Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Venture : an extensible platform for probabilistic meta-programming

This thesis describes Venture, an extensible platform for probabilistic meta-programming. In Venture, probabilistic generative models, probability density functions, and probabilistic inference algorithms are all firstclass objects. Any Venture program that makes random choices can be treated as a probabilistic model defined over the space of possible executions of the program. Such probabilistic model programs can also be run while recording the random choices that they make. Modeling and inference in Venture involves two additional classes of probabilistic programs. The first, probability density meta-programs partially describe the input-output behavior of probabilistic model programs. The second, stochastic inference meta-programs identify probable executions of model programs given stochastic constraints, and typically use density metaprograms as guides. Unlike other probabilistic programming platforms, Venture allows model programs, density meta-programs, and inference meta-programs to be written as user-space code in a single probabilistic programming language. Venture is essentially a Lisp-like higher-order language augmented with two novel abstractions: (i) probabilistic execution traces, a first-class object that represents the sequence of random choices that a probabilistic program makes, and (ii) stochastic procedures, which encapsulate the probabilistic programs and meta-programs needed to allow simple probability distributions, user-space VentureScript programs, and foreign probabilistic programs to be treated uniformly as components of probabilistic computations. Venture also provides runtime support for stochastic regeneration of execution trace fragments that makes use of the programs and meta-programs of all stochastic procedures invoked during the execution of the original traced program. This thesis describes a new prototype implementation of Venture incorporating these ideas and illustrates the flexibility of Venture by giving concise user-space implementations of primitives and inference strategies that have been built in to Church as well as other probabilistic languages.
Using Global Appearance Descriptors to Solve Topological Visual SLAM

Mobile robots have extended to many different environments, where they have to move autonomously to fulfill an assigned task. With this aim, it is necessary that the robot builds a model of the environment and estimates its position using this model. These two problems are often faced simultaneously. This process is known as SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping) and is very common since when a robot begins moving in a previously unknown environment it must start generating a model from the scratch while it estimates its position simultaneously. This chapter is focused on the use of computer vision to solve this problem. The main objective is to develop and test an algorithm to solve the SLAM problem using two sources of information: (1) the global appearance of omnidirectional images captured by a camera mounted on the mobile robot and (2) the robot internal odometry. A hybrid metric-topological approach is proposed to solve the SLAM problem.
Ein Prozeß in vielen Schritten - Die Entstehung von Krebserkrankungen nach Einwirkung exogener und endogener Kanzerogene

"Krebs" entsteht nicht wie manche andere Krankheiten unvermittelt und als Folge eines einmaligen Ereignisses. Der mehrstufige Vorgang einer Tumorerkrankung beginnt mit dem Auftreten von Fehlern in der molekularen Steuerung der betroffenen Zellen - lange bevor eine Tumorerkrankung diagnostizierbar wird.
Learning long sequences in binary neural networks

An original architecture of oriented sparse neural networks that enables the introduction of sequentiality in associative memories is proposed in this paper. This architecture can be regarded as a generalization of a recently proposed non oriented binary network based on cliques. Using a limited neuron resource, the network is able to learn very long sequences and to retrieve them only from the knowledge of some consecutive symbols.
Using a Problem-Solving/Decision-Making Model to Evaluate School Lunch Salad Bars.

Purpose/Objectives Evaluation of school-based activities is a high priority for school personnel. Nutrition activities, such as salad bars (SBs) incorporated into school lunchrooms, may increase children’s consumption of low-energy, high fiber diets. The purpose of this paper is to describe a problem-solving/decision-making model and demonstrate its application in the evaluation of a school-based SB program. Methods The proposed model includes five steps: 1) problem definition; 2) goal setting; 3) method options; 4) action plans; and 5) ongoing assessment. The Tulane Prevention Research Center (PRC) conducted an SB evaluation with 19 schools in Orleans Parish. The evaluation, developed with the 5-step model, led to multi-level school data collection: administrative, nutrition service, students, and cafeteria environmental scans. Results Important practical data about lunchroom SBs was obtained. The evaluation, using the model, successfully demonstrated that all methods were achievable, participation reached expected levels, and identified goals were attained.
Searching for Best Practices

Despite a growing body of literature, substantial variance remains between researchers, mental health experts, clinicians, and practitioners over the nature, structure, and contents of psychosocial interventions aimed at reducing the mental health burden in war-torn and postconflict societies. We conducted a focused and systematic review of the literature published over the last two decades on the most commonly used psychotherapeutic treatment modalities in medical and humanitarian interventions as represented by expert opinion, observational and qualitative or mixed-method studies, case reports, case control, and community-based studies, excluding randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and meta-analyses of RCTs. More specifically, we aimed at searching for best practices and supporting psychosocial interventions within the domain of adult mental health in civilian populations in low- and middle-income countries affected by protracted political violence, armed conflict, and wars. We noted the need to translate existing knowledge into action (know-do gap) and the critical importance of applying qualitative evidence-based knowledge that informs and supports collective interventions and best practices in medical and humanitarian assistance programs currently being undertaken.
The direct simulation of high-speed mixing-layers without and with chemical heat release

