Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Actuality of Bankruptcy Prediction Models used in Decision Support System

In the current conditions, the global economy is in a crisis situation. In terms of crisis management this article supports the Romanian companies. This article analyses some classical bankruptcy prediction models used in Decision Support Systems in order to validate or invalidate them in the actual Romanian economical conditions. It is essential to take the right decision at the right time, to help the company overcome an eventual moment of crisis, such as insolvency or even bankruptcy. Our study is based on the financial ratio of 60 Romanian companies, between 2005 and 2009. The firms are classified in two categories: bankrupted companies (B) and non-bankrupted companies (N-B).
ABBY

Objective To evaluate the safety and efficacy of crenezumab in patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer disease (AD). Methods In this phase 2 trial, 431 patients with mild to moderate AD 50 to 80 years of age were randomized 2:1 (crenezumab:placebo). Patients received low-dose subcutaneous crenezumab 300 mg or placebo every 2 weeks (n = 184) or high-dose intravenous crenezumab 15 mg/kg or placebo every 4 weeks (n = 247) for 68 weeks. Primary outcome measures were change in Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale–Cognitive Subscale (ADAS-Cog12) and Clinical Dementia Rating–Sum of Boxes scores from baseline to week 73. Results The primary and secondary endpoints were not met. In an exploratory post hoc analysis, a reduction in decline on the ADAS-Cog12 was observed in the high-dose group. Separation from the placebo group on the ADAS-Cog12 was greatest in the milder subsets of AD patients and reached statistical significance in the group with Mini-Mental State Examination scores of 22 to 26. In both groups, there was a significant increase in CSF β-amyloid1-42 levels that correlated with crenezumab CSF levels. The overall rate of adverse events was balanced between groups. One case of amyloid-related imaging abnormalities indicative of vasogenic edema or effusions was reported. Conclusions Although prespecified criteria for testing treatment effects were not met, these data suggest a potential treatment effect in patients with mild AD treated with high-dose crenezumab. Together with the safety profile for crenezumab, these data support the exploration of crenezumab treatment at even higher doses in patients with early AD. Clinicaltrials.gov identifier NCT 01343966. Classification of evidence This study provides Class II evidence that, for people with AD, crenezumab does not significantly improve cognition or function at 18 months. The study is rated Class II because <80% of enrolled patients completed the study.
MÉTODOS DE ANáLISIS DE LAS VERBALIzACIONES: ONTOLOGÍAS Y PROCESO DE ABDUCCIÓN VERbALIzATIoN ANALySIS METhoDS: oNToLogIES AND AbDuCTIoN PRoCESS

Summary This study looks into the need to develop what is known as ontologies as a way to process natural language and as a tool for the exploration and analysis of the verbalizations obtained through interviews in depth and focus groups. Each ontology operates in the context of an abductive process, which allows the expansion of the initial ontology. The main idea isn’t the construction of ontology for its computerized formalization but rather the compliance with the concept of ontology according to which its use is linked to its pertinence in the representation of a body of knowledge selected from a specific domain of reality which is of interest. The hypothesis of the text is: the analysis of the verbalizations in a research process should follow the abductive method that begins with the construction of an E-ontology and immediately develops into a recursive process of refinement and reconfigurations of what Samaja (2003) calls modeling preconceptions.
Design your own life: over ethiek en gebruiksvriendelijk ontwerpen

