Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Terrestrial water loss at night: global relevance from observations and climate models

Abstract. Nocturnal water loss (NWL) from the surface into the atmosphere is often overlooked because of the absence of solar radiation to drive evapotranspiration and the measuring difficulties involved. However, growing evidence suggests that NWL – and particularly nocturnal transpiration – represents a considerable fraction of the daily values. Here we provide a global overview of the characteristics of NWL based on latent heat flux estimates from the FLUXNET2015 dataset, as well as from simulations of global climate models. Eddy-covariance measurements at 99 sites indicate that NWL represents 6.3 % of total evapotranspiration on average. There are six sites where NWL is higher than 15 %; these sites comprise mountain forests with considerable NWL during winter that is related to snowy and windy conditions. Higher temperature, vapor pressure deficit, wind speed, soil moisture, and downward longwave radiation are related to higher NWL, although this is not consistent across all of the sites. On the other hand, the global multi-model mean of terrestrial NWL is 7.9 % of the total evapotranspiration. The spread of the model ensemble, however, is greater than 15.8 % over half of the land grid cells. Finally, NWL is projected to increase everywhere with an average of 1.8 %, although with a substantial inter-model spread. Changes in NWL contribute substantially to projected changes in total evapotranspiration. Overall, this study highlights the relevance of water loss during the night and opens avenues to explore its influence on the water cycle and the climate system under present and future conditions.
Interference Management in Heterogeneous Networks

In evolving fifth generation (5G), some demands that to be addressed are improved data rate, increased capacity, decreased latency and better quality of service. Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) is considered as an effective way to meet these prime objectives. Deployment of HetNets faces a number of challenges, among which interference management is of much importance. This chapter has summarized the major challenges and solutions of interference management. Interference cancellation, avoidance and coordination are discussed in detail, including enhanced intercell Interference Coordination (eICIC), Coordinated Multi-point Transmission (CoMP) et al. In addition, the future challenges of interference management have also been presented.
Cloud Computing: Concepts and Challenges

In recent years, computing is being make over by a fresh representation, named as cloud computing, which refers to the hardware, software: both systems and application, that act as services over the Internet. Cloud computing is growing rapidly and gaining popularity because of reduced costs, quicker implementations, and enhanced flexibility. In this paper, a survey has been done on cloud computing with a major focus on its security issues. Concepts and challenges have been discussed which will give the researchers an idea about this latest emerging technology being tossed around in the world. This paper presents an overview of the cloud deployment models, the services they offer and cloud security issues and challenges of cloud computing in both data storage and virtual applications.
Socio Metric Characteristics and Neonatal Birth Weight among Women in Akoko South West Local Government Area of Ondo State

The study investigated socio metric characteristics and neonatal birth weight among women in Akoko South west local Government area of Ondo State. This study made use of five randomly selected health facilities in Akoko south west Local Government Area engaging in delivery of babies. Consequently, a total of 250 women (patients) cards were sampled using simple randomly sampling technique, consisting of women that delivered babies between July 2017 and April 2018. The study was carried out using descriptive survey research design of ex-post facto. A questionnaire was used to obtain relevant information from the cards obtained. This study revealed that 25.2% of the respondents had low birth weight. The study revealed that age, parity and level of education have significant relationship with pattern of neonatal birth weight among women in Akoko south west. While maternal religion was not significant. Based on these, it is suggested that health education programs should also target towards creating awareness about proper age for marriage and conceiving Improvement in socio-economic indices, and better quality ANC services.
Performance analysis for a 2 (3HSS+S) parallel manipulator with double moving platforms

The working efficiency of a parallel manipulator with double moving platforms is better than a parallel manipulator with a single moving platform. In this study, a 2 (3HSS+S) parallel manipulator is presented, and the topology model of the parallel manipulator is established. After calculating, the position and velocity of the manipulator were analysed, and the workspace was obtained under the constraint conditions of parallel manipulator. Within the workspace, the motion dexterity was studied using the reciprocal of the condition number of the motion Jacobian matrix. The static load-bearing performance was analysed through the two norms of the force Jacobian matrix. The two performance indices, which are motion dexterity and static load bearing, indicate that the manipulator has favourable performance characteristics in the range of positive values of angle, which is the rotation in z-axis, but it has a singular position in the range of large negative values of angle. Within the scope of the singular point, the maximum and minimum eigenvalues of the stiffness matrix and the kinematic stiffness index (KSI) were analysed. It has been concluded that the stiffness characteristics are poor near the singular points, and the correctness analysis of the two performance indices has been verified by the results.
QUIC: A UDP-Based Multiplexed and Secure Transport

