional information to parallel programmers about the potential impact of making improvements along the critical path.
Camera calibration based on Extended Kalman Filter using robot's arm motion

This paper presents a camera calibration method that could be used in humanoid robot vision system. Extended Kalman Filter is used to estimate camera parameters. This method can take planer board feature points of the image or the object's 3D axis as inputs when doing known motion, test results show this algorithm can get good results. If the camera parameters are known, the relationship between a reference coordinate system and camera coordinate system can not get in high precision, in this paper, a method based on the arm motion is discussed.
A Non-Intrusive Approach to Gaze Estimation

Human eye tracking and gaze estimation is a new technology which acts as an interface between the user and the computer. Its main goal is to determine where a user is looking on the computer screen. Numerous methods have been developed to accomplish this task. However, they need expensive and proprietary hardware, or require the user to wear a device on his/her head, or place limitations on the user’s head movement. In this paper, we propose an inexpensive and non-intrusive algorithm to estimate the eye gaze on the computer screen. The proposed algorithm can quickly determine the glints and pupils of the user under normal lighting conditions and estimate the gaze of the user by a pretrained scaled conjugate gradient based neural network. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the promising robustness of the algorithm on estimating the gaze of users under normal lighting conditions and with moderate head movement, regardless of whether users wear glasses or contacts.
Improving the effectiveness of spectra-based fault localization using specifications

Fault localization i.e., locating faulty lines of code, is a key step in removing bugs and often requires substantial manual effort. Recent years have seen many automated localization techniques, specifically using the program's passing and failing test runs, i.e., test spectra. However, the effectiveness of these approaches is sensitive to factors such as the type and number of faults, and the quality of the test-suite. This paper presents a novel technique that applies spectra-based localization in synergy with specification-based analysis to more accurately locate faults. Our insight is that unsatisfiability analysis of violated specifications, enabled by SAT technology, could be used to (1) compute unsatisfiable cores that contain likely faulty statements and (2) generate tests that help spectra-based localization. Our technique is iterative and driven by a feedback loop that enables more precise fault localization. SAT-TAR is a framework that embodies our technique for Java programs, including those with multiple faults. An experimental evaluation using a suite of widely-studied data structure programs, including the ANTLR and JTopas parser applications, shows that our technique localizes faults more accurately than state-of-the-art approaches.
HON-P2P: a cluster-based hybrid overlay network for multimedia object management

Multimedia centric P2P must take into consideration the main characteristics and the complex relationships among multimedia objects. In this paper, we propose a cluster-based hybrid overlay network HON-P2P for sharing multimedia content. It consists in clustering peers with similar feature based or semantic properties. We define two types of clustering methods corresponding to the semantic and feature based overlays: semantic clustering and feature based clustering. To improve the information retrieval in the HON-P2P network we propose a multimedia cache management methodology. Semantic multimedia cache and feature based multimedia cache are defined for each type of overlay. Moreover, we study the cache placement possibilities inside the cluster and we propose a cache distribution technique taking into account peers capabilities and range query.
Mentors for beginning teachers as middle leaders: the messy work of recontextualising

ABSTRACT Mentors for beginning teachers in schools are often unacknowledged middle leaders in their schools. Through their work with beginning teachers, they not only provide local leadership in their contexts, they influence and shape the work of the next generation of teachers. Government-funded mentor training for the purpose of supporting beginning teachers in Education Queensland schools commenced in 2014 (Queensland Government. [2017]. Mentoring Beginning Teachers. http://education.qld.gov.au/staff/development/employee/teachers/mentoring.html). In Queensland, Australia, over 3000 experienced teachers have completed a two-day professional learning Mentoring Beginning Teacher (MBT) programme. Upon completion, mentors were expected to design and enact a mentoring programme that met the beginning teachers’ needs in their context, using the dialogic mentoring principles they had learned to fulfil the policy goals of increasing the number of beginning teachers transitioning to full registration. This article draws on Bernstein’s ([2000]. Pedagogy, Symbolic Control, and Identity: Theory, Research, Critique. Revised ed. Rowman & Littlefield) concepts of recontextualisation, and horizontal and vertical discourses of knowledge to understand how mentor teachers negotiated and enacted their roles as middle leaders in schools in diverse schooling contexts.
State-ofthe-Art and Future Research in Stream Synchronization

Synchronization is widely regarded as a fundamental problem in multimedia systems. One can distinguish between two levels of multimedia synchronization, continuous synchronization and event-based synchronization. While the first one aims at the synchronized play-out of data streams, the latter ones orchestrates the presentation of possibly distributed multimedia objects. Multimedia objects may consist of a variety of timely related subobjects, such as video clips, audio, text fragments and images. If a multimedia object contains continuous media, object synchronization comprises stream synchronization at a lower level. Thus, object synchronization mechanisms are to be based on stream synchronization functions.
Robotic Wheelchairs: Scientific Experimentation or Social Intervention?

