Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CONTENT RECOVERY AND IMAGE RETRIVAL IN IMAGE DATABASE

- Digital Images are used in magazines, blogs, website, television and more. Digital image processing techniques are used for feature selection, pattern extraction classification and retrieval requirements. Color, texture and shape features are used in the image processing. Digital images processing also supports computer graphics and computer vision domains. Scene text recognition is performed with two schemes. They are character recognizer and binary character classifier models. A character recognizer is trained to predict the category of a character in an image patch. A binary character classifier is trained for each character class to predict the existence of this category in an image patch. Scene text recognition is performed on detected text regions. Pixel-based layout analysis method is adopted to extract text regions and segment text characters in images. Text character segmentation is carried out with color uniformity and horizontal alignment of text characters. Discriminative character descriptor is designed by combining several feature detectors and descriptors. Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) is used to identify the character descriptors. Character structure is modeled at each character class by designing stroke configuration maps. The scene text extraction scheme is also supports for smart mobile devices. Text recognition methods are used with text understanding and text retrieval applications. The text recognition scheme is enhanced with content based image retrieval process. The system is integrated with additional representative and discriminative features for text structure modeling process. The system is enhanced to perform text and word level recognition using lexicon analysis. The training process is included with word database update task.
A heuristic on the rearrangeability of shuffle-exchange networks

An interconnection network that passes all N! permutations, when N=2n, in one pass through the network is defined as rearrangeable. No formal proof has been developed to show that (2n-l) stages of the shuffleexchange (SE) network are sufficient to pass all permutations. The heuristic developed for the SE network relies on the use of the topologically equivalent baseline (BL) network concatenated with the cube-connected (CC) network. This thesis establishes a control heuristic for setting the states of the switching elements for arbitrary permutations for a 7-s,tage (2n-l) BL.CC network with N=16 (2n) inputs. The conditions and requirements, which were discovered, will help serve as a foundation for future work on the proof of the rearrangeability of the SE network.
Hydrogen Sulfide-induced Chilling Tolerance of Cucumber and Involvement of Nitric Oxide

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and nitric oxide (NO) are two signaling molecules that play important roles in various physiological processes. However, the mechanisms and signal transduction pathways of H2S in plants and the relationship between the H2S and NO pathways remain unclear. In this study, we assessed changes in endogenous H2S and NO emission systems, membrane lipid peroxidation and antioxidant systems of cucumber seedlings subjected to low temperature stress (5 °C) that were pre-treated with 1.0 mM sodium hydrosulfide (NaHS), 0.15 mM hypotaurine (HT), 0.1 mM sodium nitroprusside (SNP), 15 μM hemoglobin (Hb), 1 mM NaHS and 15 μM Hb, or distilled water for 12 h. The results showed that chilling stress increased the activity and mRNA abundances of L/Dcysteine desulfhydrase (CDes), which in turn induced the accumulation of endogenous H2S. In the same way, the endogenous NO system was triggered by chilling stress. The chilling injury symptoms were significantly moderated by 1.0 mM of the H2S donor NaHS and 0.1 mM of the NO donor SNP. On the contrary, treatment with HT or Hb, the special scavengers of H2S and NO, respectively, prior to chilling stress aggravated these injury symptoms. NaHS and SNP pre-treatments reduced the malondialdehyde (MDA) levels, hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) accumulation and production rate of the superoxide anion (O2) caused by chilling stress, whereas the activities and mRNA abundances of superoxide dismutase (SOD), peroxidase (POD), ascorbate peroxidase (APX) and glutathione reductase (GR) were increased compared with the water-treated seedlings. Furthermore, NaHS and SNP led to greater accumulation of ascorbic acid (AsA) and reduced glutathione (GSH)and lessened the decrease in the AsA/DHA and GSH/GSSG ratios of stressed seedlings, thus resulting in the alleviation of oxidative damage. These results suggest that H2S could alleviate chilling stress by enhancing the antioxidative system in cucumber seedlings, which might have a possible interaction with NO signaling, because the addition of Hb reversed the positive effects.
Design , Implementation , and Evaluation of an Object Tracking Motion Detection System

