Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
»Does one size fit all?« - kognitiv variation och IT

In this article it is proposed that the development of IT interfaces, from a cognitive perspective, has taken the first of two important steps. Command-based IT interfaces, representing a technology centered design, have been replaced by graphical interfaces, representing a more human centered design. There is however a second important developmental step that we are still waiting for. This second step requires a serious appreciation of the fact that human beings differ as informational creatures – that they are not cognitively alike. Even though the majority of IT users are well served by graphical interfaces as such, it does not mean that all those users are equally comfortable with one and the same design of a particular graphical interface. Some research projects which indicate that this is not the case are presented in the text. Simply replacing the current »one size fits all« approach to interface design will however not be sufficient. There is also need for more research on what cognitive aspects are most relevant in adpating interfaces and on how this can be done in practice.
A Baseline for Visual Instance Retrieval with Deep Convolutional Networks

This paper presents a simple pipeline for visual instance retrieval exploiting image representations based on convolutional networks (ConvNets), and demonstrates that ConvNet image representations outperform other state-of-the-art image representations on six standard image retrieval datasets for the first time. Unlike existing design choices, our image representation does not require fine-tuning or learning with data similar to the test set. Furthermore, we consider the challenge "Can you construct a tiny image representation with memory requirements less than or equal to 32 bytes that can successfully perform retrieval? " We report the promising performance of our tiny ConvNet based representation.
Social media, online imagined communities and communication research

Purpose – This paper aims to examine social media communication that may consist of a database for online research and may create an online imagined community that follows special language symbols and shares common beliefs in a similar way to Anderson’s imagined communities. Design/methodology/approach – Well-known databases were searched in the available literature for specific keywords which were associated with the imagined community, and methodological tools such as online interviews, content analysis, archival analysis and social media. Findings – The paper discusses the use of multiple measures, such as document and archival analysis, online interviews and content analysis, which may derive from the online imagined community that social media create. Social media may in fact provide useful data that are available for research, yet are relatively understudied and not fully used in communication research, not to mention in archival services. Comparison takes place between online community’s characteri.
AN INTEGRATED APPROACH TO FUNCTIONAL CORPUS CONSTRUCTION

In this paper, we present our recent experience in constructing a first-of-its-kind functional corpus based on the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Annotated on selected texts from the Penn Treebank, the corpus was built by a collaborative team on a web-based annotation platform with several advanced features. After a discussion on the background and motivation of the project, we present our solutions to some of the challenges encountered in the collaborative annotation process. With fine-grained annotations of an initial corpus now available, the corpus can serve as a valuable linguistic resource that complements existing semantically annotated corpora and aids in the development of a larger-scale resource crucial for automated systems for analysis of linguistic function.
Biomechanical considerations on the design of a humanoid shoulder girdle

Presents a comparison between the ranges of motion in the human shoulder complex and in the humanoid robotic shoulder complex developed as a parallel mechanism. The Elite motion analyser was used to obtain the three dimensional trajectories of markers attached to the selected anatomical points on the shoulder girdle. The measurements show an asymmetry of the extreme positions in the shoulder girdle and the difference when the arms are stretched downward and when the arms execute inclination in the plane of the girdle's motion. The mechanism has to be inclined upward and forward for about 10/spl deg/. The obtained results of the working cone of the arm show that the central axis is inclined about 60/spl deg/ forward in the horizontal plane and 15/spl deg/ upward in the frontal plane.
Using iPads to help teens design their own activities

This paper reports on action research aimed at helping teenage English language learners become more aware of ways they might use technology to support their learning. Over nine-months we used iPads to support a wide variety of teacherdesigned learning activities and then used design thinking to help students co-design their own activities. Students’ design ideas were iteratively refined in collaboration with the teacher over several weeks. Finally, groups tried out each other’s activities. Evidence suggests students did reflect on their English learning practices and ways technology could support these. However, there is no indication that students adopted new practices outside class. Nevertheless, students did produce useful designs for classroom activities. This paper describes the activities we developed and indicates how the co-design process will be modified in future iterations in ways that might better promote uptake of technology-enhanced learning practices outside class.
Predictive Offloading Method and Framework Design Model for Efficient Mobile Cloud Computing

