Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Capturing content for virtual museums: from pieces to exhibits

Virtual museums provide ways to capture the content of a real museum in a digital (electronic) form and make this digital form more universally available. This poster describes a novel method for digitally recording not only individual museum pieces, but entire museum exhibits (consisting of one or more rooms or spaces). The methodology allows anyone with access to the Internet or a PC to experience anywhere, anytime, any part of the museum's collection or exhibits (past, present and future). Users can explore the museum exhibits in a virtual reality that is both spatially accurate and visually compelling. All objects and 3D scenes are seen in precise full color photographic quality detail. The scene and objects are polygonal meshes representing the surfaces of objects. This permits making measurements directly on the scene with millimeter precision. The methodology, its application to capturing museum exhibits, and examples of exhibits recorded using this technique are described. This work is part of the Virseum project (http://ils.unc.edu/bmh/virseum) at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). In addition to the standard capture of items and exhibits for virtual access, this methodology opens the door for many other applications, including the design of virtual (never physically implemented) exhibits and pieces.
User Selection for Multiuser MIMO BC with Zero-Forcing Beamforming

This paper investigates user selection scheme in the multiple-antennas multiuser downlink systems with the zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming transmit strategy. Among the numerous user selection algorithms, the sequential water-filling (SWF) algorithm based on LQ decomposition behave good performance in the throughput and the complexity. On another hand, setting a threshold value on channel gains can decrease evidently the search space of user selection. Considering the advantages of these two aspects, we combine them together, present a low complexity user selection scheme, and extend it to the multiple receive antennas scenario.
Marching into the Future: The Relationship between Instrumental Music Class Participation and Advanced Placement English Language and Composition Test Results

Over the decades, there have been countless claims that participation in a music class will influence the cognitive abilities of students. Yet many districts elect to eliminate these programs in times of budgetary crisis. During a period when our national education system is focused on test scores, educational reformists should focus on the implementation of courses that yield academic success. This study was designed to determine if there is a significant relationship between instrumental music class participation and Advanced Placement English Language and Composition exam scores. Data for the group comparison consisted of 529 samples from a large county school district in the upstate of South Carolina. Participants include Advanced Placement English Language and Composition course students and both instrumental music participants and non-instrumental music participants from the Parkwood County School District. The data gained from this study revealed that there is no significant relationship between Advanced Placement English Language and Composition exam scores and participation in instrumental music classes. This data was gathered through the use of three independent t-tests that sought to find a relationship between Advanced Placement English Language and Composition exam scores, instrumental music course participation, and the gender of the participants. Suggestions for further research are included.
Discovery of implicit correlation between shared information in an open environment

Sharing information and resources on the Internet has become an important activity for education. The use of ubiquitous devices makes possible for learning participants to be engaged in an open and connected social environment, and also allows the learning activities to be performed at any time and any places. In this study, the discovery of correlation among shared resources is concentrated. A hypothetical scenario is considered that the information, such as photos and thoughts, is applicable to be shared with implicit context (i.e. geographical information) by learners through a practical implementation, PadSCORM, on a mobile device. Two major contributions are achieved. First, the correlations among resources are determined through usage experiences mining and geographical information adjustment. It then assists learners in filtering out redundant information by highlighting the significance of resources. Second, an intelligent searching algorithm is proposed to visualize adaptive routes in order to facilitate search process and to enrich the learning activity.
Evaluation of spectrum access options for indoor mobile network deployment

The investments in indoor mobile networks are highly related to the spectrum availability and its associated authorization options. The aim of this paper is to discuss the differences in the spectrum demand taking into consideration both wide and local area network deployment requirements and the kind of actor that provides the indoor wireless access. The analysis covers different authorizations options namely licensed, unlicensed, licensed shared access (LSA) and secondary access. A quantitative approach is used to analyze the differences between macrocell and femtocell deployments focusing on deployment cost and spectrum demand. This is complemented by a qualitative study to explore and discuss the strategic business decisions of different actors in view of the available spectrum bands and spectrum authorization options. The main conclusions from this study are; spectrum has more value in macrocell deployment scenarios than in femtocell ones. More spectrum in macrocell deployment scenarios means that operators can deploy less number of new sites and exploit previous infrastructure investments. Femtocell networks are often coverage limited which allows for frequency re-use. As a consequence, the value of spectrum is not the same for mobile network operators (MNOs) and for local network operator (LNOs). MNOs are traditionally confined to macrocell deployment strategies which entail the exclusive usage of licensed bands. While, the use of licensed spectrum by LNOs may incur more cost than the cost of infrastructure deployment. This explains why the use of unlicensed bands is lucrative and viable for LNOs. Furthermore, the LSA scheme may or could soon become an enabler for LNO's business due to the prevailing technical, regulation and policies developments.
Molecular content of a Type Ia supernova host galaxy at z= 0.6

