Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Entity-Based Relevance Feedback for Genomic List Answer Retrieval

In this paper we present a system which uses ontological resources and a gene name variation generation tool to expand concepts in the original query. The novelty of our approach lies in our concept-based normalization ranking model . For the 2007 Genomic task, we also modiﬁed this system architecture with an additional dynamic form of query expansion called entity-based relevance feedback . This technique works by identifying potentially relevant entity instances in an initial set of retrieved candidate paragraphs. These entities are added to the initial query with the aim of boasting the rank of passages containing lists of these entities. Our ﬁnal modiﬁcation to the sys-tem, aims to maximizing the passage-level MAP score, by dropping sentences that do not contain any query concepts, from the beginning and the end of a candidate para-graph. Our TREC 2007 results show that our relevance feedback method can signiﬁcantly improve baseline retrieval performance with respect to document-level MAP.
Region Selection for Robust Face Verification using UMACE Filters

In this paper, we investigate the verification performances of four subdivided face images with varying expressions. The objective of this study is to evaluate which part of the face image is more tolerant to facial expression and still retains its personal characteristics due to the variations of the image. The Unconstrained Minimum Average Correlation Energy (UMACE) filter is implemented to perform the verification process because of its advantages such as shift–invariance, ability to trade-off between discrimination and distortion tolerance, e.g. variations in pose, illumination and facial expression. The database obtained from the facial expression database of Advanced Multimedia Processing (AMP) Lab at CMU is used in this study. Four equal sizes of face regions i.e. bottom, top, left and right halves are used for the purpose of this study. The results show that the bottom half of the face region gives the best performance in terms of the PSR values with zero false accepted rate (FAR) and zero false rejection rate (FRR) compared to the other three regions.
Dependability and Robustness: State of the Art and Challenges

Dependability is a broad concept which covers such aspects of computer systems like reliability, maintainability, and availability. Also because of this broadness, researches came up with related yet more focused notions such as self-healing and robustness. In this article, I discuss robustness in relation to dependability and make a distinction between these two. I outline the state of the art of the research in robustness and discuss required design practices leading to robust systems. In analogy to end-to-end argument, I present a new set of arguments called repairability which could help a designer resolve design decisions and choose a solution which potentially leads to a robust system.
Bake plate control using a robust multiplexed model predictive control (RMMPC)

This paper proposes a robust multiplexed model predictive control (MMPC) for a bake plate control system. The bake plate is a multi-inputs multi-outputs (MIMO) system which is required to have uniform temperature. In bake plate sytem, the controller must be able to reduce the disturbances caused when placing a cold wafer inside. Results show that the proposed robust MMPC can outperform in attenuating disturbance compare with the MMPC and the standard MPC.
Real-Time Analysis of Student Comprehension: An Assessment of Electronic Student Response Technology in an Introductory Earth Science Course

Electronic student response technologies (SRT) are capable of assessing teaching and learning methods in real time, and they offer an exceptional means of introducing active learning protocols in classes with large enrollments. These wireless systems allow students to key in responses with remote control units to questions posed by an instructor in the classroom. Student responses then are displayed in real time, allowing both students and instructors to gauge student comprehension instantaneously. From Spring 2002 to Spring 2003, we utilized SRT in 4 sections of a high-enrollment introductory Earth Science course (Geosc 020: Planet Earth) at Penn State University. We conducted a multi-faceted assessment of the use of SRT in our course that included quantitative and qualitative perception data from students enrolled in the course and faculty/administrator visitors to our classroom. Our preliminary assessment of the pedagogical merits of SRT in our course suggests that this technology is an effective tool for introductory geoscience education.
How Universal Are the Density Profiles of Dark Halos?

We use high-resolution N-body simulations to investigate the formation of virialized halos due to the gravitational collapse of collisionless matter. A variety of formation scenarios are studied, ranging from hierarchical clustering to monolithic radial collapse. The goal of these experiments was to study departures from the universal density profiles recently found to arise in cosmological settings. However, we found that even for models that exhibit quite a different formation history, the density and velocity dispersion profiles of the virialized halos are strikingly similar. Power-law density profiles do not result even in models with initial power-law profiles and without initial substructure or nonradial motions. Such initial conditions give rise to a radial orbit instability that leads to curved velocity dispersion and density profiles. The shapes of the density profiles in all our models are well parameterized by the profiles of halos formed in a generic cosmological setting. Our results show that the universality of dark halo density profiles does not depend crucially on hierarchical merging as has been suggested recently in the literature. Rather it arises because apparently different collapse histories produce a near universal angular momentum distribution among the halo particles. We conclude that the general form of the density and velocity dispersion profiles of virialized halos in an expanding universe are robust outcomes of gravitational collapse, nearly independent of the initial conditions and the formation history.
Optical neural network based on the parametrical four-wave mixing process

