Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reflectance and texture encoding for material recognition and synthesis

OF THE DISSERTATION Reflectance and Texture Encoding for Material Recognition and Synthesis by Hang Zhang Dissertation Director: Dr. Kristin Dana Material recognition plays an important role for a machine to understand and interact with the world. For example, an autonomous vehicle can use material recognition to determine whether the terrain is asphalt, grass, gravel, ice or snow in order to optimize the mechanical control and a robot can easily grab an object with proper pressure if the object’s composition is known. This thesis is dedicated to developing compact and robust material and texture representations for fast visual recognition and synthesis. Color and geometry are not a full measure of the richness of visual appearance. Reflectance describes the characteristics of light interaction with a surface, which depends on microscopic and mesoscopic composition. This thesis explores how reflectance can reveal the material categories and physical properties. We build representations that capture the spatial and angular variation of reflectance. These multi-layer deep learning representations provide invariance to intra-class variations for recognition. We also develop representations that capture sufficient detail for synthesis. In particular, this thesis develop the following methods: 1. Reflectance Hashing: Reflectance is challenging to measure and use for recognizing materials due to its high-dimensionality. In this work, we bypass the use of a gonioreflectometer by using a novel one-shot reflectance camera based on a parabolic
PROFIL KETERAMPILAN PROSES SAINS TERPADU SISWA SMP NEGERI 6 BANJARMASIN

Abstract: the research has been carried out with the purpose to know the integrated science process skills of students of class IX SMPN 6 Banjarmasin 2011/2012. The research was carried out from November 2011 until January 2012. The Data collected from the test results the integrated science process skills, further analysis is done by qualitative descriptive. The results showed that the average integrated science process skills are measured from the fifth grade students on the skills aspect of the IX regular higher (0,672) compared to class IX RSBI (0,608) and class IX Acceleration (0,624). The average integrated science process skills are measured from the fifth aspect of learning objectives based on the grade IX SMPN 6 Banjarmasin had enough good, i.e. of 0,632. The highest average score on Science process skills acquired by the students integrated kls IX regular, i.e. of 68,50%, then followed by kls IX acceleration of 62.70%, and class IX for RSBI 61,70%. The overall average score of 64,30%. This score is still relatively low, considering the KKM for the value of the Science in SMPN 6 Banjarmasin is 80 (80%). Keywords: profile, the integrated science process skills
Design science research genres: introduction to the special issue on exemplars and criteria for applicable design science research

Abstract We propose the definition of genres in IS design science research (DSR). In recent years DSR has become a well-accepted research paradigm within IS; however, now the diversity of purpose, methodology, and mental models has increased to a point where reviewers and editors are unsure about which standards to apply to particular research submissions. For some researchers an artefact of value is a system or system component, while for others artefacts ought to be theories or theory components. Such differences are hard to reconcile and researchers often face criticism from diverse corners of the paradigm, where beliefs and standards are very different. We observed this diversity of views among authors, editors, and reviewers while editing this special issue. The problem continues to the current day. A solution may lie in defining genres of IS DSR, each with its model for DSR processes and outcomes. We define five prototype genres, based on selected articles, along with their typical characteristics, standards, and values. Several articles in this special issue typify various potential genres. The recognition of mutually respectful DSR genres may improve researchers' ability to publish in the highest tier IS journals, as colleagues, reviewers, and editors recognize and respect genre differences.
Domänenspezifische Sprachen zur Umsetzung numerischer Lösungsverfahren für gewöhnliche Differentialgleichungssysteme

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are used to implement solutions for a specific problem area. In contrast to general purpose languages (GPLs), such as Java or C, they are specifically optimized for problems within a domain, which usually makes it easier and faster to implement programs. Possible sources of errors in the code can be detected and corrected in an early stage by validation mechanisms and the structure of the DSL itself. Through automatic code generation and autotuning, several code variants can be generated from a program written with a DSL. These code variants can be ported to different systems and simultaneously achieve high performance on the respective system. In this work several DSLs for the implementation of numerical solution methods for ordinary differential equations (ODEs) have been developed. All common ODE solvers can be described by data flow graphs, in which all calculations of the method are covered by basic operations as nodes. As a first step towards a finished program, the structure of the data flow graph is specified in a DSL. In a second DSL, method coefficients such as the number of steps or a butcher tableau can then be declared. With these two languages the procedure is already completely described. Two further DSLs are concerned with an efficient implementation on graphics processing units (GPUs). ODE solvers are often limited by the properties of GPUs, such as small caches or large SIMD. Therefore it is important to minimize the number of memory accesses in order to achieve the highest possible performance. This can be achieved by fusing several basic operations into one kernel. A DSL therefore deals with the mapping of nodes of the data flow graph to kernels. By transformations on the graph as a preparatory step, the number of memory accesses can be reduced even more. These so-called enabling transformations can be declared in an additional DSL.
What Representation Results from Feature Inference Category Learning

