Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Representation Learning for Homophilic Preferences

Users express their personal preferences through ratings, adoptions, and other consumption behaviors. We seek to learn latent representations for user preferences from such behavioral data. One representation learning model that has been shown to be effective for large preference datasets is Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM). While homophily, or the tendency of friends to share their preferences at some level, is an established notion in sociology, thus far it has not yet been clearly demonstrated on RBM-based preference models. The question lies in how to appropriately incorporate social network into the architecture of RBM-based models for learning representations of preferences. In this paper, we propose two potential architectures: one that models social network among users as additional observations, and another that incorporates social network into the sharing of hidden units among related users. We study the efficacies of these proposed architectures on publicly available, real-life preference datasets with social networks, yielding useful insights.
Analagesic Effect of Levetiracetam in Rat Models of Pain

Background: Antiepileptic drugs are widely used to treat multiple non-epileptic disorders such as neuropathic and inflammatory pain, migraine, essential tremors and psychiatric disorders. Levetiracetam is a novel antiepileptic drug with a broad spectrum of anticonvulsant activity with high safety margin. We evaluated the analgesic effect of levetiracetam in inflammatory induced hyperalgesia in albino rats. Methods: In this study male Wister rats weighing between 200-250 grams were taken and divided into 5 groups with 6 rats in each group. Levetiracetam was administered orally at a dose of 50mg/kg, 100 mg/kg, 200mg/kg and was compared with the control group which received distill water and the standard drug Aspirin at a dose of 100mg/kg. Hyperalgesia was induced by hot plate method. Reaction times were measured at 0, 30, 60 and 120 min after drug administration. Results: Levetiracetam at a dose of 100mg/kg after one hour of drug administration showed an increase in the reaction time compared to the saline. However, aspirin showed significant increase in the reaction time as compared to levetiracetam. Conclusion: Levetiracetam showed anti-hyperalgesia in animal model of pain and further study need to be conducted to evaluate the analgesic property.
The Universal Cover of an Affine Three-manifold with Holonomy of Infinitely Shrinkable Dimension ≤ 2

An affine manifold is a manifold with an affine structure, i.e. a torsion-free flat affine connection. We show that the universal cover of a closed affine 3-manifold M with holonomy group of infinitely shrinkable dimension (or discompacité in French) less than or equal to two is diffeomorphic to R. Hence, M is irreducible. This follows from two results: (i) a simply connected affine 3-manifold which is 2-convex is diffeomorphic to R , whose proof using the Morse theory takes most of this paper; and (ii) a closed affine manifold of holonomy of infinitely shrinkable dimension less or equal to d is d-convex. To prove (i), we show that 2-convexity is a geometric form of topological incompressibility of level sets. As a consequence, we show that the universal cover of a closed affine three-manifold with parallel volume form is diffeomorphic to R, a part of the weak Markus conjecture. As applications, we show that the universal cover of a hyperbolic 3-manifold with cone-type singularity of arbitrarily assigned angles along a link removed with the singular locus is diffeomorphic to R, confirming Kojima’s result, and that any fake cell with an affine structure must have a concave point at the boundary. Our research is to understand the geometrical and topological properties of manifolds with flat real projective or affine structures, particularly in lowdimensions. A hyperbolic structure on a manifold can be naturally regarded as a real projective structure using the Klein model of hyperbolic space. Our interest stems from the fact that the eight 3-dimensional homogeneous Riemannian structures except one locally isomorphic to PSL(2,R) can be considered naturally as real projective structures, as observed by Thurston, Kapovich, and many others even earlier. We feel that such a study has many interesting features, and are attempting to develops tools of study (see Goldman [20], [21], Choi [11], [12], and Choi-Goldman [15]). Topological and geometrical properties of real projective and affine structures on 3-manifolds are not Date: March 6, 2008. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 57M50; Secondary 53A20, 53C15.
An enquiry into the value of work experience as part of a career education programme for grade 11 pupils in a co-educational high school.

This study focused on the responses of the main role players in a Work Experience Programme which is offered as a component of Grade 11 Career Education at Hillcrest High School. The aim was to describe, evaluate and optimise the programme. The theory and literature on career development and work experience was reviewed in order to establish what programmes, methods and approaches are currently being used internationally and in South Mrica. Issues related to work experience were explored with a view to evaluate whether the programme undertaken could enhance the career decision making of Grade 11 pupils. A qualitative, participatory research method was applied. The action research design chosen enabled the researcher to collect data over a period of eight months while interacting 'with her subjects as their teacher counsellor. The design, application, analysis of findings and limitations of the research study are described and recorded. The findings indicated that the programme was regarded as a positive experience by the majority of pupils. It was possible to make recommendations from the findings for wider application of such a programme.
An Overview of the Option-Theoretic Pricing of Mortgages