In this paper we develop a formalism allowing us to describe operating of a network based on the parametrical four-wave mixing process that is well-known in nonlinear optics. The recognition power of a network using parametric neurons operating with q different frequencies is considered. It is shown that the storage capacity of such a network is higher compared with the Potts-glass models.
Pitfalls of lazy subscription

Transactional Lock Elision (TLE) uses Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) to execute unmodified critical sections concurrently, even if they are protected by the same lock. To ensure correctness, the transactions used to execute these critical sections “subscribe” to the lock by reading it and checking that it is available. A recent paper proposed using the tempting “lazy subscription” optimization for a similar technique in a different context, namely transactional systems that use a single global lock (SGL) to protect all transactional data. We identify several pitfalls that show that lazy subscription is not safe for TLE because unmodified critical sections executing before subscribing to the lock may behave incorrectly in a number of subtle ways. We also show that recently proposed compiler support for modifying transaction code to ensure subscription occurs before any incorrect behavior could manifest is not sufficient to avoid all of the pitfalls we identify. We further argue that extending such compiler support to avoid all pitfalls would add substantial complexity and would usually limit the extent to which subscription can be deferred, undermining the effectiveness of the optimization. Hardware extensions suggested in the recent proposal also do not address all of the pitfalls we identify. A longer version of this paper proposes hardware extensions that make lazy subscription safe, both for SGL-based transactional systems and for TLE, without the need for special compiler support.
Robust fault detection for the networked control system with model uncertainty

Robust fault detection for a networked control system (NCS) including model uncertainty and stochastic data packet dropout is investigated, the NCS model with stochastic variable is established. Based on the observer method, a robust fault detection filter can generate a residual signal, which has good robustness to the model uncertainty, external disturbance, data packet dropout, and sensitivity to the fault. Then, the sufficient condition of asymptotically mean-square stable for the residual dynamical system is achieved. The desired robust fault detection filter is obtained, which is constructed in terms of certain linear matrix inequality (LMI). In the residual evaluation part, a threshold involved false alarm rate is presented, and the problem of estimating false alarm rate is analyzed. Finally, two numerical examples illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
The Use of Business Intelligence Systems in Australia

Business Intelligence (BI) systems are information systems that combine operational data, models, analytical tools and user interfaces to generate information to support business decision-making. BI is an important part of IT practice and is currently the highest technical priority for chief information officers. As there is to date no published academic research on the nature of BI practice we commenced an exploratory study of the area. A survey of business and IT professionals was used to test fourteen propositions about the nature of BI system adoption, development, use, and governance in Australia. This paper reports on the slice of results related to BI system use, including findings related to six propositions about the nature of BI system use. The survey highlights the critical role of BI in organizations, which justifies research effort into the area, as well as organizational spending on BI implementations.
The Prospects for Psychological Science in Human-Computer Interaction

This paper discusses the prospects of psychology playing a significant role in the progress of human-computer interaction. In any field, hard science (science that is mathematical or otherwise technical) has a tendency to drive out softer sciences, even if the softer sciences have important contributions to make. It is possible that, as computer science and artificial intelligence contributions to human-computer interaction mature, this could happen to psychology. It is suggested that this trend might be prevented by hardening the applicable psychological science. This approach, however, has been critized on the grounds that the resulting body of knowledge would be too low level, too limited in scope, too late to affect computer technology, and too difficult to apply. The prospects for overcoming each of these obstacles are analyzed here.
Nucleotide Polymorphism and Linkage Disequilibrium Within and Among Natural Populations of European Aspen (Populus tremula L., Salicaceae)

Populus is an important model organism in forest biology, but levels of nucleotide polymorphisms and linkage disequilibrium have never been investigated in natural populations. Here I present a study on levels of nucleotide polymorphism, haplotype structure, and population subdivision in five nuclear genes in the European aspen Populus tremula. Results show substantial levels of genetic variation. Levels of silent site polymorphisms, πs, averaged 0.016 across the five genes. Linkage disequilibrium was generally low, extending only a few hundred base pairs, suggesting that rates of recombination are high in this obligate outcrossing species. Significant genetic differentiation was found at all five genes, with an average estimate of FST = 0.116. Levels of polymorphism in P. tremula are 2- to 10-fold higher than those in other woody, long-lived perennial plants, such as Pinus and Cryptomeria. The high levels of nucleotide polymorphism and low linkage disequilibrium suggest that it may be possible to map functional variation to very fine scales in P. tremula using association-mapping approaches.
Shape For Contact

