Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Seasonal Variability of the Diurnal Cycle of the Black Sea Surface Temperature from the SEVIRI Satellite Measurements

Introduction. Heat and gas exchange between the ocean and the atmosphere, and stratification and vertical mixing in the sea upper layer are subjected to the diurnal variations of the sea surface temperature. Data and methods. The data obtained by the scanner SEVIRI in 2015 (time resolution is 1 hour) are used to study seasonal and spatial variability of the sea surface temperature diurnal cycle in the Black Sea. Results. During a day, the upper layer heats from 6:00 to 17:00 (the highest temperature) and then cools from 19:00 to 5:00 (the next morning) up to its minimum. The largest diurnal deviations of the sea surface temperature from the average seasonal ones are observed in spring-summer (± 0.8 °С), whereas the lowest deviations are typical of the autumn-winter period (± 0.1−0.2 °С). A few cases when the diurnal warming is high were detected and analyzed. In some regions, the amplitude of the sea surface temperature diurnal cycle exceeded 5 °C and reached its extreme values 7–7.2 °C. The low wind speed (less than 4 m/s) is an important reason of these extreme events. The most often intensive diurnal warming is due to the low wind conditions which are highly frequently observed in May. In winter the values of the sea surface temperature diurnal amplitude are minimum and do not exceed 1.5 °C. Since April, they sharply increase and reach their maximum 2.4 °C in May. The most significant sea surface temperature diurnal amplitude is observed in the Black Sea southeast region and in its southwest coastal part. Such spatial distribution is a result of the wind shadow zone which is formed by the Caucasian and Pontic mountains. Discussion and conclusion. The features of spatial and seasonal variability of the Black Sea surface temperature diurnal cycle, and its relation to the wind characteristics in different seasons are studied based on the SEVIRI scanner high-frequency measurements.
Medical image registration by maximization of mutual information

Medical image registration has been applied to the diagnosis of breast cancer, cardiac studies, and a variety of neurological disorders including brain tumors. A new approach called maximization of mutual information (MMI), quantifying the similarity between corresponding voxel intensities of two images, has been demonstrated to be a very powerful criterion for three-dimensional medical image registration. MMI can be thought of as a measure of how well one image explains the other, it is maximized at the optimal alignment of the images. Though MMI has been widely used, many implementation issues, such as multi-resolution, interpolation, probability distribution estimation, capture ranges, and optimization methods, are still under investigation. In this thesis, we present three new implementation approaches for multimodal brain image registrations based on normalized mutual information. Each of these approaches gives improved accuracy or/and speed. We illustrate these approaches by presenting the results of tests from the data of 9 patients. Registration accuracy is evaluated by J. M. Fitzpatrick, at Vanderbilt University, U.S.A. , as part of the Retrospective Registration Evaluation Project (http://www.vuse.vanderbilt.edu/∼image/registration/). We also compare the performance of each approach to results available in the literature. The first chapter in this thesis gives an overview of medical image registration by maximization of mutual information. The thesis then continues with a chapter describing the implementation used. In chapter 3 we describe our binarization/multi-resolution scheme for CT-MR brain image registration. This method is designed to improve the accuracy of registration. Next, in chapter 4, we present another approach, a nonlinear binning method for CT-MR image registration based on background segmentation and a k-means clustering algorithm, aiming at improving accuracy and speed. Lastly, in chapter 5, we develop a wavelet-based multi-resolution approach for multimodal brain image registration. This approach performs a registration between CT and MR images or a registration between PET and MR images. This approach gives promising results for both CT-MR and PET-MR registrations.
Management Strategies for Harmful Algal Blooms in Worcester