Handboeken voor ontwerpers benadrukken dat om goede, gebruiksvriendelijke producten te ontwerpen, het vooral nodig is om precies te weten waar mensen behoefte aan hebben. Beter ontwerpen begint dus met meer en preciezer onderzoek naar de behoeften en voorkeuren van gebruikers. Mensen weten echter vooraf vaak niet wat zij willen met nieuwe technologie. Om te begrijpen hoe mensen gaan leven met nieuwe producten moet niet alleen worden gekeken naar de voorkeuren van mensen, maar ook naar hoe techniek mensen verandert. De verandering van gedragspatronen en voorkeuren onder invloed van nieuwe techniek is een belangrijk thema in de techniekfilosofie. In het project Design for Usability werk ik als techniekfilosoof samen met ontwerpers met als doel gedragsbeïnvloeding door techniek een plaats te geven in methoden voor gebruiksvriendelijk ontwerpen. Hoe kun je, door bewust gebruik te maken van gedragsbeïnvloedende kenmerken, onverwachte vormen van gebruik van producten voorkomen? En hoe kun je mensen leiden naar gewenst gedrag? Een beschouwing van de ethische consequenties van deze kijk op techniek en van het vak van ontwerpers maakt nadrukkelijk deel uit van mijn onderzoek. Kunnen techniekfilosofen die meewerken aan het ontwerpen van gedragsbeïnvloedende producten nog wel een kritisch, ethisch standpunt vasthouden? Die vraag sluit aan bij het thema van dit boek, de veranderende rol van moraal bij nieuwe technologie. Het verbeteren van het gebruiksgemak van producten is uiteraard een goed doel. Maar als ontwerpers en ethici de relatie tussen mens en techniek alleen in termen van gebruiksgemak benaderen, wordt dan niet voorbijgegaan aan belangrijke ethische (en techniekfilosofische) vragen? Het verbeteren van het gebruiksgemak, het doel van ontwerpers, verschilt immers van de kritische analyse van de invloed van techniek op gedrag en cultuur die ethici en techniekfilosofen beogen. Daar staat tegenover dat door samen te werken ethici betrokken raken bij hoe techniek wordt ontworpen. Dat is een grote uitdaging, want vaak is zo dat de ethiek machteloos moet toezien hoe technische ontwikkelingen voortrazen. Samenwerken met ontwerpers is een mogelijkheid voor de techniekethiek om haar invloed te vergroten, maar vraagt ook om aanpassingen. In deze bijdrage onderzoek ik welke benadering in de ethiek geschikt is voor deze taak. Hoe kan de ethiek aansluiten bij het gebruiksvriendelijk ontwerpen en daarin de ethische aspecten beter naar voren brengen?
MoodNetwork

Introduction: Research has often been viewed as a passive process by which participants enroll in studies developed by researchers. It is becoming clearer that to understand the nuances of mood episodes and how to prevent them, we need to conduct large clinical trials that have the power to investigate moderators and mediators, or catalysts and mechanisms of change. MoodNetwork, the first online, patient-centered research community for individuals with mood disorders, aims to change the way that traditional research has been conducted by involving patients, their caregivers, and advocates in the process of research. The aim of this report is to share lessons learned from developing MoodNetwork. Methods: Participants enroll by completing a demographic survey and consent form. Once enrolled, participants are encouraged to complete optional surveys about their mood disorders and areas of research priority. Stakeholder and advocacy partners developed the website, web-based surveys, and recruitment materials. Results: MoodNetwork has enrolled 4103 participants to date. Of this sample, 96.9% report experiencing depression and 79.7% endorse symptoms of mania or hypomania. Participants rated reducing stigma and alleviating symptoms as their 2 largest research priorities. Recruitment has been slower than expected. Recruiting a diverse sample has been challenging, and this impacts the Network’s ability to conduct comparative effectiveness research studies. Discussion: We discuss lessons learned from recruiting individuals with mood disorders to MoodNetwork, an innovative approach to conducting clinical trials. We identify and review 5 strategies for increasing enrollment as well as future directions.
On the Presence of Cascading Effect in the Key Expansion Mechanism of Rijndael-The AES

Rijndael-The AES is 128-bit block cipher based on an elegant algebraic structure over F28. This cipher employs a simple approach to its substitution, permutation (SP) operations. We take a close look on the Key Expansion Mechanism of Rijndael - The AES. This study highlights on the presence of the cascading effect in its key expansion mechanism. Thus, lowering the brute-force key guess attack by a factor of 231. Hence, for the key size of 128 bits the key diversity is 297 instead of 2128.
The graph as a victim of adverse discrimination and segregation: Comment occasioned by the first issue of information design journal

Constraints of typography have led to the physical segregation of diagrammatic treatments of information from the linear alphanumerics that have dominated scientific communication. Information Design Journal reflects these constraints. The segregated and subordinated status of graphics is metaphorically compared here to the cultural roles of women and minorities. Aspects of graphics treated include the retardation of their intellectual development and influence; their relegation to relatively tangential, simplistic and ornamental functions; and prevalent suspicions regarding their deceptiveness. However, technology now makes it possible to reintegrate graphics into the mainstream of intellectual communication.
An implementation of the FTAG model in concurrent ML

Non-imperative programming models can simplify the development of fault-tolerant software, in part because of their potential for automatically generating concurrent implementations. This paper describes the design of a concurrent implementation of FTAG, a previously-described functional model for writing fault-tolerant software based on attribute grammars. The implementation involves translating FTAG programs into Concurrent ML (CML), a strongly-typed version of ML supporting multi-threaded execution. The program convertor that realizes this translation is described, together with node and workspace managers that manage the computation tree and stable storage abstraction, respectively.
Piecewise‐Deterministic Markov Processes: A General Class of Non‐Diffusion Stochastic Models