QUIC is a multiplexed and secure transport protocol that runs on top of UDP. QUIC builds on past transport experience, and implements mechanisms that make it useful as a modern general-purpose transport protocol. Using UDP as the basis of QUIC is intended to address compatibility issues with legacy clients and middleboxes. QUIC authenticates all of its headers, preventing third parties from from changing them. QUIC encrypts most of its headers, thereby limiting protocol evolution to QUIC endpoints only. Therefore, middleboxes, in large part, are not required to be updated as new protocol versions are deployed. This document describes the core QUIC protocol, including the conceptual design, wire format, and mechanisms of the QUIC protocol for connection establishment, stream multiplexing, stream and connection-level flow control, and data reliability. Accompanying documents describe QUIC's loss recovery and congestion control, and the use of TLS 1.3 for key negotiation.
Pattern Discovery using QG for Question-Answering Pairs

1,3,4 School of Electronic Engineering and Informatics, Bandung Institute of Technology 2 Research Center for Informatics, Indonesian Institute of Science 1,2 wiwin.suwarningsih@students.itb. ac.id, 3 iping@informatika.org, 4 ayu@informatika.org What is Question Generation? Abstract: The hardest things in developing the question-answer system are to raise a question that comes from natural language sentences and to find the answers to some questions relevant to the query. In this paper, the strategy to be developed is how to apply a natural language processing using a technique automatically to generate questions and answers. A number of new ideas have been explored including a semantic-based template using a combination of semantic role labeling (SRL) with the predicate argument (PA) to create a semantic pattern within the scope of medical Indonesian sentences. It was more focused on Question Generating (QG) with a discourse task involving the following three steps: (1) Parsing the labeling of semantic-based element PICO with progression to PPPICCOODTQ (Problem, Patient, Intervention, Compare, Control, Outcome, Organs, Drug, Time, Quantity); (2) Identification and Transformation sentence; and (3) Filtering for answering Question construction. This study has presented a new approach by utilizing the semantic role labeling and flexibility template. This approach achieved the accuracy values of 0.80 simple sentence. The results showed the improvement of the performance of question generation from the information on medical outcomes.
The contribution of hip hiking to limb altitude control: a 3-D modelling approach

Recent experimental studies demonstrate a dominant contribution of vertical hip translational energy to limb elevation over obstacles. A 3-D modelling technique is used to investigate the sources and contributions of hip hiking to limb altitude control during the swing phase of obstructed gait. The models developed are fitted to the experimental kinematic data of normal humans. The effect of changing the calculated moments on the simulated kinematics was then investigated. It was found that hip hiking, is the most energy efficient strategy, and that it is most effective when applied during the double-support phase of locomotion prior to initiation of the swing phase.
Learning from the Artist: Theory and Practice of Example-Based Character Deformation

Movie and game production is very laborious, frequently involving hundreds of person-years for a single project. At present this work is difficult to fully automate, since it involves subjective and artistic judgments. Broadly speaking, in this thesis we explore an approach that works with the artist, accelerating their work without attempting to replace them. More specifically, we describe an “example-based” approach, in which artists provide examples of the desired shapes of the character, and the results gradually improve as more examples are given. Since a character’s skin shape deforms as the pose or expression changes, or particular problem will be termed character deformation. The overall goal of this thesis is to contribute a complete investigation and development of an example-based approach to character deformation. A central observation guiding this research is that character animation can be formulated as a high-dimensional problem, rather than the two- or three-dimensional viewpoint that is commonly adopted in computer graphics. A second observation guiding our inquiry is that statistical learning concepts are relevant. We show that example-based character animation algorithms can be informed, developed, and improved using these observations. This thesis provides definitive surveys of example-based facial and body skin deformation. This thesis analyzes the two leading families of example-based character deformation algorithms from the point of view of statistical regression. In doing so we show that a wide variety of existing tools in machine learning are applicable to our problem. We also identify several techniques that are not suitable due to the nature of the training data, and the high-dimensional nature of this regression problem. We evaluate the design decisions underlying these example-based algorithms, thus providing the groundwork for a ”best practice” choice of specific algorithms. This thesis develops several new algorithms for accelerating example-based facial animation. The first algorithm allows unspecified degrees of freedom to be automatically determined based on the style of previous, completed animations. A second algorithm allows rapid editing and control of the process of transferring motion capture of a human actor to a computer graphics character. The thesis identifies and develops several unpublished relations between the underlying mathematical techniques. Lastly, the thesis provides novel tutorial derivations of several mathematical concepts, using only the linear algebra tools that are likely to be familiar to experts in computer graphics. Portions of the research in this thesis have been published in eight papers, with two appearing in premier forums in the field.
Performance of BERT on Persuasion for Good

