Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Theoretical Informatics and Applications Eye Localization for Face Recognition *

We present a novel eye localization method which can be used in face recognition applications. It is based on two SVM classifiers which localize the eyes at different resolution levels exploiting the Haar wavelet representation of the images. We present an extensive analysis of its performance on images of very different public databases, showing very good results. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification.68T10, 68T45.
Taxes and Female Labor Supply 1

The Economic Recovery Act of 1981 and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 changed the U.S. income tax structure in a dramatic fashion. In particular, these two reforms reduced the marginal tax rates for married households. In this paper I investigate what part of the rise in labor force participation of married women between 1980 to 1990 (a rise of 13 percentage points) can be accounted by the changes in taxes. I build an heterogeneous agent model populated by married households. Households differ by age and educational attainment levels of their members and decide whether the second earner, the wife, should participate in the labor market. I select parameter values so that the model economy is consistent with the 1980 U.S. economy in terms of income tax structure, wages (skill premium and gender gap), marital sorting (who is married with whom), and female labor force participation. Using counterfactual experiments I find that 20-24% of the rise in married female labor force participation is accounted for by the changes in the income tax structure. Changes in wages account for 62-64%, and changes in marital sorting account for 14-16% of the rise in the participation rate of married women.
Un programme innovateur de promotion du bien-être psychologique POUR des personnes Âgées dépressives

La recherche dans le domaine de la motivation a demontre que la presence de buts personnels est associee au bien-etre psychologique (BEP). Un programme de 14 semaines concu pour aider les participants a realiser leurs projets a ete offert a des personnes âgees (≥ 65 ans) depressives (BDI-II ≥ 9; M = 22,05) afin d’ameliorer leur BEP. Les niveaux de BEP, de depression et d’anxiete des personnes qui ont participe au programme (n = 24) ont ete compares a ceux d’un groupe controle (n = 18). Les analyses ont montre que les participants au programme se sont ameliores significativement sur la plupart des indicateurs de BEP, incluant la depression, ce qui semble indiquer qu’un programme de gestion des buts pourrait etre une maniere innovatrice de promouvoir la sante mentale des aines depressifs. Toutefois, l’amelioration est observee uniquement pour la serenite et le sens a la vie dans les analyses comparatives avec le groupe controle. Les etudes ulterieures devraient tenter de developper des programmes de promotion de la sante mentale qui offrent aux individus des moyens d’atteindre un etat de fonctionnement optimal.
Robust Rearrangement Planning Using Nonprehensile Interaction

As we work to move robots out of factories and into human environments, we must empower robots to interact freely in unstructured, cluttered spaces. Humans do this easily, using diverse, whole-arm, nonprehensile actions such as pushing or pulling in everyday tasks. These interaction strategies make difficult tasks easier and impossible tasks possible. In this thesis, we aim to enable robots with similar capabilities. In particular, we formulate methods for planning robust open-loop trajectories that solve the rearrangement planning problem using nonprehensile interactions. In these problems, a robot must plan in a cluttered environment, reasoning about moving multiple objects in order to achieve a goal. The problem is difficult because we must plan in continuous, high-dimensional state and action spaces. Additionally, during planning we must respect the physical constraints induced by the nonprehensile interaction between the robot and the objects in the scene. Our key insight is that by embedding physics models directly into our planners we can naturally produce solutions that use nonprehensile interactions such as pushing. This also allows us to easily generate plans that exhibit full arm manipulation and simultaneous object interaction without the need for programmer defined high-level primitives that specifically encode this interaction. We show that by generating these diverse actions, we are able to find solutions for motion planning problems in highly cluttered, unstructured environments. In the first part of this thesis we formulate the rearrangement planning problem as a classical motion planning problem. We show that we can embed physics simulators into randomized planners. We propose methods for reducing the search space and speeding planning time in order to make the planners useful in real-world scenarios. The second part of the thesis tackles the imperfect and imprecise worlds that reflect the true reality for robots working in human environments. We pose the rearrangement planning under uncertainty problem as an instance of conformant probabilistic planning and offer methods for solving the problem. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms on two platforms: the home care robot HERB and the NASA rover K-Rex. We demonstrate expanded autonomous capability on HERB, allowing him to work better in high clutter, completing previously infeasible tasks and speeding feasible task execution. In addition, we show these planners increase autonomy for the NASA rover K-Rex by allowing the rover to actively interact with the environment.
Neuroscience and Phenomenology