This article surveys theoretical work on the pricing of mortgages as derivative assets, often termed the option-pricing approach to mortgage valuation. Emphasis is on the possibility of terminating such mortgages through either prepayment or default, with particular attention paid to default. Some description of individual papers is provided, but the primary focus is on the body of theory that this literature represents. In order that mortgage valuation not be trivial, the future must be uncertain; therefore, all papers discussed here operate within a stochastic economic environment. In the absence of default, the single most relevant feature of the external economy is a stochastic term structure, though when default risk is considered, one must also account for the uncertain behavior of the mortgage’s underlying asset, the real estate itself. Within this framework, the article articulates the strengths and limitations of the option-pricing approach to mortgage valuation.
The Effect of Naturalization on Wage Growth: A Panel Study of Young Male Immigrants

For young male immigrants, naturalization facilitates assimilation into the U.S. labor market. Following naturalization, immigrants gain access to public‐sector, white‐collar, and union jobs, and wage growth accelerates—consistent with removal of employment barriers. The faster wage growth of immigrants who naturalize might alternatively result from greater human capital investment prior to naturalization, stemming from a long‐term commitment to U.S. labor markets, but there is no evidence that wage growth accelerates or the distribution of jobs improves until citizenship is attained. Finally, the gains from naturalization are greater for immigrants from less‐developed countries and persist when we control for unobserved productivity.
Utilization-based schedulability analysis for switched Ethernet aiming dynamic QoS management

Ethernet switches are typically found in many large-scale distributed real-time systems providing low-end transactions as well as bulk backbone routing to real-time applications. The FTT-SE protocol (Flexible Time-Triggered communication over Switched Ethernet) is a recent proposal to bypass the limitations of conventional switches in terms of real-time behavior while catering for growing requirements on dynamic reconfigurability and adaptability. For this end, this paper develops linear time-complexity and memory-efficient on-line admission control tests based on utilization bounds for Rate-Monotonic and EDF scheduling on Ethernet switches using FTT-SE, which are suited for dynamic Quality of Service (QoS) management. Our analysis also has broader applicability in general periodic task sets with bounded release delays. For FTT-SE with 100Mbps links and 1500 bytes of maximum packet size, our sufficient schedulability condition achieves an utilization bound of 61% for RMS and 88% for EDF. Simulation results on randomly generated task sets demonstrate that such bounds are within 18% and 5% utilization of the ideal tests for RMS and EDF, respectively.
Job satisfaction, support and possibilities of development in opinions of women and men managers

The aim of the article is to identify factors related to managerial job satisfaction, 17 and underline the differences regarding their importance in the context of gender. The study 18 was conducted with the usage of a questionnaire in a group of 387 managers (140 women, 19 247 men) from 50 enterprises. Results show that in these organizations are existing significant 20 gender differences in the context of: support from supervisor, procedural fairness, perceived 21 development opportunities. In the group of women mean results are lower but correlations 22 with job satisfaction stronger. This means that job satisfaction factors for female and male 23 managers differ, which requires differentiation of practices and further exploration. 24
Identifying extract-method refactoring candidates automatically

Refactoring becomes an essential activity in software development process especially for large and long life projects. Extract-method is one of the most frequently used refactorings to address code smells such as long and incohesive methods, and duplicated code. Automated means of identifying opportunities for refactoring can make the software development process faster and more efficient. In this paper, an abstraction for methods viz. Data and Structure Dependency (DSD) graph and an algorithm viz. longest edge removal algorithm to find extract-method refactoring candidates is proposed.
The Impacts of Hinged and Solid Ankle-Foot Orthoses on Standing and Walking in Children with Spastic Diplegia

Objective The purpose of this study was to examine the impacts of hinged and solid anklefoot orthoses (AFOs) on standing and walking abilities in children with spastic diplegia. Materials & Methods In a quasi-experimental design, 30 children with spastic diplegia, aged 4-6 years were recruited. They were matched in terms of age, IQ, and level of GMFCS E&R. Children were randomly assigned into 3 groups: a hinged AFO group (n=10) plus occupational therapy (OT), a solid AFO group (n=10) plus OT, a control group who used only OT for three months. Gross motor abilities were measured using Gross Motor Measure Function (GMFM). Results We obtained statistically significant differences in the values between baseline and after treatment in all groups. The groups were also significantly different in total GMFM after intervention. Furthermore, there were differences between hinged AFOs and solid AFOs groups, and between hinged AFOs and control groups. Conclusion We concluded that gross motor function was improved in all groups; however, hinged AFOs group appears to improve the gross motor function better than solid AFOs and control groups.
A perceptually motivated multiple-F0 estimation method