Given a desired function for an effector, what is its appropriate shape? This thesis addresses the problem of designing the shape of a rigid end effector to perform a given manipulation task. It presents three main contributions: First, it describes the contact kinematics of an effector as the product of both its shape and its motion, and assumes a fixed motion model to explore the role of shape in satisfying a certain manipulation task. Second, it formulates that manipulation task as a set of constraints on the geometry of contact between the effector and the world. Third, it develops tools to transform those contact constraints into an effector shape for general 1-DOF planar mechanisms and general 1-DOF spatial mechanisms, and discusses the generalization to mechanisms with more than one degree of freedom. We describe the case studies of designing grippers with invariant grasp geometry, grippers with improved grasp stability, and grippers with extended grasp versatility. We further showcase the techniques with the design of the fingers of the MLab hand, a three-fingered gripper actuated with a single motor, capable of exerting any combination of geometrically correct enveloping or fingertip grasps of spherical, cylindrical, and prismatic objects of varying size.
Interactive comment on “Distributions of the carbonate system properties, anthropogenic CO2, and acidification during the 2008 BOUM cruise (Mediterranean Sea)” by F. Touratier et al

Comment from Referee #1 : This paper reports on inorganic carbon variables (i.e.DIC and alkalinity) measured during the BOUM cruise in 2008. This is without doubt an important data set since only a very limited number high quality measurement of the carbonate system is available for the Mediterranean Sea, particularly for the western basin. The authors use these data to derive the anthropogenic perturbation to the carbonate system and can thus report on the change in pH and DIC concentrations over time, i.e. “ocean acidification” and anthropogenic carbon (Cant)”. A great deal of effort is spent on comparing these results with results obtained by other groups.
Food prices and the inflation experiences of low-income households

Food prices have been rising rapidly over the past two years. In August 2008, aggregate food prices were 6.1 percent above their level in August 2007. Prices in August 2007 were already 4.8 percent above the level in August 2006. Because food purchases represent a larger portion of the expenditures of low-income households, these increases in price have a more substantial impact on the purchasing power of low-income households. This article describes the food inflation experiences of different population groups to demonstrate how different groups have been differentially affected by the recent run-up in food prices. In addition to spending more of their budget on food, lower-income households also concentrate more of their food expenditure on food consumed at home than higher-income households. Because the prices for food at home have been growing more rapidly than the prices of food away from home, this creates an additional gap in the impact of food inflation on lower- and higher-income households.
Specification of prior distributions under model uncertainty

We consider the specification of prior distributions for Bayesian model comparison, focusing on regression-type models. We propose a particular joint specification of the prior distribution across models so that sensitivity of posterior model probabilities to the dispersion of prior distributions for the parameters of individual models (Lindley's paradox) is diminished. We illustrate the behavior of inferential and predictive posterior quantities in linear and log-linear regressions under our proposed prior densities with a series of simulated and real data examples.
An Evaluation of Biofield Treatment on Susceptibility Pattern of Multidrug Resistant Stenotrophomonas maltophilia: An Emerging Global Opportunistic Pathogen

Stenotrophomonas maltophilia (S. maltophilia) is a Gram-negative bacillus, an opportunistic pathogen, particularly among nosocomial infections. Multi-drug resistant strains are associated with very high rate of morbidity and mortality in severely immunocompromised patients. Present study was designed to evaluate the effect of biofield treatment against multidrug resistant S. maltophilia. Clinical sample of S. maltophilia was collected and divided into two groups i.e. control and biofield treated which were analyzed after 10 days with respect to control. The following parameters viz. susceptibility pattern, minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC), biochemical studies and biotype number of both control and treated samples were measured by MicroScan Walk-Away® system. The results showed an overall change of 37.5% in susceptibility pattern and 39.4% in biochemical study while 33.3% changes in MIC values of tested antimicrobials after biofield treatment. Further, the treated group of S. maltophilia has also shown a significant change in biochemical reactions followed by its biotype number as compared to control group. Biochemical reactions of treated group showed negative reaction to acetamide and positive reactions to colistin, glucose, adonitol, melibiose, arabinose, nitrate, oxidation-fermentation, raffinose, rhaminose, sorbitol, sucrose, and Voges-Proskauer as compared with control. The biofield treatment showed an alteration in MIC values of amikacin, amoxicillin/K-clavulanate, chloramphenicol, gatifloxacin, levofloxacin, moxifloxacin, ceftazidime, cefotetan, ticarcillin/K-clavulanate, trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole. Altogether, data suggest that biofield treatment has significant effect to alter the sensitivity pattern of antimicrobials and biotype number against multidrug resistant strain of S. maltophilia.
Complete Genome Sequence of Lactobacillus acidophilus MN-BM-F01