This text contributes to a necessary dialogue, and possibly a translation of the different notions employed by neuroscience and phenomenology. This effort is particularly significant for cognitive neuroscientists whose main topic is social cognition and the related notion of intersubjectivity. What I qualify as “embodied simulation” (which exploits, not only but mainly, the intrinsic functional organization of the motor system) is a crucial functional mechanism in social cognition, not confined to the domain of action, but encompassing other aspects of intersubjectivity such as emotion and sensation. It is “embodied” because it uses a pre-existing body model in the brain: all the brain areas showing mirror mechanisms model our interaction with the world. This model of interaction, this praktognosia, turns out to be highly relevant not only when the task is to guide our own behavior, but also to understand the behavior of others. The very last part of the text is devoted to reply to some arguments against embodied simulation coming from phenomenologists themselves.
Vascular dysfunction and exercise

The endothelium regulates vascular permeability and actively controls the exchange of molecules in response to environmental and molecular signals. Endothelial cells regulate vascular tone by releasing a number of soluble me diators, including nitric oxide, prostaglandin I2, and endothelium-deriv ed hyperpolarizing factor. Misbalance between pro-oxidants and antioxidants results in increased production of reactive oxygen species, increased oxi dative stress and endothelial dysfunction. Endothelium dysfunction is characterized by an impaired nitric oxide bioavailability due to reduced production of nitric oxide, reduced endothelium-dependent hyper-polarization and enhanced production of contracting factors. Endothelium dysfunction leads to vascular remodeling by vascular smooth muscle cells proliferation, migration and extracellular matrix remodeling. The presence of impaired endotheliumdependent vasodilation is a marker of endothelial dysfunction. The benefits of exercise on the cardiovascular system have long been recognized. Most clinical and experimental studies have reported beneficial effects of regular physical activity in increasing nitric oxide bioavailability and reducing oxidative stress. Therefore, regular physical exercise may be a protective factor against vascular dysfunction induced by acute exertion.
Parc automobile et effet de serre. Agir sur le parc automobile pour réduire l’effet de serre

Cette etude traite des conditions du renouvellement du parc automobile afin de mieux maitriser l'impact sur l'effet de serre. Quels sont les criteres d'achat et les conditions d'utilisation des vehicules ? Quelles politiques publiques peuvent orienter le choix des consommateurs et l'offre des constructeurs vers des vehicules moins polluants ? Divers instruments de politiques publiques sont analyses.
Wavelet-based digital elevation model analysis

Estimations of the local roughness of Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) have been used both for a better geological understanding of terrain structures and for a more accurate DEM interpolation leading to higher resolution terrain maps. This work investigates two fractal dimension estimators for the characterization of the roughness of DEMs: the power spectrum estimator and the wavelet-based estimator. The performance of these methods is compared in terms of image segmentation capabilities. Since wavelets and fractals are related by the same multiresolution concept, we expect to have better results using the wavelet analysis method. This expectation is confirmed by experiments on synthetic images and real DEMs: measurements of fractal parameters using wavelet-based methods are more reliable than the same measurements performed using other methods. Finally we discuss some examples in which the fractal analysis of DEMs allows the separation of different roughness classes and reveals artifacts in the computation of elevation data.
Projeto UEM na região – saúde bucal buscando qualidade de vida através de ações Extensionistas

cmcalazans@gmail.com 2Professora adjunto do Departamento de Odontologia da Universidade Estadual de Maringá. mchicarelli1@gmail.com 3Professora assistente do Departamento de Odontologia da Universidade Estadual de Maringá. elen_tolentino@hotmail.com 4Alunas do curso de Graduação em Odontologia da Universidade Estadual de Maringá PROJETO UEM NA REGIÃO – SAÚDE BUCAL BUSCANDO QUALIDADE DE VIDA ATRAVÉS DE AÇÕES EXTENSIONISTAS
Dynamics of Noise Traders’ Risk in the NSE and BSE Markets.