Abstract— Research in robotics is becoming an ever more applied science. Roboticists acknowledge the existence of a role for experiments in their research, but whether the results of such experiments provide useful information to the intended industry or profession remains somewhat ambiguous. In this paper, we particularly consider experiments relating to robotic wheelchairs. There are many prototype robotic wheelchairs, but what level of performance must they achieve before being accepted into mainstream society and how do we verify the reliability of such performance? How can researchers evaluate their systems effectively? We compare and contrast the metrics used by medical practitioners to gauge the mobility status of a patient with those that are popularly used in academia to evaluate robotic wheelchair performance. We conclude that to design and execute successful experiments with robotic wheelchairs, researchers must draw not only on the experience of the intended end users, but also on the expertise of the medical practitioners who assess and support the patients in the day–to–day use of their wheelchairs.
Advanced Unsupervised Anonymization Technique in Social Networks for Privacy Preservation

: We study the problem of anonymizing social network where the network data is split between several data holders or players. In such setting, each player controls some of the nodes and he knows only the edges that are adjacent to the nodes under his control. The goal is to provide anonymized view of entire network with respect to two scenarios. Scenario 1, where All players know the identities of all nodes but each player needs to protect the information from other players is the existence or non -existence of edges adjacent to his nodes. Scenario 2, each player needs to protect the identities of all nodes under his control along with the existence or non-existence of edges adjacent to his nodes. We start the study with sequential clustering algorithm applied to centralize and scenario 1 of distributed setting. Then we extend the algorithm to scenario 2 which is the most complicated part according to previous studies. Finally we conclude by outlining the future research proposals in that direction.
Intrusion detection techniques for virtual domains

A virtual domain enables grouping of related virtual machines running on separate physical machine into a single network domain with a unified security policy. Since the virtual machines can be running different operating systems and applications, the attacker can exploit even a single vulnerability in any of the operating system or applications in a single virtual machine to attack other machines in the virtual domain. There is a need to develop intrusion detection techniques to deal with different types of attacks in virtual domains. In this paper we consider the design choices for attack detection and propose intrusion detection architecture to deal with attacks in virtual domains. Our architecture takes into account the specific features of the virtual machine as well as security policies of the virtual domains to deal with different types of attacks in virtual machines. We have described the operation of the proposed system architecture in detail. Finally we present how our model can efficiently deal with different types of attacks and performance analysis of our model.
Glucocorticoids Enhance Muscle Proteolysis through a Myostatin-Dependent Pathway at the Early Stage

Myostatin, a member of the TGF-β superfamily of secreted proteins, is expressed primarily in skeletal muscle. It negatively regulates muscle mass and is associated with glucocorticoid-induced muscle atrophy. However, it remains unclear whether myostatin is involved in glucocorticoid-induced muscle protein turnover. The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of myostatin in protein metabolism during dexamethasone (DEX) treatment. Protein synthesis rates and the expression of the genes for myostatin, ubiquitin-proteasome atrogin-1, MuRF1, FoxO1/3a and mTOR/p70S6K were determined. The results show that DEX decreased (P<0.05) protein synthesis rates while increasing the abundance of myostatin. DEX increased (P<0.05) the level of phospho-FoxO1/3a (Thr 24/32) and the expression of MuRF1. In contrast, DEX treatment had no detectable effect on atrogin-1 protein levels (P>0.05). The phosphorylation levels of mTOR and p70S6K were decreased by DEX treatment (P<0.05). Follistatin treatment inhibited the DEX-induced increase in myostatin (P<0.05) and the activation of phosphor-FoxO1/3a (Thr 24/32) (P< 0.05) and MuRF1 (P<0.05). Follistatin treatment had no influence on the protein synthesis rate or on the phosphorylation levels of mTOR (Ser 2448) and p70S6K (Thr 389) (P> 0.05). In conclusion, the present study suggests that the myostatin signalling pathway is associated with glucocorticoid-induced muscle protein catabolism at the beginning of exposure. Myostatin is not a main pathway associated with the suppression of muscle protein synthesis by glucocorticoids.
Bruch's membrane aging decreases phagocytosis of outer segments by retinal pigment epithelium.