This master’s thesis documents the design, implementation, and evaluation of Pharos, an Internet of Things (IoT)-based object tracking system (OTS). The OTS also provides a Geofencing-based alarm mechanism, to detect unauthorized displacements of the tracked objects. Pharos consists of hardware devices, the so-called tags, and a web application. The challenges of this project were to create a reliable, secure, and user-friendly system. The tag’s two major components are a positioning and a wireless communication module. Since there are multiple feasible solutions for both modules, a detailed comparison of positioning and wireless communication technologies is provided in this master’s thesis. These comparisons are then used to justify the LoRa and Global Positioning System (GPS)-based design of the tags. The web app consists of a front-end and a back-end component. The back-end is a Django-based service which implements the data management and logic for the OTS. The Docker virtualization technology is used for the hosting of the back-end. The major design concerns for the back-end were its security and reliability. The front-end of Pharos provides the interface to control the system. The challenges for the front-end were to develop a user-friendly interface which promotes efficiency and a safe usage of the system. The front-end implementation uses the technologies Hypertext Markup Language 5 (HTML5), Cascading Style Sheets 3 (CSS3) and JavaScript. Further, the Vue.js front-end framework was used to make the web page reactive. A Representational State Transfer (REST) Application Programming Interface (API) is used to connect the front-end to the back-end.
Including the state of the art scientific workflow management systems in an e-Science environment

In e-Science environments, the service for scientific workflows facilitates the management of experiment data and activities, the prototyping of computing systems and the orchestration of the runtime system behaviour. Reusing the successful and stable design of Scientific Workflow Management Systems (SWMS) can not only improve the efficiency for developing advanced high-level application specific functionality, but also reduce cost and risks for utilising an e-Science infrastructure in a new problem domain. However, most of the existing workflow management systems are driven by the domain specific applications; the applicability to different domains is limited. Investigating the internal links between the characteristics of domain specific applications and the requirements on the development of workflow management systems is essential to realise a common e-Science framework for scientists from different domains to share their knowledge and to conduct domain specific scientific research. In this paper, we give an abstract model of SWMSs and survey the state of the art in existing systems, and based on that we discuss the challenges in developing an effective workflow management system. The research is conducted in an ongoing project: Virtual Laboratory for e-
Analysis of Piezoelectric Heterogeneous Bimorph Energy Harvesters

Piezoelectric materials have been known for the conversion of electrical energy into mechanical energy and mechanical energy to electrical energy. The property of the piezoelectric materials in converting the mechanical energy into electrical energy has paved a wat for their vast applications in sensors and actuators. This paper presents the study and modeling of the piezoelectric heterogeneous bimorphs made of PZT-5A and structural steel for harvesting of electrical power from mechanical power. These bimorphs can potentially be used as the replacements for the battery and power supplies in the milliwatt range. The following paper presents the theoretical analysis heterogeneous bimorph and its several factors such as efficiency, dependence of voltage and power on the efficiency, analysis of the dependence of load on voltage and power generated along with the frequency, acceleration dependence on the voltage and power. There by later on an application each of the developed models in the fields such as vibrating machinery in the industries and use of the modeled weight beams such in the case of bending platforms such as treadmill sand conveyor belts will be discussed as an applications. Keywords—Piezoelectricmaterials, piezoelectricity, power generation, piezeoceramics, piezoelectric heterogenoeus bimorphs, PZT ceramics.
GEOREFERENCED SPECTRAL MAPS.an Improved instrument for Action planning ON Environmental Noise Mitigation

Exposure-response relationships have been widely studied using A weighted equivalent sound pressure level (Leq,A) measured outside building environments in contrast with field surveys. On one hand low frequencies are minimized by A-weighted filter network. On the other hand low frequencies are predominant even inside buildings for some of the most salient sources in many cities (i.e. road traffic). These relationships do not consider that people spend a large part of their time inside building environments. The spread of the exposure-response relationships can, presumably, be reduced by relating people response to the noise spectrum levels inside building environments instead of the outdoors Leq,A. Outdoors spectral maps can be georeferenced using geographical information systems. Then the indoors spectrum for each building can be estimated if the georeferenced data of façades and interiors properties were available. Furthermore city planners can use the outdoors spectral maps to estimate the adequate sound insulation of façades for new projects. In this article a georeferenced spectral map of a part of the city of Rosario, Argentina is developed using inexpensive resources and some interesting tools for this purpose are presented using technical computing software. Different forms of presenting the data are analyzed in relation to the requirements of different agents, public, city planners, Geographical Information Systems users, etc.
THE EFFECT OF COLOR SPACE ON MEAN SHIFT OBJECT TRACKING : A COMPARATIVE STUDY

The mean shift algorithm is a widely used tool for robust and real-time object tracking that can use any feature space such as the color space. Therefore, in this article, we have studied and analyzed the various effects of using different color space configurations with the mean shift algorithm on the tracking process in surveillance videos. We have done so by investigating the potency of the gray space and four other color spaces (RGB, HSV, YIQ, YCbCr [each color space was studied under all the available seven configurations]). In the end, we have reached a conclusion that deciding which color space (or which configuration of the color space channels) to be used not only can be a very critical decision which may affect greatly the results of the tracking process, but also there is no color space configuration that can succeed all the time in all situations. Therefore, it is better to select the appropriate color space configuration according to the situation at hand.
Recent Analysis and Capability Enhancements to the ADAPT Dynamic Event