In the literature of Financial Economics, the connotation “noise” and “noise traders” play critical roles in stocks’ equilibrium pricing mechanism. The equilibrium prices, however, include economic and non-economic aspects. In an empirical exploration, the paper seeks to explore the nature and magnitude of the noise traders’ risk in the Indian markets specifically during its present recovery phase. Besides the daily trading data for “open”, “high”, “low”, and “close” prices, and corresponding trading volumes, the study utilizes the intra-day 1D (one minute) and also 5D (five minutes) trade-prices, trade-volumes, and trade-times data of the sample firms (mostly the Nifty-Fifty firms) listed both in the National Stock Exchange (NSE) and the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). The study utilizes the NSE-Nifty and the BSE-Sensex indices for the market return data. The study examines two important critical facets in Behavioral Finance – (i) whether stocks’ total return variations incorporate noise traders’ risk or not, that is, whether noise is priced in the stock markets’ equilibrium pricing mechanism or not, and (ii) whether informed traders’ short-run risky arbitrage positioning forces them to long-short positioning for possible hedging opportunities or not. The study methodologically argues that the noise as opposed to information has both systematic and firm-specific components and it varies over time while each component includes fundamental (that is, idiosyncratic) and noise aspects. At some days’ lag-periods, long-short position by traders over the two stock markets can hedge the fundamental systematic and the fundamental firm-specific shocks and may detach the noise shocks. Once stocks are traded at long or short horizons in the markets, traders’ long-short returns expose noise aspects across stocks in the markets. On the context of current recovering markets, the study explores comparisons of the results with the current price-volume-trade time data with those of two years earlier. The findings suggest that the intra-day returns (derived from 1D and 5D data) impound a significant level of noise while the daily return (weekly) returns have high (moderate) exposures to noise. The findings of conditional volatilities of long-short returns from the GARCH models show that the estimate of time-varying idiosyncratic noise is highly persistent at presence of noise traders in the equilibrium pricing mechanism. The study concludes that stocks’ prices impound information as well as noise in the market places during the four distinct trading days.
Efficient Extraction of Top-k Instances from Web

: Finding proper information from web pages is very difficult. Because we face problems such as most of available data contains unnecessary information such as some product advertisements, Facebook or twitter posts. One more problem is, obtained data is not in structured format. To overcome these problems, we introduce a system which mainly focuses on extracting exact information in top-k list format. List data is very eventful source to retrieving information. This paper work on information extraction from top-k web pages which contains top-k instances for open domain knowledge based. For example-“Top 10 IT companies in India”. As compare to structured information from web, Top-k list data is cleaner and ranked. Top-k data has interesting semantics. We propose a system which gives direct top-k list when user enters a search query within minimum time. Extraction of top-k list depends on 1] Extracting web URLs and its titles 2] Removing dust from web URLs 3] Using extraction algorithm extract exact top-k list.
Zů erkanntnuß gebracht: Frühneuhochdeutsche Funktionsverbgefüge – sprachliche Strukturen in der Diglossiesituation