We consider the task of automatically classifying the persuasion strategy employed by an utterance in a dialog. We base our work on the PERSUASION-FOR-GOOD dataset, which is composed of conversations between crowdworkers trying to convince each other to make donations to a charity. Currently, the best known performance on this dataset, for classification of persuader’s strategy, is not derived by employing pretrained language models like BERT. We observe that a straightforward fine-tuning of BERT does not provide significant performance gain. Nevertheless, nonuniformly sampling to account for the class imbalance and a cost function enforcing a hierarchical probabilistic structure on the classes provides an absolute improvement of 10.79% F1 over the previously reported results. On the same dataset, we replicate the framework for classifying the persuadee’s response.
Design of an autofocus lens for VGA ¼-in. CCD and CMOS sensors

We present the design of a lens for CCD or CMOS sensors using a new generation of lenses with electrically controlled focal length. These new elements made out of liquids (a drop of oil in water) work according to the principle of electro-wetting: the spreading of a drop of water on an electrically insulating surface can be modified by creating an accumulation of charges at the base of the drop. The densities of the two liquid phases are matched in order to keep the phases in place whatever the position of the lens. This new lens can be used in small devices to achieve auto-focus camera modules. There are several ways to integrate our adaptive optic in a fixed camera module lens, classically made up of plastic lenses. We will discuss three different configurations for a VGA system with 4 mm focal length, f/3 aperture, 60° field. The optical resolution is excellent, for object distance going from 50 mm to infinity.
Design and Development of Spoken Dialogue System in Indic Languages

Based on the modular architecture of a task-oriented Spoken Dialogue System (SDS), the presented work focussed on constructing all the system components as statistical models with parameters learned directly from the data by resolving various language-specific and language-independent challenges. In order to understand the research questions that underlie the SLU and DST module in the perspective of Indic languages (Hindi), we collect a dialogue corpus: Hindi Dialogue Restaurant Search (HDRS) corpus and compare various state-of-the-art SLU and DST models on it. For the dialogue manager (DM), we investigate the deep-learning reinforcement learning (RL) methods, e.g. actor-critic algorithms with experience replay. Next, for the dialogue generation, we incorporated Recurrent Neural Network Language Generation (RNNLG) framework based models. For speech synthesisers as a last component in the dialogue pipeline, we not only train several TTS systems but also propose a quality assessment framework to evaluate them.
A General Encryption Algorithm for Different Format Videos

With the rapid development of social network, more and more information is being presented in the form of multimedia, so the security of multimedia files, especially video files, has been capturing the attention of the researchers. Video encryption is widely applied to the DRM system, video conference, medical and military fields and so on. A general video encryption algorithm is proposed to solve the problem that the existing multiple formats (compression formats and container formats) of video requires a unified encryption scheme. Meanwhile, the proposed scheme can not only provide variable levels of security, but also have good performance of compression efficiency and computational complexity, which can ensure that the encrypted video data can be operation.
A Visually-Aware Conversational Robot Receptionist

Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have the potential to play an increasingly important role in a variety of contexts including healthcare, but most existing systems have very limited interactive capabilities. We will demonstrate a robot receptionist that not only supports task-based and social dialogue via natural spoken conversation but is also capable of visually grounded dialogue; able to perceive and discuss the shared physical environment (e.g. helping users to locate personal belongings or objects of interest). Task-based dialogues include check-in, navigation and FAQs about facilities, alongside social features such as chit-chat, access to the latest news and a quiz game to play while waiting. We also show how visual context (objects and their spatial relations) can be combined with linguistic representations of dialogue context, to support visual dialogue and question answering. We will demonstrate the system on a humanoid ARI robot, which is being deployed in a hospital reception area.
Clustering of Wall Geometry from Unstructured Point Clouds Using Conditional Random Fields