With the emergency of the mobile computing, more and more useful mobile applications make it possible for a user to manage personal schedule, entertainment, and do many useful activities. Offloading is a common method to remedy the resource constraint problem of mobile devices. That is, resource-heavy and computation-intensive components are offloaded to a resource-rich server, which runs the components and returns the result. The conventional dynamic offloading approach is to migrate computation-intensive offloadable components after offloading situation occurrence. To resolve the mentioned problem, we propose a predictive offloading framework which migrates computation-intensive offloadable components in advance. As the result, the limitations of the conventional dynamic offloading are overcome, the overall efficiency of offloading is greatly increased. In this paper, we will present the predictive offloading method for efficient mobile cloud computing. At last, we will present experiment result for validating applicability and practicability of our proposal.
From e-learning to "Distance Learning": The Case of the University of Ferrara

—The intention of this research paper is to verify the effectiveness of a learning model known as Distance attendance (FAD), applied in two face-to-face degree courses at the University of Ferrara, during the academic year 2013-14. In practice some modules of a series of face-to-face degree courses are organized so that they can also be followed through distance learning. The project is part of the research activity of the Center of communication technologies, innovation and distance learning of the same University, and comes in the wake of the international debate on technology-mediated learning, particularly the use of the paradigms of social constructivism and collective and connective intelligence. Through the empirical observation (in the virtual environment) of the performance of all the first semester modules that took place through distance learning in the 2013/14 academic year, and a subsequent questionnaire for students, the cognitive artifacts, technological tools and didactic methodologies used were investigated. The result of this research highlights how, alongside the clear benefits offered by this experiment, the lecturers involved did not make optimal use of the paradigms functional to media didactic processes. The digital technology normalization process of the university modules must therefore be accompanied by a new didactic model in order to, on one hand, improve technology enhanced didactics and, on the other hand, facilitate students who, for various reasons, cannot be present in the classroom in person.
Comparative Analysis of Various SRAM Cells with Low Power, High Read Stability and Low Area

SRAMs are very important part of today‟s movable devices like laptops and mobile phones. Different SRAM cells of different number of transistors have their own respective advantages and drawbacks. In this work an attempt has been made to reduce the leakage power by adding some transistors. Each SRAM cell provides an efficient way to reduce the leakage power, but disadvantage of each SRAM cell limit the application of them. In this paper, the study and transient analysis on four different SRAM cells has been carried out and compared with respect to various parameters like power dissipation, delay and area. The simulation is carried out in 180nm CMOS technology using tanner tools. Layout is carried out using microwind.
Performance of Two-Way Code-Multiplexed UWB Relay Networks

Recently, two-way relay network has been taken attention. In this paper, the two-way relayprotocols of ultra-wideband (UWB) network based on code-multiplexed transmitted-reference (CMTR)impulse radio have been studied. Based on code-multiplexed scheme, a new two-way relayingstrategy for two-slots protocol is designed. The corresponding bit error rate (BER) performance isevaluated via simulations and compared with three-slots scheme which can get path diversity gainfrom direct link between terminals. Simulation results reveal that the performance of the two-slotsrelaying scheme is almost same with that of the three-slots scheme. Meanwhile the throughput ispromoted about 33% over three-slots scheme.
Exploring how primary school students function in computer supported collaborative learning

This study investigated how elementary school students cooperate to complete a shared learning task in a networked environment. A total of thirty students were organised to use a computer supported collaborative system to accomplish group tasks. The task included generating three concept maps. The collaborative system provided each member of each group with the capacity to control and modify shared concept maps. Examination of the students' textual communications showed that students would frequently manage teamwork coordination and collaborate on how to proceed with the group tasks. However, they rarely worked on processing knowledge, which should be central to the generation of concept maps. The findings of this exploratory study will not only enable us to identify the features of computer supported collaborative learning, but also provide hints on how to design or improve a collaborative system when applied in education.
Average- and Median-Based Smoothing Techniques for Improving Digital Speech Quality in the Presence of Transmission Errors