This paper describes a method for estimating of the fundamental frequencies (FO) of several concurrent musical sounds. The method consists of a computational model of the human auditory periphery, followed by a novel periodicity analysis mechanism. Estimation of multiple fundamental frequencies is achieved by cancelling each detected sound from the mixture and by repeating the estimation for the residual. Computational load of the method remains reasonable since the peripheral hearing model (i.e., the hardest part) needs to be computed only once. The method is relatively straightforward to implement and outperformed two state-of-the-art reference methods in simulations.
A Heuristic Framework for Image Filtering and Segmentation: Application to Blood Vessel Immunohistochemistry

The blood vessel density in a cancerous tissue sample may represent increased levels of tumor growth. However, identifying blood vessels in the histological (tissue) image is difficult and time-consuming and depends heavily on the observer's experience. To overcome this drawback, computer-aided image analysis frameworks have been investigated in order to boost object identification in histological images. We present a novel algorithm to automatically abstract the salient regions in blood vessel images. Experimental results show that the proposed framework is capable of deriving vessel boundaries that are comparable to those demarcated manually, even for vessel regions with weak contrast between the object boundaries and background clutter.
Design of Low Phase-Noise Oscillators and Wideband VCOs in InGaP HBT Technology

A method for design of low phase-noise balanced-Colpitts (BC) fixed-frequency oscillators (FFOs) and wideband voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) is presented. Analytical expressions describe how to design an oscillator for best phase noise, given a limited Q factor and a certain active device. The theory needs only two free parameters: the impedance level (Zc) and tapping ratio (n) of the resonator. It is described how to chose ZC and n for low phase noise and large tuning range, respectively. The design method is verified with a low phase-noise FFO and a wideband VCO, both designed in InGaP HBT technology. The BC FFO presents a phase noise of 112 dBc/Hz at 100-kHz offset from a 9.2-GHz carrier. The wideband VCO implemented in the same technology presents a minimum phase noise of 106 dBc/Hz at 100-kHz offset from a 9-GHz carrier. Over the frequency range of 8.4-9.7 GHz, the phase noise is better than 102 dBc/Hz and the output power is 7 0.5 dBm. The wide tuning range, constant output power, and relatively constant and low phase noise are achieved due to double pairs of tuning varactors, one between emitters and one between collectors. To the authors' best knowledge, this type of double-tuned BC VCO topology has not been previously published.
Cloud Virtual Network Embedding: Profit, Power and Acceptance

In this paper, we investigate maximizing the profit achieved by infrastructure providers (InPs) from embedding virtual network requests (VNRs) in IP/WDM core networks with clouds. We develop a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model to study the impact of maximizing the profit on the power consumption and acceptance of VNRs. The results show that higher acceptance rates do not necessarily lead to higher profit due to the high cost associated with accepting some of the requests. The results also show that minimum power consumption can be achieved while maintaining the maximum profit
Do Companies Benefit by CSR

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a concept, whereby organizations consider the interests of society by taking responsibility for the impact of their activities on all those stakeholders in all aspects of their operations. Business is a creative entrepreneurial process that provides livelihoods for the majority of the world’s people. It has been instrumental in bringing about sustainable development. The “Stakeholder” concept provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the relationships of a corporation with relevant constituencies in its industry, as well as its political, social, economic and legal environment. It has been seen form the review of the existing literature that business needs the cooperation and collaboration of these groups who have some stake in the organization, organization need to manage them properly. To analyze the various eleven factors of benefits of CSR a survey was conducted among the 389 stakeholders of Tamil Nadu using stratified sampling. The factor analysis reduces them to four factors as corporate image factor that captured four original factors, while the efficiency factor captured three original factors. The third factor named customer orientation factor accounted for two while the fourth factor named balancing factor accounted for the remaining two original factors.
WEB-based management and representation of spatial and geographic data

Access control is an important component of any database management system. Several access control models have been proposed for conventional databases. However, these models do not seem adequate for geographical databases, due to the peculiarities of geographical data. Previous work on access control models for geographical data mainly concerns raster maps (images). In this paper, we present a discretionary access control model for geographical maps. We assume that each map is composed of a set of features. Each feature is represented in one or more maps by spatial objects, described by means of different spatial properties: geometric properties, describing the shape, extension and location of the objects, and topological properties, describing the topological relationships existing among objects. The proposed access control model allows the security administrator to define authorizations against map objects at a very fine granularity level, taking into account the various spatial representations and the object dimension. The model also supports both positive and negative authorizations as well as different propagation rules that make access control very flexible.
A Trust Region Method for Parabolic Boundary Control Problems