The City of Worcester has multiple different bodies of water accessible to the community for recreational purposes. Every summer, residents from all over the city like to visit the different recreational areas to make the most out of the hot summer weather. However, most people are not aware of the implications of Harmful Algal Bloom (HABs) formation. This kind of HAB can cause many adverse health effects in both humans and animals including vomiting, diarrhea and flu-like symptoms. HAB formation has been an issue identified from a local to an international level. Many places and organizations have established a set of guidelines to manage the potential effects that HABs could cause. In order to manage recreational water quality and avoid closing beaches, a management strategy that covers prevention, monitoring, treatment and response strategies should be established. We collaborated with Worcester’s Department of Public Works (DPW) to recommend management strategies for prevention, monitoring, treatment and response for HABs in Worcester. Worcester's current strategies are more developed when compared to other locations. ​ After compiling our research, we came to the conclusion that Worcester is ahead of the curve judging on their implementation of methods for each category under prevention, monitoring & testing, treatment, and response. However, after conducting extensive research, interviews and literature reviews, we found several methods that can be augmented or implemented to Worcester’s current efforts to manage HABs. For example, for prevention, we determined that Barley straw is a new method that can effectively be implemented in Worcester. In terms of monitoring and testing, we found many methods such as a biovolume count, establishing nitrogen and phosphorus thresholds and using probes and fluorometers can improve Worcester’s current efforts to monitor cyanobacteria. In the other hand, we believe that Worcester’s current treatment methods are working fine for the city and preventing HAB formation is only another way we can keep the lakes safe. Therefore, asides from Aluminum sulfate, prevention is the second best treatment. Lastly, for the response, we determined that most locations perform the same basic actions when it comes to public notification of harmful algal blooms; the three main methods to do this are posting of signs at the affected waterbody, posts on websites, and posts on social media. Currently, Worcester is proactive in finding a way to make the HABs less of a detriment on the city’s public recreation. The research done on this project gave an insight on how the methods being currently used to combat HABs can be implemented in Worcester. In spite of all the methods we identified that could be augmented or newly implemented, it is clear that Worcester’s efforts to manage HABs are already far more advanced than the many other locations and organizations we looked into.
Success factors for small rural tourism units: an exploratory study in the Portuguese region of Serra da Estrela

Over the past few decades, tourism has come to be considered a way of promoting economic and social development in peripheral, rural areas where traditional agriculture has declined. This is the case of the Portuguese region of Serra da Estrela, where rural tourism has been seen as a strategy for regional development. However, it is important to understand the extent to which tourism activities are able to meet the expectations of tourists and entrepreneurs, in order to represent a realistic development strategy. The current exploratory study compared the performance of 42 small tourism businesses operating in Serra da Estrela in an attempt to understand the impact of several factors on their success. Using occupancy rate as an indicator of success, a linear model was estimated, revealing the importance of adopting information and communications technologies (ICT) in tourism service as a factor for success. The study also shows that the supply of other services, besides housing, and client satisfaction promote the increase in net occupancy rates. Contrary to expectations, two of the explanatory variables related to management (owning and living in the touristic unit) have a negative impact on success.
The Residue of Uniqueness

»Was von der Einzigartigkeit bleibt«. To build an argument for the supervening importance of agenda, I locate the digital humanities within the context of a central human predicament: the anxiety of identity stemming from the problematic relation of human to non-human, both animal and machine. I identify modelling as the fundamental activity of the digital humanities and draw a parallel between it and our developing confrontation with the not-us. I then go on to argue that the demographics of infrastructure within the digital humanities, therefore in part its emphasis, is historically due to the socially inferior role assigned to those who in the early years found para-academic employment in service to the humanities. I do not specify an agenda, rather conclude that modelling, pursued within its humane context, offers a cornucopia of agenda if only the “mind-forged manacles” of servitude’s mind-set can be broken.
Document Re-ranking Based on Clique Model

Document re-ranking is an effective measure to meet the user's demand on high-precision information retrieval.This paper presents a document re-ranking model based on document clique,which is extracted from the document Markov network constructed form corpus.The incorporation of the document clique information into document re-ranking is proved valid with better precision than the BM25 model over adi,cacm,med,cisi and cran datasets.
Economic Assessment of Cereal Residue Harvest and Transport Systems in Relation to the Distance Between the Field and the Storage Centre

: The work has been developed under the AGROinLOG Project, aimed at demonstrating the technical, environmental and economic feasibility of Integrated Biomass Logistics Centres (IBLC) for food and non-food products. The goal of the project is to give support to one of the agroindustries selected in the Project, dehydrating facility, to build an IBLC extending the utilization of their equipment used for regular activity to new business chain based on the valorisation of agricultural residues, cereal straw and maize stalks. In particular, the purpose of this work is to evaluate the maximum distance between the fields and the storage centre from which it is more economically convenient to gather the biomass with balers instead of forage hauling equipment, regularly utilized in their activity. To this aim the performance of the machines (working times, yield and material losses) and fuel consumption in each operation (harvesting, loading, transport and unloading) of both yards have been evaluated. With the data collected in field, machine costs analysis was performed. The total costs per ton of biomass harvested (€ t -1 ) are about 59% higher for baling system and from the analysis of unitary transport costs, resulted a cost per ton per km three times higher when the biomass is transported with the self-loading wagon.
Spectral Methods for Natural Language Processing