Komplexe Prädikatsausdrücke des Typs zur Anwendung bringen haben – unter verschiedenen Aspekten – seit den 1960er Jahren immer wieder die Aufmerksamkeit der Linguistik gefunden. Zumindest für das Neuhochdeutsche können derartige ‚Funktionsverbgefüge‘ (im Folgenden FVG) als vergleichsweise gut erforscht gelten, zumal mittlerweile mehrere (z.T. diachron orientierte) umfangreiche Korpusuntersuchungen (vgl. zuletzt Storrer 2013) vorliegen. Auch in älteren Sprachstufen sind FVG belegt: So lassen sich bereits in althochdeutschen Texten in großer Zahl Konstruktionen wie in angest bringen ‚in Angst versetzen‘ oder in chorunka bringen ‚in Versuchung bringen‘ nachweisen (Relleke 1974: 31; vgl. auch Schrodt 2004: 71). Für das Mittelhochdeutsche liegt mit Tao (1997) eine systematische Korpusstudie vor, in der zahlreiche Belege hinsichtlich ihrer morphosyntaktischen Eigenschaften und satzsemantischen Leistungen analysiert werden. Ein Desiderat stellt jedoch nach wie vor die Erfassung und Beschreibung frühneuhochdeutscher FVG dar. Das ist insofern bemerkenswert, als für diese Sprachepoche im Bereich der Verbgefüge Ausbauund Verfestigungsprozesse nachzuweisen sind (vgl. Polenz 2000: 188–189). Dass auch bei FVG mit Grammatikalisierung bzw. dem Ausbau
The Projection from V 1 to Extrastriate Area 21 a : A Second Patchy Efferent Pathway that Colocalizes with the CO Blob Columns in Cat Visual Cortex

primary visual cortex (area 17) to the various extrastriate areas may contribute to functional differences in the output to each of these areas. The pattern of neurons projecting to extrastriate area 21a was examined using large injections of retrograde tracers and compared to the pattern shown by neurons projecting to the lateral suprasylvian area (LS). Patches of neurons projecting to 21a showed a bimodal laminar distribution, with numerous labeled cells in the upper and lower third of layer 3 bracketing a sparsely labeled central third; LS-projecting neurons were confined to the lower and middle thirds of layer 3. The 21a projecting cells were relatively tighter in their clustering pattern than the LS projecting cells, i.e. the difference in labeling density between patch and interpatch zones was greater for 21a-projecting cells than for LS-projecting cells. As previously shown for the LS-projecting cells, patches of 21aprojecting cells colocalized with CO blob columns in area 17. Combined with our earlier results, this study shows that the CO blob compartments in area 17 give rise to at least two distinct efferent pathways, one projecting to LS and the other to 21a, and furthermore suggest that each pathway may carry unique information to its extrastriate target.
A POSSIBLE PALEOCLIMATIC IMPLICATION OF A RECENT CHANGE OF CORRELATIONS BETWEEN THE TREE-GROWTH AND THE CURRENT WARMING

Recent studies have revealed a reduced sensitivity of tree-growth to temperature at high Northern Hemisphere (NH) latitudes during recent decades. Causes of this reduction are not known, but it seems to be for certain that this reduction has important implications for paleoclimatic reconstructions based on tree-rings because there is a risk that warmer phases of paleoclimates can be essentially underestimated if the problem is not taken into account. We add some more observational evidences of the reduction and argue: it is a signal that temperatures recently have reached above optimum levels for the tree-growth in some areas of NH. If such equally warm, or warmer, phases existed in the past, and if tree-growth responded negatively to temperatures during these phases, it would be necessary to apply separate transfer functions to calibrate tree-ring records in terms of temperature for warmer and colder phases of the past climates.
Heteroskedasticity Consistent Covariance Matrix Estimators for the GMME of Spatial Autoregressive Models ∗

In the presence of heteroskedasticity, the conventional test statistics, based on the ordinary least 6 square estimator, lead to incorrect inference results in the linear regression model. Given that heteroskedasticity is common in cross-sectional data, the test statistics based on various forms 8 of heteroskedasticity consistent covariance matrices (HCCMs) have been developed in the literature. Heteroskedasticity is a more serious problem for spatial econometric models, generally 10 causing inconsistent estimators. We investigate the finite sample properties of a heteroskedasticity robust generalized method of moments estimator for a spatial econometric model with an 12 unknown form of hetereoskedasticity. We develop various HCCM-type corrections to improve the finite sample properties of the GMME and the conventional Wald test. Our Monte Carlo 14 experiments indicate that the HCCM-type corrections produce more accurate inference results for the model parameters and the effects estimates. 16 JEL-Classification: C13, C21, C31.
Structured Query Formulation and Result Organization for Session Search