In digital speech communication, transmission errors generally introduce impulsive distortions in the received speech waveform. Smoothing of this waveform results at once in a squelching of the distortion component, and in an undesirable smearing of the speech. However, our experience with practical differential PCM (DPCM) codes (with adaptive quantizers and first-order predictors) has shown that if the error probability is fairly significant (for example, 0.025), the noise attenuation is perceptually desirable in spite of the attendant speech-muffling. Our observations are based on computer simulations and informal listening tests. The smoothing can be performed either on the received DPCM word (prediction error signal) or the reconstructed speech amplitude. (The two signals are identical in nondifferential PCM.) Smoothing algorithms can be either linear (based, for example, on running averages) or nonlinear (based, for example, on running medians). Studies with 3-bit quantizers indicate that with independently occurring transmission errors, smoothing of the prediction error signal is perceptually desirable, although the benefits decrease as a function of the predictor coefficient a, with the maximum advantage showing up for a = 0 (PCM). Running averages and running medians seem to work equally well, and suggested block lengths for their computations are three or five samples. Results with clustered transmission errors show a higher advantage due to smoothing and a preference of linear methods and longer block lengths.
Rancang bangun penghitung dan pengidentifikasi kendaraan menggunakan Multiple Object Tracking

Detection of a vehicle with a video camera is one accurate technology for detecting vehicles efficiently and can be used for large-scale data collection. This study has been conducted implementation of counters and identifiers vehicles on the highway using multiple object tracking. The system uses an algorithm Gaussian mixture models and Kalman filter to detect and track the position, speed, direction of motion and size of vehicles from time to time in each image frame. The process of counting and identifying the vehicle consists of several stages of image acquisition, object detection using a Gaussian mixture models, morphology, object tracking using a Kalman filter and counting as well as the identification of the vehicle. The results of system performance is obtained by calculating the value of accuracy. Best performance results from the system counters and identifiers of vehicles on the highway using multiple object tracking obtained by the time of the morning and the worst at night. The results of the performance measurement system and vehicle identifiers using multiple object tracking accuracy of the results obtained on the morning of 94%, by 90% during the day, in the afternoon by 85%, and the evenings of 59%. Keywords : Counters and vehicle identifiers, multiple object tracking, Gaussian mixture models, Kalman Filter
Optimal Brain Surgeon and general network pruning

The use of information from all second-order derivatives of the error function to perform network pruning (i.e., removing unimportant weights from a trained network) in order to improve generalization, simplify networks, reduce hardware or storage requirements, increase the speed of further training, and, in some cases, enable rule extraction, is investigated. The method, Optimal Brain Surgeon (OBS), is significantly better than magnitude-based methods and Optimal Brain Damage, which often remove the wrong weights. OBS, permits pruning of more weights than other methods (for the same error on the training set), and thus yields better generalization on test data. Crucial to OBS is a recursion relation for calculating the inverse Hessian matrix H/sup -1/ from training data and structural information of the set. OBS deletes the correct weights from a trained XOR network in every case. <<ETX>>
Model-Driven Engineering of Web Service Compositions: A Transformation from ISDL to BPEL

An approach to system specification defined by the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) separates the specification of system functionality from the specification of the implementation of that functionality on a specific platform. To this end, the MDA proposes a framework for transforming a model into another model of the same system. The framework can also be used to transform a model into code for creating a system. Model-Driven Engineering, which combines the MDA with process and analysis, puts the MDA into work in software development. The Interaction Systems Design Language (ISDL) is a modeling language that is aimed at supporting the design of distributed systems. The ISDL allows one to model and to structure a system at higher levels of abstraction. At some level, an ISDL model has to be mapped onto available concrete components to create the system. Web services allows applications within an enterprise to be accessible through the Web by providing an interface that is described in the Web Service Description Language (WSDL). Web services can be further composed to provide a more sophisticated Web service that performs some business process. A language for defining the behavior of a Web service composition is the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS, or BPEL for short). From the perspective of a design process, the WSDL and the BPEL are concrete components for implementing a system being designed. This thesis provides a transformation from ISDL to BPEL using approaches suggested by the MDA, i.e. marking and metamodel transformation. An ISDL profile for business processes modeling with a mapping to the BPEL is developed. In addition, metamodels for the WSDL and the BPEL are developed. The metamodels are used to define transformation specifications from ISDL to WSDL and from ISDL to BPEL. The transformation is able to generate WSDL and BPEL documents from an ISDL model that complies with the profile.
A Four-Wheel-Rhombus-Arranged Mobility System for a New Lunar Robotic Rover