Spectral Methods for Natural Language Processing Jang Sun Lee (Karl Stratos) Many state-of-the-art results in natural language processing (NLP) are achieved with statistical models involving latent variables. Unfortunately, computational problems associated with such models (for instance, finding the optimal parameter values) are typically intractable, forcing practitioners to rely on heuristic methods without strong guarantees. While heuristics are often sufficient for empirical purposes, their de-emphasis on theoretical aspects has certain negative ramifications. First, it can impede the development of rigorous theoretical understanding which can generate new ideas and algorithms. Second, it can lead to black art solutions that are unreliable and difficult to reproduce. In this thesis, we argue that spectral methods—that is, methods that use singular value decomposition or other similar matrix or tensor factorization—can effectively remedy these negative ramifications. To this end, we develop spectral methods for two unsupervised language processing tasks. The first task is learning lexical representations from unannotated text (e.g., hierarchical clustering of a vocabulary). The second task is estimating parameters of latent-variable models used in NLP applications (e.g., for unsupervised partof-speech tagging). We show that our spectral algorithms have the following advantages over previous methods: 1. The algorithms provide a new theoretical framework that is amenable to rigorous analysis. In particular, they are shown to be statistically consistent. 2. The algorithms are simple to implement, efficient, and scalable to large amounts of data. They also yield results that are competitive with the state-of-the-art.
Thin Screen: The Creation of Depth Perception in Desktop Virtual Reality in Alignment with Human Visual Perception

Human depth perception involves complex visual and brain functions. Depth perception in desktop virtual reality has become more important given the uses of such spaces for learning, training, collaboration, simulations, showcasing work, and conducting research on human behaviors. This chapter involves a meta-analysis of the extant research on human depth perception in virtual worlds. It posits some early design concepts for both the creation and evolution of such spaces but also their deployment for educational purposes.
Nonlinear H, Decoupling Control For Hovering Helicopter

Although longitudinal and lateral dynamics of helicopters in hovering are highly nonlinear and severely coupled, we will show in this paper that the nonlinear six degree-of-freedom Ha controller designed for hovering helicopter can be exactly separated into two three degree-of-freedom controllers, one for translational motion and the other for rotational motion.
Study on EM Absorption Analysis of Mobile Handset Antenna

The development of the low SAR handset antenna with the apparition of advanced handset devices is presented in this paper. The main objective of the paper is to give an overview of the development of handset antenna with reducing specific absorption rate (SAR) and satisfying market demand in the last years. The development of handset antenna with higher efficiency, compact size, cost effective, multiband and Low SAR are studied for several types of antenna
Simplified and modified approach for face recognition using PCA

This paper gives the simple implementation of face recognition using principal component analysis, based on information theory concepts, seek a computational model that best describes a face, by extracting the most relevant information contained in that face. This technique is not new, but in this paper the implementation is given with very simple manner. Eigenfaces approach is a principal component analysis method, in which a small set of characteristic pictures are used to describe the variation between face images. A face recognition system, based on the eigenfaces approach is proposed. Eigenfaces approach seems to be an adequate method to be used in face recognition due to its simplicity, speed and learning capability. Experimental results using MATLAB are presented in this paper to demonstrate the viability of the proposed face recognition method. The face orientation is also considered in this experiment, and gives very good results.
A Survey on The Technology & Application of Grid Computing

Grid computing is a new kind of distributed computing technology and computing environment,and also an attentive hot point of information technology in the world. It launches a space for new generation internal application, due to its supporting the complicated service efficiently and useable resource in the Internet. This paper sums up the results and applications instance in the grid computing in the world during recent years,and then analyzes emphatically the system architecture,components,working principle in the grid computing and some typical grid systems,and then discusses the problems of the large scale science computing and network service in grid computing in China,and also points out the future trends.
New image enhancement algorithm for night vision

In order to improve the clearness of images captured at night, a new enhancement algorithm is proposed in this paper. Its characters are: (1) enhancing the dark image with contrast enhancement and histogram equalization in series, so both the local and global information can be used; (2) a contrast transforming function which is suited to deal with dark image is proposed; (3) it can be realized in real time. The new method shows good performance in dealing with night vision images.
Malicious Users Detection and Nullifying their Effects on Cooperative Spectrum Sensing