Recently, a variety of research has been conducted in the feature inference category learning paradigm, the main results of which are summarized by Markman and Ross (in press). Participants learn about several perceptual categories by feature inference on the instances composing them-given the category label and several features predict a missing feature--rather than by a more typical classification procedure--given several features predict the category label.
INTELLIGENT AGENTS IV

The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is the best established agent architecture currently available. It has been deployed in many major industrial applications, ranging from fault diagnosis on the space shuttle to air traffic management and business process control. The theory of PRS-like systems has also been widely studied: within the intelligent agents research community, the beliefdesire-intention (BDI) model of practical reasoning that underpins PRS is arguably the dominant force in the theoretical foundations of rational agency. Despite the interest in PRS and BDI agents, no complete attempt has yet been made to precisely specify the behaviour of real PRS systems. This has led to the development of a range of systems that claim to conform to the PRS model, but which differ from it in many important respects. Our aim in this paper is to rectify this omission. We provide an abstract formal model of an idealised dMARS system (the most recent implementation of the PRS architecture), which precisely defines the key data structures present within the architecture and the operations that manipulate these structures. We focus in particular on dMARS plans, since these are the key tool for programming dMARS agents. The specification we present will enable other implementations of PRS to be easily developed, and will serve as a benchmark against which future architectural enhancements can be evaluated.
Design of the UAV Digital Actuator Automatic Test System Based on Dual-core Microcontroller TMS320F28377D

For purpose of UAV digital actuator test, one of UAV’s key components, whose static and dynamic performance impacts on the UAV maneuvering performance, this paper studies an automatic digital actuator test system, introduces its hardware and software design scheme, and demonstrates its application. The TI dual-core microcontroller TMS28377D serves as its core with abundant communication interfaces widely used in digital actuators such as RS422, RS485, RS232, and CAN Bus. Besides, there are rotary incremental encoders connected to the test system, providing the actual position information of digital actuator, as well as a SD card for data record in real time. Via Ethernet communication, the test system communicates with the upper computer which sends command and receives feedback. The advantages of automatic digital actuator designed in this paper are high reliability and easy upgrading. The automatic test system has great potential in the development, production and storage of the UAV digital actuator. Keywords—UAV; digital actuator; automatic test system; TMS320F28377D
A comparative study of ANN and Kalman Filtering-based observer for SOC estimation

Electrical Vehicle Batteries (EVB) study has gained a lot of interest in recent years, with the aim of better managing their use, due to the high changes in the electric vehicle dynamics and operational modes, which could cause severe damages to the battery if not properly managed. Recently lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries have become the most suitable technology for electric vehicles, because of their interesting features such as a relatively long cycle life, lighter weight and high energy density. However, there is a lot of work that is still needed to be done in order to ensure safe operating lithium-ion batteries, starting with their internal status monitoring, cell balancing within a battery pack and thermal management. In this paper, a comparative study of two different methods for state of charge estimation techniques are presented: Kalman filtering observers and artificial neural network based observers. The respective results are compared in terms of accuracy, implementation requirement, and overall performances.
Satellite markers: a simple method for ground truth car pose on stereo video

Artificial prediction of future location of other cars in the context of advanced safety systems is a must. The remote estimation of car pose and particularly its heading angle is key to predict its future location. Stereo vision systems allow to get the 3D information of a scene. Ground truth in this specific context is associated with referential information about the depth, shape and orientation of the objects present in the traffic scene. Creating 3D ground truth is a measurement and data fusion task associated with the combination of different kinds of sensors. The novelty of this paper is the method to generate ground truth car pose only from video data. When the method is applied to stereo video, it also provides the extrinsic camera parameters for each camera at frame level which are key to quantify the performance of a stereo vision system when it is moving because the system is subjected to undesired vibrations and/or leaning. We developed a video post-processing technique which employs a common camera calibration tool for the 3D ground truth generation. In our case study, we focus in accurate car heading angle estimation of a moving car under realistic imagery. As outcomes, our satellite marker method provides accurate car pose at frame level, and the instantaneous spatial orientation for each camera at frame level.
Integrated Coarse to Fine and Shot Break Detection Approach for Fast and Efficient Registration of Aerial Image Sequences

iv LIST OF FIGURES . viii LIST OF TABLES . xii CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION . 1 CHAPTER II: BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK . 5 II.1 Image Registration Overview . 5 II.2 Transformation Models . 6 II.3 Feature Matching Methods . 8 II.4 Parametric Methods . 16 II.5 Other Methods . 20 II.6 Image Comparison Measurements . 23 II.7 Tracking Algorithms . 28 CHAPTER III: INTEGRATING COARSE TO FINE AND SHOT BREAK DETECTION APPROACHES. 30 III.1 Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) . 31 III.2 Efficient Second-Order Minimization (ESM). 44 III.3 Shot Break Detection Criteria. 51 III.4 Sequential Process. 57 CHAPTER IV: RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS. 59
AcoustaNomad: A context-aware Blogging and Learning Platform in Mobile IPv6 Networks