We study the properties and the molecular content of the host of a Type Ia supernova (SN1997ey). This z = 0.575 host is the brightest submillimetre source of the sample of Type Ia supernova hosts observed at 450 and 850 μm by Farrah et al. Observations were performed at the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimetrique 30 m telescope (IRAM 30 m) to search for CO(2-1) and CO(3-2) lines in good weather conditions but no signal was detected. The star formation rate cannot exceed 50 M ⊙ yr -1 . These negative results are confronted with an optical analysis of a Keck spectrum and other data archives. We reach the conclusion that this galaxy is a late-type system (0.7L B * ), with a small residual star formation activity (0.2 M ⊙ yr -1 ) detected in the optical. No source of heating (active galactic nucleus or starburst) is found to explain the submillimetre-continuum flux and the non-CO detection excludes the presence of a large amount of cold gas. We thus suggest that either the star formation activity is hidden in the nucleus (with A v ∼ 4) or this galaxy is passive or anemic, and this flux might be associated with a background galaxy.
Multi-level stroke textures for sketch based non-photorealistic rendering

This paper presents a novel method for sketch based rendering of three-dimensional models using a single texture containing multiple levels of stroke distributions. The proposed method eliminates the need for loading several mipmapped sequences of images in a tonal art map. Instead, stroke textures are embedded into different levels of the intensity range to create a single texture. Appropriate values of the intensity threshold and texture scale parameter are then computed to map stroke lines with the required density and resolution to polygonal elements. Most computations are performed inside the geometry shader of the OpenGL-4 pipeline. Various aspects of non-photorealistic rendering including edge rendering, curvature alignment, procedural stroke generation and texture computations are discussed. The paper also details the complete implementation aspects of the proposed method, and provides some experimental results.
Energy-dependent variability and the origin of the soft X-ray excess in active galactic nuclei

The origin of the soft excess seen in many active galactic nuclei (AGN) below ∼1 keV is still an unsolved problem. It is unlikely to represent a true continuum component as its characteristic ‘temperature’ shows a remarkable constancy over a wide range of AGN luminosity and black hole mass. This instead favours an association with atomic processes, in particular with the increase in opacity between 0.7 and 2 keV associated with partially ionized O and Fe. The opacity jump can give rise to a soft excess through either reflection or transmission, and both scenarios can fit the spectra equally well as long as there is strong velocity shear to smear out the characteristic narrow atomic features. Here we use orthogonal constraints from the energy-dependent variability. The rms spectra seen in XMM‐Newton AGN data often show a broad peak between 0.7 and 2 keV. We show that the absorption model can explain the data well if the ionization state of the smeared absorption responds to luminosity changes in the continuum.
The Expression Pattern of the Transcription Factor Phox2 Delineates Synaptic Pathways of the Autonomic Nervous System

Many transcription factors, and most prominently among them, homeodomain proteins, are expressed in specific groups of cells in the developing nervous system in patterns that suggest their involvement in neural fate determination. How various aspects of neural identity are controlled by such transcription factors, or sets of them, is still mostly unknown. It has been shown previously that Phox2 is such a homeodomain protein, expressed exclusively in differentiated groups of neurons or their precursors, and that its expression correlated with that of the noradrenaline synthesis enzyme dopamine-β-hydroxylase. Here we confirm this striking correlation at the single-cell level with the use of an anti-Phox2 antibody. Moreover, we uncover a second, nonmutually exclusive correlative clue to the Phox2 expression pattern: a high proportion of Phox2-expressing cells are involved in, or located in areas involved in, synaptic circuits, i.e., that of the medullary control reflexes of autonomic functions. This suggests that Phox2 could be involved in the establishment of these circuits.
Executive functioning during prolonged exercise: a fatigue-based neurocognitive perspective

ABSTRACT Despite emotional, technical and endurance implications for athletes’ performance, a consensus has yet to be reached to explain the impairment of executive functioning during exercise. In particular, recent research challenges the original assumption of a linear dose–response effect of exercise intensity on cerebral physiology and executive functioning. We propose a fatigue-based neurocognitive perspective of executive functioning during prolonged exercise, suggesting that top-down (cognitive and physical efforts) and bottom-up processes (body sensations) act in parallel of arousing mechanisms to determine cognitive outcomes. In this perspective, executive functioning during prolonged exercise would be dynamical rather than steady (i.e. positively then negatively impacted by exercise) and would be to analyse in regards of exercise termination rather than of exercise intensity.
Stopband Characteristics Prediction with Suspending Microstrip Line for Rectangular Spiral EBG Structure

Suspending micro strip line method is applied to predict the stop band characteristics of the rectangular spiral EBG structure. Effects of height and width of the suspending micro strip line on stop band data, including center frequency and bandwidth, are considered. To investigate this method in detail, a 5×5 mushroom-like EBG structure is fabricated. The measured stop band results are compared with those obtained by FDTD method and HFSS, respectively. Finally, an L-band helix antenna based on the rectangular spiral EBG structure is designed. It is found that the input and radiation performance can be improved.
Differential contributions of basal ganglia and thalamus to song initiation, tempo, and structure.

Basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuits are multistage loops critical to motor behavior, but the contributions of individual components to overall circuit function remain unclear. We addressed these issues in a songbird basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuit (the anterior forebrain pathway, AFP) specialized for singing and critical for vocal plasticity. The major known afferent to the AFP is the premotor cortical nucleus, HVC. Surprisingly, previous studies found that lesions of HVC alter song but do not eliminate the ability of the AFP to drive song production. We therefore used this AFP-driven song to investigate the role of basal ganglia and thalamus in vocal structure, tempo, and initiation. We found that lesions of the striatopallidal component (Area X) slowed song and simplified its acoustic structure. Elimination of the thalamic component (DLM) further simplified the acoustic structure of song and regularized its rhythm but also dramatically reduced song production. The acoustic structure changes imply that sequential stages of the AFP each add complexity to song, but the effects of DLM lesions on song initiation suggest that thalamus is a locus of additional inputs important to initiation. Together, our results highlight the cumulative contribution of stages of a basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuit to motor output along with distinct involvement of thalamus in song initiation or "gating. "
Quantum search problems in the cyclic group state spaces

The hardness to solve an unstructured quantum search problem by a standard quantum search algorithm mainly originates from the low efficiency to amplify the amplitude of the marked state in the Hilbert space of an n−qubit pure-state quantum system by the oracle unitary operation associated with other known quantum operations, which usually is inversely proportional to the square root of dimension of the Hilbert space. In order to bypass this square speedup limitation it is necessary to develop other type of quantum search algorithms. It is described in detail in the paper for a quantum dynamical method to solve the quantum search problem in the cyclic group state space. The binary dynamical representation for a quantum state in the Hilbert space of the n−qubit quantum system is generalized to the multi-base dynamical representation for a quantum state in the cyclic group state space. Thus, any quantum state in the cyclic group state space may be described completely in terms of a set of dynamical parameters that are closely related to the symmetric property and structure of the cyclic group. The quantum search problem therefore could be solved by determining the set of dynamical parameters that describe completely the unknown marked state of the search problem instead by directly measuring the marked state which is a necessary step in the standard quantum search algorithm. In an analogue way used in the hidden subgroup problems, a cyclic group state space may be formed by mapping all the group elements of a cyclic group one-to-one onto the states of the Hilbert space of the n−qubit quantum system and the set of these states is called the cyclic group state space of the Hilbert space. It is an invariant state subspace under the action of the cyclic group operations in the Hilbert space. An unstructured quantum search problem in the Hilbert space may be affected greatly by the symmetric property and structure of the cyclic group if it can be reduced to and is solved in the cyclic group state space. When the cyclic group is high symmetric, that is, the cyclic group with order p is a product group of many cyclic subgroups in which each subgroup has an order ∼ O(log p), the quantum search problem in the cyclic group state space
They Say It Where I’m From: Using the Language of Idioms to Compare the Characteristics of Individualism vs. Collectivism

of Thesis Idioms, proverbs and other metaphorical language are a base component to how people communicate that has to be mutually understood. Slang and common sayings are a fundamental part of language. With language being such a large factor of culture, it’s natural to assume that it would mimic cultural ideals and norms. This study focuses on the cultural dimension Individualism/Collectivism and if the orientation correlates to language usage. The goal of this research is to conduct an analysis of the use of idiomatic expressions in comparison to Individualistic or Collectivistic orientation and setting. Research of expressions and phrases has been done in several languages from cultures of varying levels within the Individualism/Collectivism dimension. The data is achieved by surveying the populace on their cultural dimension and responses to idiomatic expressions with Individualistic or Collectivistic ideals. As a result, this study contributes to the field of cultural dimensions and linguistic idiom analysis by examining the connection between the two. It finds a correlation to situational type and the I/C dimension as well as a connection to multilingual learning and Collectivistic traits. Further, it attempts to dig deeper into different languages’ associations with cultures and their dimensions.
Vowel Synthesis Based on the Spectral Morphing and Its Application to Speaker Conversion