Complicated search such as making a travel plan usually requires more than one search queries. A user interacts with a search engine for multiple iterations, which we call a session. Session search is the task that deals with document retrieval within a session. A session often involves a series of interactions between the user and the search engine. To make use of all the queries and various interactions in a session, we propose an e ective structured query formulation method for session search. By identifying phrase-like textual nuggets, we investigate di erent degrees of importance for phrases in queries, aggregate them to create a highly e ective session-wise query, and send them to state-of-the-art search engine to retrieval the relevant documents. Our system participated in the TREC 2012 Session track evaluation and won the second position in whole session search (RL2-RL4). A second main contribution of this thesis is to increase stability of result organization for session search. Search result clustering (SRC) hierarchies are widely used in organizing search results. These hierarchies provide users overviews about their search results. Search result organization is usually sensitive to even slight change in queries. Within a session, queries are related and hence the search result organization should be related as well and maintain a more stable representation of the organization. We propose two monothetic concept hierarchy approaches that exploit external knowledge to build more stable SRC hierarchies for session search. One approach corrects
Combinatorics of acyclic orientations of graphs : algebra, geometry and probability

This thesis studies aspects of the set of acyclic orientations of a simple undirected graph. Acyclic orientations of a graph may be readily obtained from bijective labellings of its vertex-set with a totally ordered set, and they can be regarded as partially ordered sets. We will study this connection between acyclic orientations of a graph and the theory of linear extensions or topological sortings of a poset, from both the points of view of poset theory and enumerative combinatorics, and of the geometry of hyperplane arrangements and zonotopes. What can be said about the distribution of acyclic orientations obtained from a uniformly random selection of bijective labelling? What orientations are thence more probable? What can be said about the case of random graphs? These questions will begin to be answered during the first part of the thesis. Other types of labellings of the vertex-set, e.g. proper colorings, may be used to obtain acyclic orientations of a graph, as well. Motivated by our first results on bijective labellings, in the second part of the thesis, we will use eigenvectors of the Laplacian matrix of a graph, in particular, those corresponding to the largest eigenvalue, to label its vertex-set and to induce partial orientations of its edge-set. What information about the graph can be gathered from these partial orientations? Lastly, in the third part of the thesis, we will delve further into the structure of acyclic orientations of a graph by enhancing our understanding of the duality between the graphical zonotope and the graphical arrangement with the lens of Alexander duality. This will take us to non-crossing trees, which arguably vastly subsume the combinatorics of this geometric and algebraic duality. We will then combine all of these tools to obtain probabilistic results about the number of acyclic orientations of a random graph, and about the uniformly random choice of an acyclic orientation of a graph, among others.
An anti-spam prototype.

Anti-spam systems are software systems which filter spam e-mails. Spam e-mails are nowadays a serious problem which causes high losses to the institutions. This report proposes a new anti-spam prototype made up by three stages. The first, the pre-processing, analyses the e-mails to search for known spam patterns, as well as performs eliminations or replacements to simplify the e-mails and to make them uniform. The second stage, the feature selection, identifies the most relevant features of the e-mails. The third stage, the classification, consists in an artificial neural model — the multilayer perceptron — to classify the e-mails. The anti-spam prototype is exhaustively tested on three public corpora — SpamAssassin, LingSpam and Trec 2007 — available in the Internet. The prototype performance is assessed according to the percentage of correct classifications in both e-mail classes — legitimate (ham) and spam. It is also assessed the time spent in training and testing of the neural model. The results obtained are very promising. The anti-spam prototype has very good performance on the three corpora.