Recently, the development of mobile applications is more and more popular. The mobile applications will not only take advantage of contextual information, such as location-awareness, to offer greater services to a mobile host (MH) but maintain exiting transport-layer connections as the MH moves from one location to another. This paper exhausts our most recent work: the AcoustaNomad project. AcoustaNomad not only uses the mobile IPv6 to maintain the existing connections even if the MH changes locations and addresses, but utilizes location-aware technique to detect what kind of services the new location provides. In addition, AcoustaNomad provides two mature mobile applications: mobile learning and audio blogging. This paper proposes the architecture of AcoustaNomad and experimental results that demonstrate the ability of AcoustaNomad to enable location-aware services and applications.
An efficient direct method for image registration of flat objects

Image alignment of rigid surfaces is a rapidly developing area of research and has many practical applications. Alignment methods can be roughly divided into two types: feature-based methods and direct methods. Known SURF and SIFT algorithms are examples of the feature-based methods. Direct methods refer to those that exploit the pixel intensities without resorting to image features and image-based deformations are general direct method to align images of deformable objects in 3D space. Nevertheless, it is not good for the registration of images of 3D rigid objects since the underlying structure cannot be directly evaluated. In the article, we propose a model that is suitable for image alignment of rigid flat objects under various illumination models. The brightness consistency assumptions used for reconstruction of optimal geometrical transformation. Computer simulation results are provided to illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithm for computing of an accordance between pixels of two images.
Effects of captions and subtitles on the listening process: Insights from EFL learners' listening strategies

Kyoto Prefectural University hosogoshi@kpu.ac. jp Captions and subtitles as a form of scaffolding for audiovisual materials has gained much attention in second or foreign language (l2) learning in recent years and various studies report their positive effects on learners’ listening comprehension. However, few attempts have been made to investigate how textual information specifically affects the listening process. The present study aims to examine the relationship between on-screen text and the listening process with special reference to 11 distinct listening strategies. A total of 114 first-year Japanese-speaking efl learners were divided into three groups: no-text group, English caption group, and Japanese subtitle group. Each group was instructed to watch a university lecture video in English under its assigned condition and to answer a questionnaire about the listening strategies employed during the listening activity. The major findings obtained from the present study include (1) the degree of use of imagery and summarization strategies was significantly higher in the subtitle group, and (2) most of the listening strategies relevant to each listening process showed more inter-correlation in the no-text and the caption groups than in the subtitle group throughout the listening process. Pedagogical implications concerning when to use captions and subtitles for l2 listening instruction are discussed.
Continental soil drivers of ammonium and nitrate in Australia

Abstract. Soil N is an essential element for plant growth, but its mineral forms are subject to loss from the environment by leaching and gaseous emissions. Despite its importance for the soil-plant system, factors controlling soil mineral N contents over large spatial scales are not well understood. We used NH4+ and NO3- contents (0–30 cm depth) from 469 sites across Australia and determined soil controls on their regional variation. Soil mineral N varied regionally but depended on the different land uses. In the agricultural region of Australia, NH4+ tended to be similar (median 4.0 vs. 3.5 mg N kg−1) and NO3- was significantly enriched (3.0 vs. 1.0 mg N kg−1), compared to the non-agricultural region. The importance of soil controls on mineral N in the agricultural region, identified by the model trees algorithm Cubist, showed that NH4+ was affected by total N, cation exchange capacity (CEC) and pH. In the non-agricultural region, NH4+ was affected not only by CEC and pH, but also by organic C and total P. In each of the regions, NO3- was primarily affected by CEC, with more complex biophysical controls. In both regions, correlations between mineral N and soil C : N : P stoichiometry suggest that more NH4+ was found in P-depleted soil relative to total C and total N. However, our results showed that only in the non-agricultural region was NO3- sensitive to the state of C and its interaction with N and P. The models helped to explain 36 %–68 % of regional variation in mineral N. Although soil controls on high N contents were highly uncertain, we found that region-specific interactions of soil properties control mineral N contents. It is therefore essential to understand how they alter soil mechanisms and N cycling at large scales.
Assessment of Maize Production and Adoption of Improved Maize Seeds in Tanahun District of Nepal