Dynamic probabilistic risk assessment (DPRA) methodologies and the dynamic event tree (DET) methodology specifically allow traditional PRA to be complemented by insights into timedependent behavior. The ADAPT DET driver has been enhanced recently to provide greater capability to generate DETs and analyze results. The functions that ADAPT uses to gather and present output data have been standardized and enhanced with the goal of automating as much of the process as feasible while remaining simulator and technology agnostic. These individual enhancements come together to reduce the burden on the analyst and allow insights to be discovered more quickly. A recent goal has been the use of ADAPT on high performance computing (HPC) platforms. The number and granularity of treatment of uncertain parameters in a DET may lead to a state space explosion unless DETs are truncated (e.g., using a probability threshold) which may make the complete DET to be infeasible to run on local machines or small computer clusters. Progress can be greatly accelerated by using the large capacity of HPCs. A scheme is presented by which ADAPT gains the capability to distribute jobs to an HPC and retrieve the results seamlessly alongside other types of computation hosts.
E 2 E : Embracing User Heterogeneity to ImproveQuality of Experience on the Web

Conventional wisdom states that to improve quality of experience (QoE), web service providers should reduce the median or other percentiles of server-side delays. This work shows that doing so can be inefficient due to user heterogeneity in how the delays impact QoE. From the perspective of QoE, the sensitivity of a request to delays can vary greatly even among identical requests arriving at the service, because they differ in the wide-area network latency experienced prior to arriving at the service. In other words, saving 50ms of server-side delay affects different users differently. This paper presents E2E, the first resource allocation system that embraces user heterogeneity to allocate server-side resources in a QoE-aware manner. Exploiting this heterogeneity faces a unique challenge: unlike other application-level properties of a web request (e.g., a user’s subscription type), the QoE sensitivity of a request to server-side delays cannot be pre-determined, as it depends on the delays themselves, which are determined by the resource allocation decisions and the incoming requests. This circular dependence makes the problem computationally difficult. We make three contributions: (1) a case for exploiting user heterogeneity to improve QoE, based on end-to-end traces from Microsoft’s cloud-scale production web framework, as well as a user study on Amazon MTurk; (2) a novel resource allocation policy that addresses the circular dependence mentioned above; and (3) an efficient system implementation with almost negligible overhead. We applied E2E to two open-source systems: replica selection in Cassandra and message scheduling in RabbitMQ. Using traces and our testbed deployments, we show that E2E can increase QoE (e.g., duration of user engagement) by 28%, or serve 40%more concurrent requests without any drop in QoE.
Beyond Black-Scholes : The Stochastic Volatility Option Pricing Model and Empirical Evidence from Thailand

This study compares the performance of two option pricing models, namely Heston stochastic volatility and Black-Scholes (BS) models(Black & Scholes, 1973). Using SET50-Index option prices, both Heston and Black-Scholes models give pricing errors which are quite large for deep-in-the money options. But the errors of Heston model are smaller for both puts and calls, and for all their moneyness. Based on these findings, this study concludes that the Heston model performs better than the BS model in pricing options in Thailand’s option markets.
Structural Reliability Updating with Stochastic Subspace Damage Detection Information

Damage detection algorithms as a part of Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) are widely applied in research and industry and have shown the ir capabilities to efficiently detect structural damages. These algorithms usually compare a model f rom a safe reference state of a structure to vibration data from a possibly damaged state. For s uch a comparison, special properties of real vibration data introduce uncertainties, such as low signal-to-noise ratios, non-stationary or nonwhite ambient excitation, non-linear behavior and m any more. Recently, statistical damage detection algorithms based on stochastic subspace i dentification have been proposed that take into account the uncertainties in the data. Building upo n the uncertainty modeling, the next step in the view of the authors is to utilize damage detection algorithm information in the context of the structural reliability theory. Therefore, this pape r introduces an approach for the updating of the structural reliability with damage detection algori thm information. Two steps are described namely the determination of a probability of detection (Po D) distribution function for damage detection algorithms accounting for the relevant uncertaintie s and the concept of Bayesian updating of the structural reliability. The introduced approaches a re pplied in generic examples. In this way the potential of the utilization of damage detection sy stem information for more reliable structural systems are demonstrated.
Formalization of natural language requirements into temporal logics: a survey