Different from traditional ground vehicles, planetary robotic rovers with limited weight and power need to travel in unfamiliar and extremely arduous environments. In this paper, a newly developed four-wheel-rhombus-arranged (FWRA) mobility system is presented as a lunar robotic rover with high mobility and a low-weight structure. The mobility system integrates independent active suspensions with a passive rotary link structure. The active suspension with swing arms improves the rover's capacity to escape from a trapped environment whereas the passive rotary link structure guarantees continuous contact between the four wheels and the terrain. The four-wheel-three-axis rhombus configuration of the mobility system gives a high degree of lightweight structure because it has a simple mechanism with the minimum number of wheels among wheeled rovers with three-axis off-road mobility. The performance evaluation of the lightweight nature of the structure, manoeuvrability and the mobility required in a planetary exploring environment are illustrated by theoretical analysis and partly shown by experiments on the developed rover prototype.
Physical access network topology map in hyper operator overlay architecture

A novel service architecture, called hyper operator overlay architecture, has been proposed (see Cao, J. et al., GLOBECOM'02, 2002) to provide seamless services to future mobile users as well as application service providers over heterogeneous access technologies. The basic concept of hyper operator overlay architecture is to organize heterogeneous access networks, various contents and Web service providers, and mobile users in order to mitigate variation among them. Current independently developed service management schemes at each access network cause difficulties in providing truly seamless experience over heterogeneous access networks to mobile users and third party service providers. Among the numerous technical challenges in the hyper operator overlay architecture, the paper focuses on how to estimate a geographical access network configuration without recourse to access network operators, and how to use the physical access network topology map in order to reduce handoff time as well as a device's battery consumption.
Development of a stereo vision mixed reality framework

Augmented reality is a fairly young research field, still in an infancy stage at Stellenbosch University. Since this is one of the first augmented reality projects, one goal is to present a theoretical study of augmented reality. This study is given in the literature study, along with a review of the available development solutions. While there are various tools available with which one can create markerbased augmented reality applications, these tools are not meant for testing new techniques and algorithms in an augmented or mixed reality. The remaining goals of this project is to create a platform for the rapid design of augmented reality applications, and to expand the capabilities of this platform beyond marker-based augmented reality. In this project we present the design and implementation of a pragmatic mixed-reality framework capable of a wider variety of applications. A design is shown where marker tracking can be used alongside other computer vision techniques to design new applications. The framework utilises stereo cameras to find the position of real world objects, and a 3D display to make the mixed reality environment as immersive as possible. Proof of concept test applications built with the framework are presented. Colour based techniques are used to find a user’s hand and create a virtual representation of it. This allows the user to interact with a virtual object in an augmented reality scene by ‘touching’ it with her hand. ii Stellenbosch University http://scholar.sun.ac.za
A micropower current-mode CMOS function approximation circuit

A current-mode weak-inversion circuit for analog function approximation is proposed. It is based on the fuzzy logic paradigm and exploits a modular architecture with respect to the number of inputs and the number of rules. Simulation results show that a 2-input, 1 output transcendental function can be approximated with a 50% RMS error at the expense of 5 /spl mu/W of power consumption with a 3.3 V supply.
Corners Truncated Square Multiband Microstrip Patch Antenna Design

The area of micro strip antennas has seen some inventive work in recent years and is currently one of the most dynamic fields of antenna theory. Mobile personal communication systems and wireless computer networks are commonly used nowadays and they need antennas in different frequency bands. The design adopts patch structure and introducing the novel truncated patch offering multiband applications. The proposed patch has a compact dimension. The antenna works on four bands having center frequencies, 5.6, 7.1, 8,1, and 9.5 GHz. The design is suitable for applications in C-band and X-band Communications. Design results are obtained by a HFSS (High Frequency Structure Simulator) which is used for simulating microwave passive components.
The tonal-metric hierarchy: A corpus analysis

Despite the plethora of research on the role of tonality and meter in music perception, there is little work on how these fundamental properties function together. The most basic question is whether the two hierarchical structures are correlated – that is, do metrically stable positions in the measure preferentially feature tonally stable pitches, and do tonally stable pitches occur more often than not at metrically stable locations? To answer this question, we analyzed a corpus of compositions by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Chopin, tabulating the frequency of occurrence of each of the 12 pitch classes at all possible temporal positions in the bar. There was a reliable relation between the tonal and metric hierarchies, such that tonally stable pitch classes and metrically stable temporal positions co-occurred beyond their simple joint probability. Further, the pitch class distribution at stable metric temporal positions agreed more with the tonal hierarchy than at less metrically stable locations. This tonal-metric hierarchy was largely consistent across composers, time signatures, and modes. The existence, profile, and constancy of the tonal-metric hierarchy is relevant to several areas of music cognition research, including pitch-time integration, statistical learning, and global effects of tonality.