The major objective of this study is to assess the status of maize production and adoption of improved maize seeds in Tanahun district. The study also aims to determine the factors affecting the adoption of the improved seeds. 100 maize farmers from four different local bodies of Tanahun were selected by the purposive sampling method for the household survey. Descriptive statistics, chi-square test, independent samples t-test, one-way ANOVA, logit model and index score ranking method were used for the data analysis. The productivity of maize and annual income from maize were 767.62 kg/ha and Rs 9500 higher for the farmers using improved seeds as compared to those using the local seeds. The mean annual household income of farmers replacing the seeds yearly was Rs 18983 higher than the farmers replacing the seeds rarely. The frequency of the agriculture technician support and the frequency of seed replacement with the improved seed were found to significantly determine the adoption of the improved maize seeds. Farmers receiving the regular technician support were 15.726 times more likely to adopt the improved seeds as compared to those receiving the technician support rarely or never. The adopters had 458.10 kg/ha higher productivity than the non-adopters. Lack of irrigation facility was found to be the major problem in maize cultivation whereas the lack of timely availability of improved seed was found to be the most important constraint for the adoption of improved seeds. Int. J. Appl. Sci. Biotechnol. Vol 7(2): 279-288
Macroeconomic factors behind financial instability: Evidence from Granger causality tests

Dieser Beitrag untersucht mithilfe einer Granger-Kausalitatsanalyse den Zusammenhang zwischen Ungleichheit, privater Verschuldung und Finanzkrisen fur ein Sample von 14 Landern uber den Zeitraum 1975-2013. Auserdem analysieren wir die Relevanz weiterer Bestimmungsfaktoren von Kreditbooms und legen dar, inwiefern die Ergebnisse von der Wahl des Kreditmases beeinflusst werden. Die Panel-Granger-Kausalitatstests liefern Hinweise, dass Veranderungen der Topeinkommensanteile signifikante Auswirkungen auf die zukunftige Haushaltsverschuldung haben. Den Teststatistiken ist ferner zu entnehmen, dass der Zusammenhang zwischen Veranderungen der Topeinkommensanteile und den Bankkrediten an den gesamten nicht-finanziellen Privatsektor schwacher ausfallt. Dieses Ergebnis ist konsistent mit der Argumentation, dass eine steigende Einkommensungleichheit zu einer hoheren Kreditnachfrage von Haushalten der Mittelschicht fuhrt, um ihre relativen Konsumstandards aufrechtzuerhalten. Die Analyse zeigt zwar, dass der Zusammenhang zwischen Veranderungen der Einkommensungleichheit gemessen am Gini-Koeffizient und der privaten Verschuldung wenig robust ist. Allerdings liefern die Ergebnisse Evidenz fur eine Feedback-Beziehung zwischen den Krediten der privaten Haushalte und der Einkommensverteilung. Daruber hinaus gibt es Hinweise, dass zwischen dem Konjunkturverlauf beziehungsweise der Vermogenspreisentwicklung und der Verschuldung eine wechselseitige Abhangigkeit vorliegt, was zu selbstverstarkenden Boom-Bust-Zyklen fuhren kann. Die Geldpolitik scheint hingegen kein wichtiger Bestimmungsfaktor fur die Ausweitung der privaten Verschuldung zu sein, wahrend die Finanzmarktderegulierung zumindest in einzelnen Landern zur Entstehung von Kreditbooms beigetragen hat.
The Role of Search Frictions and Bargaining for Inflation Dynamics

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model that integrates labor market search and matching into an otherwise standard New Keynesian model. I allow for changes of the labor input at both the extensive and the intensive margin and develop two alternative specifications of the bargaining process. Under efficient bargaining (EB) hours are determined jointly by the firm and the worker as a part of the same Nash bargain that determines wages. With right to manage (RTM), instead, firms retain the right to set hours of work unilaterally. I show that introducing search and matching frictions affects the cyclical behavior of real marginal costs by way of two different channels: a wage channel under RTM and an extensive margin channel under EB. In both cases, the presence of search and matching frictions may cause a lower elasticity of marginal costs with respect to output and thus help to account for the observed inertia in inflation.
Measuring the Effects of Commodity Price Shocks on Asian Economies

Commodity prices have become volatile over the past two decades, and their recent sharp decline has decreased the consumer price index (CPI) inflation rates for most of the economies. While many Asian economies have benefited from low international oil and food prices, the commodity exporters have suffered. Thus, the negative impact on production through the decline of producer prices has attracted considerable attention. Given this situation, policymakers have become increasingly concerned about measuring the magnitude of oil and food price shock diffusion on a nation's various inflationary indicators. This study investigates this problem by using a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model. Specifically, we examine the impact of a one-time hike in oil and food prices on the general price levels and production for nine Asian countries and 13 other countries, including the United States and the Eurozone. We also analyze the differences of shock propagations in the pre- and post-GFC periods. Results indicate that the increased integration and dependence on exports intensified the Asian region's vulnerability to external shocks.