One of the challenges of requirements engineering is the fact that requirements are often formulated in natural language. This represents difficulty if requirements must be processed by formal approaches, especially if these approaches are intended to check the requirements. In model checking, a formal technique of verification by exhaustive state space exploration, requirements must be stated in formal languages (most commonly, temporal logics) which are essentially supersets of the Boolean propositional logic. Translation of natural language requirements to these languages is a process which requires much knowledge and expertise in model checking as well the ability to correctly understand these requirements, and hence automating this process is desirable. This paper reviews existing approaches of requirements formalization that are applicable for, or at least can be adapted to generation of discrete time temporal logic requirements. Based on the review, conclusions are made regarding the practical applicability of these approaches for the considered problem.
Influence of Parental Communication on Pre-school Children ’ s Socio-emotional Development in Ngong Ward in Kenya

Parents influence a lot how children interact with their social surroundings as well as play a part in children's social and emotional behaviours. Children who can use language effectively to negotiate social situations or those who have the i nt llectual ability to consider another’s point of view are more likely to acquire strong social sk i l . Sound parent-child relationship is based on effective communication that is friendly and res pectful in manner. This study sought to examine the influence of parental communication on pre-school children’s socio-emotional development in Ngong Ward in Kajiado County, Kenya. The study adopted a cross-sectional survey design. The study population was constituted of 1,707 parents and teachers from 82 private and public pre-schools in Ngong Ward. The s tudy used a sample of 199 subjects. Since the target population was heterogeneous, stratified an simple random sampling techniques were employed during sample selection. Data collect ion was conducted by means of a questionnaire which had close ended items. Descript ive statistics were used to analyse the data. Quantitative responses based on Likert scale were c od d in the computer by the use of Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21. Proc essed data were then presented using frequencies, percentages and summarized using Table s. Th study found that parental communication is vital for the development of socio -emotional development in children. Further, the ability of the parent to keep communication lin es open and to interact with the emotional side of their children goes a long way in influencing po sitive emotional responses in the pre-school children. The study recommends that there is need t o ngage parents at all levels of the child’s engagement in school to not only maximize the child ’s potential in academics and performance but also to help build confidence and self-efficacy in pre-school learners.
A Hardware / Software Infrastructure for Performance Monitoring on Leon 3 Multicore Platforms

Monitoring applications at run-time and evaluating the recorded statistical data of the underlying micro architecture is one of the key aspects required by many hardware architects and system designers as well as high-performance software developers. To fulfill this requirement, most modern CPUs for High Performance Computing (HPC) have been equipped with Performance Monitoring Units (PMU) including a set of hardware counters, which can be configured to monitor a rich set of events. Unfortunately, embedded and reconfigurable systems are mostly lacking this feature. Towards rapid exploration of High Performance Embedded Computing in near future, we believe that supporting PMU for these systems is necessary. In this paper, we propose a PMU infrastructure, which supports monitoring of up to seven concurrent events. The PMU infrastructure is implemented on an FPGA and is integrated into a Leon3 platform. We show also the integration of our PMU infrastructure with the perf_event, which is the standard PMU architecture of the Linux kernel.
Generation of space vector PWM by using arduino uno

Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation (SVPWM) method is widely used as a modulation technique to drive a three-phase inverter. It is an advanced computational intensive method used in pulse width modulation (PWM) algorithm for the three-phase voltage source inverter. Compared with the other PWM techniques, SVPWM is easier to implement, thus, it is the most preferred technique among others. Mathematical model for SVPWM was developed using MATLAB/ Simulink software. In this paper, the interface between MATLAB Simulink with the three-phase inverter by using Arduino Uno microcontroller is proposed. Arduino Uno generates the SVPWM signals for Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM) and is described in this paper. This work consists of software and hardware implementations. Simulation was done via Matlab/Simulink software to verify the effectiveness of the system and to measure the percentage of Total Harmonic Distortion (THD). The results show that SVPWM technique is able to drive the three-phase inverter with the Arduino UNO.
Segmentation Networks Domain Adaptation A real image ( a ) Without adaptation ( b ) With adaptation Real images without annotations Synthetic images with annotations ... ... ? ?

Recent years have witnessed the great success of deep learning models in semantic segmentation. Nevertheless, these models may not generalize well to unseen image domains due to the phenomenon of domain shift. Since pixel-level annotations are laborious to collect, developing algorithms which can adapt labeled data from source domain to target domain is of great significance. To this end, we propose self-ensembling attention networks to reduce the domain gap between different datasets. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method is the first attempt to introduce selfensembling model to domain adaptation for semantic segmentation, which provides a different view on how to learn domain-invariant features. Besides, since different regions in the image usually correspond to different levels of domain gap, we introduce the attention mechanism into the proposed framework to generate attention-aware features, which are further utilized to guide the calculation of consistency loss in the target domain. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework can yield competitive performance compared with the state of the art methods.