ABSTRACT Lactobacillus acidophilus MN-BM-F01 was originally isolated from a traditional fermented dairy product in China. The characteristics of this bacterium are its low post-acidification ability and high acid-producing rate. Here, we report the main genome features of L. acidophilus MN-BM-F01.
Urbanization with and without Structural Transformation

We document several new facts regarding urbanization and structural change in developing countries and develop a model that can account for them. Most developing countries follow a standard pattern: urbanization is a by-product of either "push" from agricultural productivity growth or a "pull" from industrial productivity growth. In these countries urbanization occurs with structural transformation and cities are "production cities", with a mix of workers in tradable and non-tradable sectors. For a distinct subset of countries that rely on natural resource exports, however, urbanization has increased at an equally rapid pace, but it is not associated with an increased importance of manufacturing and services in GDP. In these countries urbanization has taken place in "consumption cities" where the mix of workers is heavily skewed towards non-tradable services. We adapt a standard model of structural transformation to explain how natural resources can both drive urbanization as well as shift the composition of the urban labor force. The model may help explain why natural resource exporters - and Sub-Saharan Africa in particular - have experienced urbanization without structural transformation, which has implications for the pace of long-run growth in these areas.
Bidirectional elbow exoskeleton based on twisted-string actuators

In this paper, a bidirectional elbow exoskeleton device based on rotational twisted string actuators is proposed. A novel actuation mechanism incorporating antagonistic motors is proposed and its kinematic model is presented along with its experimental evaluation. Two antagonistic actuation mechanisms provide the motion of the forearm link in both directions thus allowing to position the forearm precisely even in the presence of such disturbances as friction, external forces, and at different positions of the upper arm link. In addition, we propose a method to control the antagonistic exoskeleton based on the actuators kinematics. The developed twisted strings-driven elbow exoskeleton can be effectively used in a variety of haptics, teleoperation, and rehabilitation applications.
Implementation of Modeling the Land-Surface/Atmosphere Interactions to Mesoscale Model COAMPS

Abstract : The long-term goal of this project is to improve the treatment of convection and the prediction of convective precipitation in the Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS 1), by including selected land-surface and urban canopy schemes in COAMPS, along with tools that will allow the user to choose the optimum ones for selected nested-grid configurations. The objectives of this project are to: (a) integrate land-surface models and urban canopy schemes into COAMPS, (b) evaluate the limitations of the proposed schemes in describing surface-atmosphere interactions during drought conditions, (c) investigate the impact of land-atmosphere interactions on Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) skill, and (d) validate the COAMPS model performance when using the land-surface and urban canopy schemes. Our approach is to use COAMPS to study the impact of land-vegetation processes on the prediction of mesoscale convection over central Europe during summer months. This will be accomplished by implementing new and more detailed surface databases into COAMPS, developing a new data assimilation system for surface parameters, and performing numerical tests with COAMPS to determine the importance of selected parameters within the land-surface model (LSM). The results of this study will be applicable to similar continental areas.
Optical Flow at Occlusion

We implement and quantitatively/qualitatively evaluate two optical flow methods that model occlusion. The Yuan et al. method [1] improves on the Horn and Schunck optical flow method at occlusion boundaries by using a dynamic coefficient (the Lagrange multiplier α) at each pixel that weighs the smoothness constraint relative to the optical flow constraint, by adopting a modified scheme to calculate average velocities and by using a “compensating” iterative algorithm to achieve higher computational efficiency. The Niu et al. method [2] is based on a modified version of the Lucas and Kanade optical flow method, that selects local intensity neighbourhoods, spatially and temporally, based on pixels that are on different sides of an occlusion boundary and then corrects any erroneous flow computed at occlusion boundaries. We present quantitative results for sinusoidal sequence with a known occlusion boundary. We also present qualitative evaluation of the methods on the Hamburg Taxi sequence and and the Trees sequence.
On emotion controlled architectures for intelligent autonomous agents

A hand-held power tool, for example a rotary percussive drill, includes a component for undergoing linear movement and a bearing support for the component. The bearing support comprises a cylinder formed from sheet metal strip with the longitudinal edges spaced to form a gap in the wall of the cylinder. By making the bearing support from a sheet metal strip and providing a gap in the cylinder wall considerable cost savings are achieved.