The automated reconstruction of Building Information Modeling (BIM) objects from point cloud data is still subject of ongoing research. A vital step in the process is identifying the observations for each wall object. Given a set of segmented and classified point clouds, the labeled segments should be clustered according to their respective objects. The current processes to perform this task are sensitive to noise, occlusions, and the associativity between faces of neighboring objects. The proper retrieval of the observed geometry is especially important for wall geometry as it forms the basis for further BIM reconstruction. In this work, a method is presented to automatically group wall segments derived from point clouds according to the proper walls of a building. More specifically, a Conditional Random Field is employed that evaluates the context of each wall segment in order to determine which wall it belongs to. First, a set of classified planar primitives is obtained through algorithms developed in prior work. Next, both local and contextual features are extracted based on the nearest neighbors and a number of seeds that are heuristically determined. The final wall clusters are then computed by decoding the graph. The method is tested on our own data as well as the 2D-3D-Semantics (2D-3D-S) benchmark data of Stanford. Compared to a conventional region growing method, the proposed method reduces the rate of false positives, resulting in better wall clusters. Overall, the method computes a more balanced clustering of the observations. A key advantage of the proposed method is its capability to deal with wall geometry in complex configurations in multi-storey buildings opposed to the presented methods in current literature.
Investigation of observed and modelled nocturnal wind and temperature oscillations in an Alpine valley

The study is based on measurements carried out in the Inn Valley, Austria (see Fig.1a), during winter 2005/2006 in the context of the European Interreg IIIB project ALPNAP∗∗(Heimann et al., 2007). The measurement sites where all located in the Inn Valley (see section 2.1), at the foot of the valley slopes . We found some interesting recurrent events and fluctuations manifesting in sudden nocturnal temperature drops. We are trying to understand the causes of these phenomena by investigation of the observations and used additionally simulations with MM5 which may help to understand these fluctuations. Similar kinds of simulations have been carried out by Hornsteiner and Zängl (2004), who modelled a local “mini-föhn” using MM5 and in Zängl and Vogt (2006) who compared valley wind characteristics in the Rhine Valley whereas Monti et al. (2002) investigated fluctuations in katabatic flows at the foot of a slope in the Salt Lake Basin, to mention only a some of the large number of and interesting literature.
Seasonal and Spatial Variation in the Location and Reactivity of a Nitrate‐Contaminated Groundwater Discharge Zone in a Lakebed

Groundwater discharge delivering anthropogenic N from surrounding watersheds can impact lake nutrient budgets. However, upgradient groundwater processes and changing dynamics in N biogeochemistry at the groundwater‐lake interface are complex. In this study, seasonal water‐level variations in a groundwater flow‐through lake altered discharge patterns of a wastewater‐derived groundwater contaminant plume, thereby affecting biogeochemical processes controlling N transport. Pore water collected 15 cm under the lakebed along transects perpendicular to shore varied from oxic to anoxic with increasing nitrate concentrations (10–75 μM) and corresponding gradients in nitrite and nitrous oxide. Pore water depth profiles of nitrate concentrations and stable isotopic compositions largely reflected upgradient groundwater N sources and N cycle processes, with minor additional nitrate reduction in the near‐surface lakebed sediments. Potential denitrification rates determined in laboratory microcosms were 10–100 times higher in near‐surface sediments (0–5 cm) than in deeper sediments (5–30 cm) and were correlated with sediment carbon content and abundance of denitrification genes (nirS, nosZI, and nosZII). Potential anammox‐driven N2 production was detectable in deeper anoxic sediments. Injection of bromide and nitrite in the lake sediments showed that the highest net nitrite consumption rates were within the top 10 cm. However, short transit times owing to rapid upward pore water velocities (4–5 cm hr−1) limited removal of the contaminant nitrate transiting through the sediments. Results demonstrate that local hydrologic and biogeochemical processes at the point of discharge affect the distribution and discharge rate of N through lakebed sediments, but processes in the upgradient groundwater can be more important for affecting N speciation and concentration.
The effect of wave directional spread on coastal hazards at coastlines fronted by a coral reef

Many coastlines fronted by a coral reef are threatened by wave driven flooding. For this reason, waves in coral reef environments has been topic of many studies. However, most are focused on a 1D simplification of the coral reef environment. These studies neglect the impact of 2D processes, for example wave directional spread. In this study an attempt is made to understand and investigate the influence of wave directional spread on wave runup. XBeach Non-Hydrostatic with an additional vertical layer is used to perform a great amount of digital experiments. A synthetic database is created consisting of 540 different model runs. The analysis showed that wave directional spread influences the wave runup by affecting the wave setup and low frequency runup. So, for the most accurate runup predictions it is advised to include directional spreading in the analysis. Furthermore, the complete exclusion of directional spreading in the runup analysis will lead to an over prediction of the runup, so current 1D models give conservative estimations of the runup. Lastly, it was found that the exact wave directional spread is not that important but it is advised to obtain information about the wave field that is dealt with and take that into account in the runup analysis.