Abstract Submitted：October 27, 2015 1 st Revision：March 20, 2016 Accepted：March 24, 2016* This study was supported by research fund from Chosun University, 2015. ** Dept. of Information and Communication Engineering, Chosun Univ.*** Dept. of Information and Communication Engineering, Chosun Univ, Corresponding AuthorSpectrum sensing in cognitive radio (CR) has a great role in or der to utilize idle spectrum opportunistically, since it is responsible for making available dynamic spectrum access efficiently. In this research area, collaboration among multiple cognitive radio users has been proposed for the better ment of detection reliability. Even though cooperation among them improves the spectrum sensing performance, some fals ely reporting malicious users may degrade the performance rigorously. In this article, we have studied the de tection and nullifying the harmful effects of such malicious users by applying some well known outlier detection methods bas ed on Grubb’s test, Boxplot method and Dixon’s test in cooperative spectrum sensing. Initially, the performance of each technique is compared and found that Boxplot method outperforms both Grubb’s and Dixon’s test for the case w here multiple malicious users are present. Secondly, a new algorithm based on reputation and weight is developed to identify malicious users and cancel out their negative impact in final decision making. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme effectively identifies the malicious users and suppress their harmful effects at the fusio n center to decide whether the spectrum is idle.
Estimating the 95th Percentile of the Paste-Void Spacing Distribution in Hardened Cement Paste Containing Air Entrainment | NIST

The spacing equations of Powers, Philleo, and Pleau and Pigeon are used to estimate the uniform thickness of paste surrounding entrained air voids that is required to encompass 95 % of the air-paste system. Spacing equation accuracy is determined by comparison to the numerically exact result of Lu and Torquato. The air void system is approximated by spheres with radii from a lognormal distribution. For the systems studied here, both the Philleo and the Pleau and Pigeon equations are accurate to within approximately 10 %. The Powers spacing factor can be used to estimate the same quantity to within a factor of two, and could be made far more accurate by adjusting the result using the variance in the air void radius distribution.
A Review on the Development of Big Data Analytics and Effective Data Visualization Techniques in the Context of Massive and Multidimensional Data

Objectives: Data visualization, the use of images to represent information, is now becoming properly appreciated due to the benefits it can bring to business. This paper focuses on the general background of data visualization and visualization techniques. Methods: Data visualization has the prospective to assist humans in analysing and comprehending large volumes of data, and to detect patterns, clusters and outliers that are not obvious using non-graphical forms of presentation. For this reason, data visualizations have an important role to play in a diverse range of applied problems, including data exploration and mining, Information retrieval and intelligence analysis. In real time various techniques have been used of which Geometric projection techniques, Iconographic display techniques, Pixel-oriented, Hierarchical techniques, Graph-based techniques are discussed. Findings: The major difficultly in big data visualization is to preserve any of the original dimensional information. The taxonomy detailed here show that the local and global structure of the data can be visualized in an interactive manner and has a massive advantage.
Comparison of Physical Properties of Untreated and Heat Treated Beech and Hornbeam

Istraživanjem fizikalnih svojstava toplinski obrađene bukovine i grabovine utvrđeno je da njihova srednja vrijednost opada i signifikantno se razlikuje od srednjih vrijednosti fizikalnih svojstava recentne bukovine i grabovine. Srednja vrijednost gustoce u apsolutno suhom stanju recentne bukovine veca je za 8, 5% od toplinski obrađene, a kod grabovine je taj postotak 7, 5%. Smanjenje srednjih vrijednosti maksimalnih utezanja toplinski obrađene bukovine u odnosu na recentnu je jos veci i iznosi kod maksimalnog radijalnog utezanja 7%, 23, 5% kod maksimalnog tangencijalnog utezanja i 19, 3% kod maksimalnog volumnog utezanja. Recentna grabovina ima srednju vrijednost maksimalnog radijalnog utezanja za 123% vecu, 86% maksimalnog tangencijalnog utezanja i 99, 5% kod maksimalnog volumnog utezanja vecu u odnosu na ista fizikalna svojstva toplinski obrađene grabovine. Takvim smanjenjem maksimalnih utezanja u radijalnom i tangencijalnom smjeru toplinskom obradom grabovina posebno postaje prihvatljivija za izradu proizvoda kod kojih je dimenzionalna stabilnost znacajna.
C-SAW: Computer-supported scaffolding of argumentative writing

The goals of this development and research was to determine if C-SAW—an instructional technology designed according to principles derived from research and literature on supporting argumentative writing—could scaffold novices' cognitive and meta-cognitive processes to support the construction of argumentation that favours learning and conceptual change. The main results of a field study and an experimental study pointed to C-SAW mediating reasoning by scaffolding writing processes requiring the use of cognitive resources that would otherwise be allocated to form rather than content and reflection. Though not improving text quality, scaffolding increased argument introduction and completion correlated to increases in conceptual knowledge and changes towards less absolutist epistemic beliefs. This indicated that scaffolded written argumentation, even in the absence of text quality, may suffice to introduce new knowledge and raise awareness of one's own beliefs and certitudes regarding knowledge, making learners more open to deeper learning and conceptual change.