A general class of non-diffusion stochastic models is introduced with a view to providing a framework for studying optimization problems arising in queueing systems, inventory theory, resource allocation and other areas. The corresponding stochastic processes are Markov processes consisting of a mixture of deterministic motion and random jumps. Stochastic calculus for these processes is developed and a complete characterization of the extended generator is given; this is the main technical result of the paper. The relevance of the extended generator concept in applied problems is discussed and some recent results on optimal control of piecewise-deterministic processes are described.
Performance analysis of clustering algorithms for information retrieval in image databases

In image databases, a good indexing method makes nearest-neighbor retrieval of images accurate and efficient. Since existing alphanumeric indexing methods are not particularly suitable in image databases, researchers have proposed new methods for indexing by clustering methods. In this paper, we analyze the performance of two unsupervised neural network clustering algorithms, the competitive learning (CL) and rival penalized competitive learning (RPCL), together with k-means and VP-tree for image database indexing. We present some performance experiments to measure their accuracy and efficiency. Based on the experimental results, we concluded that RPCL and CL are good information retrieval in image database.
An ultra-flexible electrotactile display for the roof of the mouth

In some situations, novel oral tactile interfaces can be advantageous by freeing hands for tactile tasks. If the tongue is dedicated to operating an input device, an oral tactile display may be used on other oral structures. Fabrication of an ultra-flexible electrotactile display that can conform to the complex geometry of the roof of the mouth is described. A polyimide transfer process is used to release an array of electroplated dome-shaped electrodes (700 /spl mu/m in diameter, 200 /spl mu/m high) from a rigid substrate.
A SOFTWARE TESTING APPROACH BASED ON BEHAVIORAL UML MODELS

The aim of this paper is to describe a systematic way to construct tests from a formal software specifica- tion for validating a system implementation. In order to achieve this goal, the specification could be extended to create UML states that directly address those aspects of the system we wish to test. The presented technique generates test cases from UML communication and state machine diagrams which allow testing a correct class integration of object- oriented software. UML state machine diagrams provide a good way for test generation in a form that can be easily manipulated. The concept of the technique and an example model are presented.
Modeling the Workload-Performance Relationship

Human factors research is often focused on the mental workload that is required to perform a task or set of tasks with the goal of reducing workload to make systems easier to manage. The Improved Performance Research Integration Tool (IMPRINT) includes an algorithm to predict mental workload. The algorithm was developed using subject matter expert ratings of workload tasks. We aimed to enhance this capability by developing algorithms using data from four new studies investigating change in performance as demands on mental resources increase. The results indicate three task types of similar difficulty and one task type of much greater difficulty. We then map these to our hypothesized workload function. Finally, we propose a way forward in modeling performance as a function of workload in IMPRINT.
Dealing with blocking in supervisory control of discrete event systems

A study is made of the supervisory control of discrete-event systems where blocking is unavoidable or nonblocking solutions do not yield good performance. The authors consider strategies to improve the performance of a given blocking supervisor. Performance is characterized in terms of a satisfying measure (how much of the legal marked behavior is achieved) and a blocking measure (how often the execution of legal unmarked strings is blocked). Techniques are presented for improving each of these conflicting measures. <<ETX>>
Negotiation-based approaches to the settlement of environmental disputes

In recent years, bargaining and negotiations have become an area of growing interest to the environmental management and impact assessment community. The negotiations in an environmental dispute can be modeled and analyzed by a cooperative hypergame when the parties involved in the negotiations have misunderstandings about each other. In this paper, the Water Aquifer dispute between the City of Antonio and the developers in 1980s is modeled as a cooperative hypergame, where the bargaining and negotiations in the dispute are incorporated in conjunction with misperceptions. The effect of misperception is systematically analyzed so that the behavior of the decision makers in a complicated situation can be fully explored and understood. <<ETX>>
Multiple-antenna transmission with partial side information

We consider a single user, narrowband channel with multiple transmit antennas and a single receive antenna. The channel is characterized by a vector /spl alpha//spl I.oarr/ of gains and phases, perfectly known at the receiver and partially known at the transmitter. By varying the amount and kind of side information at the transmitter, we evaluate the gap between perfect channel knowledge and no channel knowledge in terms of expected SNR.
Visualization: An Aid to Design and Understand Neural Networks in a Parallel Environment