PURPOSE We have shown previously that aging of human Bruch's membrane affects the attachment, survival and gene expression profile of the overlying retinal pigment epithelium (RPE). Herein we determine the effects of Bruch's membrane aging on RPE phagocytosis of rod outer segments. METHODS Explants of human Bruch's membrane were prepared from cadaver donor eyes (aged 9-81years) within 48 h of death, and 6 mm punches were embedded with the basal lamina in a 96-well plate. Approximately 50,000 ARPE-19 cells per well were seeded onto the explant surface and cultured for two weeks until they reached confluence. In addition, ARPE-19 were also seeded onto RPE-derived extracellular matrix (RPE-ECM) that was unmodified or modified by nonenzymatic nitration. Bovine rod outer segments were purified by sucrose gradient centrifugation, labeled with 10 ug/ml fluorescein isothiocyanate, and added to ARPE-19 cultured on Bruch's membrane or RPE-ECM for 24 h. Phagocytic activity was quantified by flow cytometry of harvested cells. RESULTS The ability of RPE to phagocytose rod outer segments decreased as a function of aging of Bruch's membrane; mean phagocytotic activity of ARPE-19 on younger Bruch's membrane was significantly higher than on older Bruch's membrane (129.7 +/- 34.8 versus 67.4 +/- 4.2 arbitrary units, respectively; p<0.01). Nitrite treatment of RPE-ECM decreased rod outer segment phagocytosis compared to untreated RPE-ECM and mimicked the effects of aging of human Bruch's membrane. CONCLUSIONS Aging of human Bruch's membrane decreases rod outer segment phagocytosis by ARPE-19. This effect can be mimicked by nonenzymatic nitration of extracellular matrix in vitro. Our observations may have implications for understanding the role of aging changes within Bruch's membrane on pathogenesis of age-related macular degeneration and other disorders.
Myocardial Ischemia and Reperfusion Leads to Transient CD8 Immune Deficiency and Accelerated Immunosenescence in CMV-Seropositive Patients

Rationale: There is mounting evidence of a higher incidence of coronary heart disease in cytomegalovirus-seropositive individuals. Objective: The aim of this study was to investigate whether acute myocardial infarction triggers an inflammatory T-cell response that might lead to accelerated immunosenescence in cytomegalovirus-seropositive patients. Methods and Results: Thirty-four patients with acute myocardial infarction undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention were longitudinally studied within 3 months after reperfusion (Cohort A). In addition, 54 patients with acute myocardial infarction and chronic myocardial infarction were analyzed in a cross-sectional study (Cohort B). Cytomegalovirus-seropositive patients demonstrated a greater fall in the concentration of terminally differentiated CD8 effector memory T cells (TEMRA) in peripheral blood during the first 30 minutes of reperfusion compared with cytomegalovirus-seronegative patients (−192 versus −63 cells/&mgr;L; P=0.008), correlating with the expression of programmed cell death-1 before primary percutaneous coronary intervention (r=0.8; P=0.0002). A significant proportion of TEMRA cells remained depleted for ≥3 months in cytomegalovirus-seropositive patients. Using high-throughput 13-parameter flow cytometry and human leukocyte antigen class I cytomegalovirus-specific dextramers, we confirmed an acute and persistent depletion of terminally differentiated TEMRA and cytomegalovirus-specific CD8+ cells in cytomegalovirus-seropositive patients. Long-term reconstitution of the TEMRA pool in chronic cytomegalovirus-seropositive postmyocardial infarction patients was associated with signs of terminal differentiation including an increase in killer cell lectin-like receptor subfamily G member 1 and shorter telomere length in CD8+ T cells (2225 versus 3397 bp; P<0.001). Conclusions: Myocardial ischemia and reperfusion in cytomegalovirus-seropositive patients undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention leads to acute loss of antigen-specific, terminally differentiated CD8 T cells, possibly through programmed cell death-1–dependent programmed cell death. Our results suggest that acute myocardial infarction and reperfusion accelerate immunosenescence in cytomegalovirus-seropositive patients.
The Impact of Educational Standards on the Level and Distribution of Earnings

The goal of this paper is to present the following finding: an egalitarian policy maker might prefer higher standards than would a policy maker whose goal was to maximize the sum of earnings. The result is based on the observation that if workers are differentiated with respect to ability, an increase in educational standards will increase the earnings of both the most-able and the least-able workers. The only workers whose earnings fall are those workers who after the increase fail to continue meeting the standard.
CMU Spoken Document Retrieval in Trec-8: Analysis of the role of Term Frequency TF

The participation of Carnegie Mellon University in the TREC-8 Spoken Document Retrieval Track used the basic same Sphinx speech recognition system as in TREC-7. Due to some unfortunate defaults in the parameter setup files, the speech recognizer did not perform in a reasonable manner. We will not analyze the results of the speech recognizer runs, as we believe the results contained abnormal types of errors, and insights or improvements on these errors would not generalize. A thorough examination of the speech recognition condition is given in [3]. However, we did evaluate a slightly modified weighting scheme in the reference (R1) and baseline (B1) conditions, which is described below.
A ZVS-PWM THREE-PHASE CURRENT-FED PUSH-PULL DC-DC CONVERTER IN MICROGRIDS

In this paper, a ZVS-PWM three- phase current-fed push-pull dc-dc converter is proposed. When compared to single-phase topologies, the three-phase dc-dc conversion increases the power density, uses the magnetic core of the transformer more efficiently, reduces the stress on switches, and requires smaller filters since the frequency for its design is higher. The proposed converter employs an active clamping technique by connecting the primary side of the transformer to a three- phase full bridge of switches and a clamping capacitor. This circuit allows the energy from the leakage inductances to be reused, increasing the efficiency of the converter. If appropriate parameters are chosen, soft- commutation of the switches (ZVS) can also