In this paper, we propose a speaker conversion and morphing technique for speech synthesis based on the spectral morphing, although the target synthesized voice is restricted to vowel and vowel-like speech sound at present. In the experiments, we have prepared the databases of four speakers, which consisted of the normalized spectra on Japanese fundamental five vowels and the mean fundamental frequency (pitch). The raw speech parameters including three formant frequencies, pitch pattern and amplitude one were extracted from the connected vowels, /aiueo/ uttered by a male and converted or morphed into another speaker's voice using each database. As results of the dissimilarity tests, the desirable performances in speaker conversion or speaker morphing were confirmed in the proposed vowel synthesis. It is expected that this type of voice synthesis method will be applicable to a hybrid TTS, where a specific speaker's voice is synthesized according to the synthetic rule
Towards a Multiagent System for Competitive Website Ratings

Websites usually appear to the web surfer like isolated islands: Their self-description and their hyperlinks linking to other sites re(cid:176)ect solely the requirements, opinion and preferences of the respective site owner, there is no explicit relation to the information, service and product oﬁers of competing sites, and the assessment of the site by other users is unknown as well. In contrast to usual recommendation systems, this paper outlines a multiagent system which derives multidimensional website ratings from the possibly con(cid:176)icting opinions of interacting rating agents witch compete in the assertion of their individual ratings against others to provide a \socially enhanced" solution for this well-known problem. The rating agents act as representatives for individual web users, interest groups, other web sites, private or public organizations, and represent their ratings in an open discussion forum which is attached to the rated web site. This forum is continuously observed by a rating instance which computes rich, social weighted general ratings of diﬁerent abstraction level from the forum communications. In contrast to the results of usual majority voting based recommendation systems, these general ratings take into account the social structures like norms and roles which emerge from the agents communication process. In addition to the presentation of general ratings to the web surfer, the ratings and the social structures can also be queried by the rating agents themselves to improve their rating capabilities.
LDL: A Logic-Based Data Language

In this paper we describe the considerations that led us to the design of LDL and nrovide an overview of the features of-this language. L$L is designed to combine the flexibility of logic programming with the high performance of the relational database technology. The design offers an improved mode of control over the existing logic programming languages together with an enriched repertoire of data objects and constructs, including: sets, updates and negation. These advantages are realized by means of a compilation technology.
EFFICIENT LINE MATCHING BY IMAGE SEQUENTIAL ANALYSIS FOR URBAN AREA MODELLING

: 3D city modelling from airborne imagery includes mainly two parts: (1) image processing procedures and (2) 3D modelling for man-made objects such as buildings, roads and other objects. Line extraction and stereo matching are usually utilized as an image processing procedures. However, there are some issues for automatic man-made object modelling. In particular, spatial data acquisition of buildings are important for reliable city modelling. With this objective, this paper focuses especially on efficient line matching method using optical flow and trifocal tensor. Furthermore, line matching in general stereo matching methods were also investigated, and performance of the proposal line matching method was compared with these general methods in this paper.
A Model for Predicting Mortality in Acute ST-Segment Elevation Myocardial Infarction Treated With Primary Percutaneous Coronary Intervention: Results From the Assessment of Pexelizumab in Acute Myocardial Infarction Trial

Background—Accurate models to predict mortality are needed for risk stratification in patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Methods and Results—We examined 5745 patients with STEMI undergoing primary PCI in the Assessment of Pexelizumab in Acute Myocardial Infarction Trial within 6 hours of symptom onset. A Cox proportional hazards model incorporating regression splines to accommodate nonlinearity in the log hazard ratio (HR) scale was used to determine baseline independent predictors of 90-day mortality. At 90 days, 271 (4.7%) of 5745 patients died. Independent correlates of 90-day mortality were (in descending order of statistical significance) age (HR, 2.03/10-y increments; 95% CI, 1.80 to 2.29), systolic blood pressure (HR, 0.86/10-mm Hg increments; 95% CI, 0.82 to 0.90), Killip class (class 3 or 4 versus 1 or 2) (HR, 4.24; 95% CI, 2.97 to 6.08), heart rate (>70 beats per minute) (HR, 1.45/10-beat increments; 95% CI, 1.31 to 1.59), creatinine (HR, 1.23/10-&mgr;mol/L increments >90 &mgr;mol/L; 95% CI, 1.13 to 1.34), sum of ST-segment deviations (HR, 1.25/10-mm increments; 95% CI, 1.11 to 1.40), and anterior STEMI location (HR, 1.47; 95% CI, 1.12 to 1.93) (c-index, 0.82). Internal validation with bootstrapping confirmed minimal overoptimism (c-index, 0.81). Conclusions—Our study provides a practical method to assess intermediate-term prognosis of patients with STEMI undergoing primary PCI, using baseline clinical and ECG variables. This model identifies key factors affecting prognosis and enables quantitative risk stratification that may be helpful in guiding clinical care and for risk adjustment for observational analyses.