In this paper we develop a trust region algorithm for constrained parabolic boundary control problems. For the computation of a trust region step we propose an iterative scheme which is a projected form of the Steihaug trust region conjugate gradient method. To ensure the good local convergence properties in the terminal phase, a smoothing step at each iteration is added. This step and the projection require the modification of the standard trust region algorithm and its convergence proof. The algorithm has sup-norm convergence in the terminal phase and L2 convergence in the global phase. The results are illustrated for a parabolic boundary control problem.
Software Attack Modeling and Its Application

In recent years, software faces more and more security threats, such as software piracy, malicious reverse engineering, software tampering, which make much loss to software users or software manufacturers. The idea and process of attacking software can give us guidance on how to prevent the attack and protect software effectively. In this paper, we understand software attack (in the paper software attack mostly means software Reverse Engineering attack) process by modeling it. We model software attack process based on the Marked Petri Net, called SAMMPN, which is a six-tuple (P, T, F, Path, Rate, Cost). Then, based on the SAMMPN, we propose methods to guide software attacks, to evaluate software protection and to improve protection techniques. At last, we verify the SAMMPN by a case, which shows unpacking guidance, evaluates four kinds of Packers and gives improving suggestions for these Packers. The case shows that SAMMPN can help us effectively understand the software attack process and improve software protection.
Hardware implementation of KLMS algorithm using FPGA

Fast and accurate machine learning algorithms are needed in many physical applications. However, the learning efficiency is badly subjected to the intensive computation. Knowing that hardware implementation could speed up computation effectively, we use a FPGA hardware platform to implement an on-line kernel learning algorithm, namely the kernel least mean square (KLMS) which adopts the simple survival kernel as the Mercer kernel. By using an on-line quantization method and pipeline technology, the requirement of hardware resources and computation burden can be reduced significantly and the data processing speed can be accelerated apparently without losing accuracy. Finally, a 128-way parallel FPGA platform which works at 200MHz is implemented. It could achieve an average speedup of 6553 versus Matlab running on a 3GHz Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2320 CPU.
2011the International Conference on Advanced Power System Automation and Protection Using a Real Time Digital Simulator with Phasor Measurement Unit Technology

Testing of Phasor Measurement Units (PMU devices) is necessary for any PMU application, be it a simple visuali-zation and archiving system or a more complex set of real-time system operations tools. PMUs are available from virtually every manufacturer of protection and monitoring equipment. PMUs can be an embedded function within relays or disturbance recorders, alternatively, PMUs can be standalone products. Many PMUs installations throughout the world are typically used for offline analysis and monitoring. PMU data can include monitoring of oscillations, angle difference, system frequency and voltage stability. Other ideas for PMU data include situational awareness, alarm and operational limit settings, state estimation and congestion management to name a few.
A robust characterization of audio signals using the level of information content per Chroma

In this paper we propose a new technique to characterize audio-signals. We use Shannon's Entropy to estimate the level of information content per chroma and we show that involving entropy contributes for a more robust audio characterization. A new audio-fingerprint (AFP) based on this feature is proposed in this paper which we have called Entropy-Chroma Fingerprint (ECFP). Two approaches were considered to estimate entropy; the first assumes the spectral coefficients distribute normally, while the second, estimates its probability density function (PDF) with the Parzen Windows Estimation method. We compared the robustness of the ECFP against the Chromagram-Based Audio-Fingerprint (CBFP) which is determined using the Constant Q Transform (CQT). Three thousand and five hundred AFPs were determined from songs of several genres. A subset of 350 songs were severely degraded and searched for using excerpts of 5 seconds for that matter. The ECFP determined assuming gaussianity on the PDF turned out to be much more robust than the CBFP. The ECFP determined assuming gaussianity is much faster to process than both, the CBFP and the ECFP determined with Parzen Windows and still more robust.
A new classification algorithm based on ensemble PSO_SVM and clustering analysis

Aiming at the existing problems of support vector machine ensemble, such as strong randomicity, larger scale of training subsets size and high complexity of ensemble classifier, this paper put forward a novel SVM ensemble construction method based on clustering analysis. Firstly, the samples are clustered into several clusters according to their distribution with rival penalty competitive learning algorithm(RPCL). Then a small quantity of representative instances are chosen as training sets and training SVM that adopt self-perturbation in population convergence speed. Finally Ensemble improvement SVM is constructed by relative majority voting. Man-made data are used to test C_PSOSVM. Experiment result illustrate that the algorithm can improve ensemble SVM classification precision, reducing time-space complexity compared with Bagging, Adaboost.