In this paper, we describe two visualization tools developed on the DAP-510, a SIMD machine having 1024 processors. The two tools are (i) the interactive visualization tool, and (ii) the display tool. The interactive visualization tool allows the user to steer the course of computation by interactively modifying its parameters based on the visual feedback. The display tool transforms the numeric data into a visual form. It also gives the user capability to manipulate the visual representation. In the implementation of these tools we exploit the parallel features of DAP-510. These tools are utilized for designing and understanding the neural networks. However, it is worth mentioning that these tools are general in nature and can easily interact with other parallel computa, tion processes.
USING ALDRICH'S MODEL TO DEVELOP A COMPUTER SIMULATION FOR ACQUIRING COMPUTER MAINTENANCE SKILLS AND SATISFACTION TOWARDS LEARNING

This paper aims to reflect on the experience of designing a computer simulation program to acquire computer maintenance skills according to Aldrich's simulation creation model which is consisting of 13 phases, the activities of this research took place in the Department of Computer Science at Dammam University. The experiment has been made on a sample of (75) female students; in the fact that; the maintenance subject requires practical skills, teachers were facing two main problems in the lab lecture of computer maintenance, first, the learner cannot follow the teacher's practical explanation because the learners bound around her to watch, which might lead the teacher to re-explain more than once, this re-explaining would waste the lecture time and the time needed for practicing, The second problem is that when learners apply what they have learned on one or two computers others have to wait until they finish, this also decreases the time needed for practicing, some learners might not have enough time to master the skill others might not have the time to practice at all; So the suggested solution was a simulated computer maintenance lab environment designed by Aldrich's educational simulation creation model using Gange psychomotor skill teaching model to explain the skills and bloom's mastery learning theory to evaluate them. The simulation has saved the time for the learners to practice what they've learned manually, and reduced the time taken in explanation and training because the learner watches the explanation on the computer and trains to install the parts on the computer too without affecting the time needed to train other learners. The outcomes of the research proved the effectiveness of the proposed simulation in acquiring computer maintenance skills and extending the time needed for practicing, which in turn contributed to accelerate the educational process and improve its outcomes. The results also revealed that; participants were highly satisfied with using simulation software in learning maintenance skills.
Performance of COFDM for LEO satellite channels in global mobile communications

The growing interest in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) research motivated us to propose OFDM for satellite communications. In this paper, convolutional coding (CC) and trellis coded modulation (TCM) are combined with OFDM for a Rician fading channel according to the specifications given by the Iridium system. Here, the bit error rate (BER) performance of OFDM with 8-PSK and 16-QAM modulation techniques along with two different coding schemes are considered for a LEO satellite channel. Results are analyzed with two frequency bands, i.e. Ka and L band. Results show that there is no significant difference of the BER performance between the two frequency bands considered. Trellis coded OFDM gives the best performance compared to convolutional coded OFDM. The peak to average power ratio (PAPR) can be reduced approximately by 1.5 dB with the help of the partial transmit sequence technique (PTS).
A Tool for Space-Efficient On-the-fly Race Detection *

Detecting races is important for debugging shared-memory parallel programs, because the races result in unintended nondeterministic execution of the programs. Previous on-the-fly techniques to detect races in parallel programs with general inter-thread coordination show serious space overhead which is dependant on the maximum parallelism of the program. This paper presents a tool for space-efficient on-the-fly race detection. This employs a two-pass algorithm which splits a parallel loop with just one event variable into a series of two serializable loops, while preserving the semantics of the original program. The first serializable loop contains all the original dynamic blocks which are executed before the first wait operation in every thread. And, the next serializable loop contains all the original dynamic blocks which are executed after the first wait operation in every thread.
Synthesis and decoding of emotionally expressive music performance

A recently developed application of Director Musices (DM) is presented. The DM is a rule-based software tool for automatic music performance developed at the Speech Music and Hearing Dept. at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. It is written in Common Lisp and is available both for Windows and Macintosh. It is demonstrated that particular combinations of rules defined in the DM can be used for synthesizing performances that differ in emotional quality. Different performances of two pieces of music were synthesized so as to elicit listeners' associations to six different emotions (fear, anger, happiness, sadness, tenderness, and solemnity). Performance rules and their parameters were selected so as to match previous findings about emotional aspects of music performance. Variations of the performance variables IOI (Inter-Onset Interval), OOI (Offset-Onset Interval) and L (Sound Level) are presented for each rule-setup. In a forced-choice listening test 20 listeners were asked to classify the performances with respect to emotions. The results showed that the listeners, with very few exceptions, recognized the intended emotions correctly. This shows that a proper selection of rules and rule parameters in DM can indeed produce a wide variety of meaningful, emotional performances, even extending the scope of the original rule definition.