A direct numerical simulation of high speed reacting and non-reacting flows for H2-air systems is presented. The calculations are made for a convective Mach number of 0.38 with hyperbolic tangent initial profile and finite rate chemical reactions. A higher-order numerical method is used in time accurate mode to time advance the solution to a statistical steady state. About 600 time slices of all the variables are then stored for statistical analysis. It is shown that most of the problems of high-speed combustion with air are characterized by relatively weak heat release. The present study shows that: (1) the convective speed is reduced by heat release by about 10 percent at this convective Mach number M(sub c) = 0.38; (2) the variation of the mean and rms fluctuation of temperature can be explained on the basis of temperature fluctuation between the flame temperature and the ambient; (3) the growth rate with heat release is reduced by 7 percent; and (4) the entrainment is reduced by 25 percent with heat release. These differences are small in comparison with incompressible flow dynamics, and are argued to be due to the reduced importance of heat release in comparison with the large enthalpy gradients resulting from the large-scale vortex dynamics. It is finally suggested that the problems of reduced mixing in high-speed flows are not severely complicated by heat release.
Everyday forms of resistance and claim making in Durban South Africa

ABSTRACT South Africa has high levels of visible protest, which occur in parallel with less visible forms of protest. This paper considers the quieter forms of resisting in Durban drawing from two cases studies: informal street traders and shack dwellers. It applies Scott’s concept of ‘everyday resistance’ and Bayat’s notion of ‘quiet encroachment’. Street traders represent an ‘invisible’ power, preferring to avoid engagements with authorities and undermining power structures through a repertoire of daily trading tactics. Shack dwellers are more of a ‘visible’ power where protest is entrenched as part of the settlement ‘culture’ reflecting an ‘offensive’. Abbreviations: NGO: non-governmental organisation; ABM: Abahlali base Mjondolo; ANC: African National Congress; SEDA: Small Enterprise Development Agency
An Efficient Approach of Travel Recommendation Model from High Dimensional Databases – A Survey

: The proliferation of digital cameras and the growing practice of online photo sharing using social media sites such as Flickr have resulted in huge volumes of geo tagged photos available on the Web. Based on users’ traveling preferences elicited from their travel experiences exposed on social media sites by sharing geo tagged photos, we propose a new method for recommending tourist locations that are relevant to users (i.e., personalization) in the given context (i.e., context awareness). We obtain user-specific travel preferences from his/her travel history in one city and use these to recommend tourist locations in another city. Our technique is illustrated on a sample of publicly available Flickr dataset containing photos taken in various cities. Results show that our context-aware personalized method is able to predict tourists’ preferences in a new or unknown city more precisely and generate better recommendations compared to other state-of-the-art landmark recommendation methods.
The Role of Disaster Regulations and Insurance Regulations on the Development of Disaster Insurance Markets

Recently, the climate regulations and stop-loss regulations have become a central policy parameter globally. In market-oriented economies, insurers as the biggest stakeholder-industry of natural disaster risk are facing the issue related to industry sustainability. Thus, the policy implications of natural disasters regulation on the insurance industry are enormous. Therefore, this chapter has made an effort to analyze the disaster management in the integrated framework. This integrated framework is based upon the analysis of the role of regulatory actions taken by three actors, namely, disaster regulation, insurance regulations, and firms' actions across the three stages of disaster management, namely, pre-disaster, underwriting, and post-disaster stages in G-7 economies. Based on the outcomes of the current analysis, the chapter found that there are two polar opposite integrated models (i.e., isolated best policy model in the case of Japan and spiral policy model in the case of Italy). Five models fall in between the two.
3D Java Game Development with Homura

ABSTRACT The gaming industry now boasts revenues comparable to that of the filming industry and its progress over the last three decades has seen such advancements that games now provide a life-like immersive experience which is set to continue. Development has been dispersed across multiple toolsets requiring specialist gaming engineers to bring many aspects of game development together to create top titles. There is a need to simplify this process, not only for ease of development but to capture the imaginations or those outside the game development domain. We already see this through modding and more recently in virtual environments where the games or worlds are influenced by the content created by users. With this in mind we propose a novel integrated development environment called Homura. Homura is based on the Eclipse platform and extends the jME game engine, with new interfaces, content and libraries, thus, providing a software suite that integrates source editors, compilers, including spatial and positional editors to afford advanced graphical functionalities within the IDE.
Influence of Kinship Social Support on the Parenting Experiences and Psychosocial Adjustment of African-American Adolescents.

The association of kinship support with psychosocial adjustment and parenting practices for 125 African-American adolescents (52 boys and 73 girls) in Grades 9-12 from single- and 2-parent households was assessed. Findings revealed that kinship support was positively associated with adolescent adjustment and with authoritative parenting practices in single- but not 2-parent households. Results also indicated that parenting practices mediated the effects of kinship support. When the effects of authoritative parenting practices were controlled, significant relations found between kinship support and adolescent adjustment were no longer apparent. The importance of kinship support for the functioning of African-American families and adolescents was discussed
Use of the QuADS Architecture for Multimodal Output Generation

QuADS (Queen’s Advanced Dialogue System) is a suite of highly generic and customizable Java classes for the development of spoken and multimodal dialogue systems. Some of the classes in QuADS represent communicative acts, such as are found in information-providing or transaction-based dialogues: in classifying these acts, whether generated by the system or understood by the system from the user’s input, QuADS uses a dialogue act hierarchy based on the DIT++ taxonomy. Other classes are concerned with the underlying task of finding the information or service that the user requires, or, when the user’s specific information request cannot be satisfied, of presenting reasonable alternatives. In this paper, as well as giving an overview of the QuADS architecture, we examine the means by which a system developed with QuADS selects the modalities that it will use to present information to the user, taking into account the availability of a particular modality in a given system configuration, and considering also the user’s preference for particular modalities. Although we apply some obvious measures to avoid ‘information overload’, at present we are concerned not so much with the ‘optimal’ modality or combination of modalities for a particular task as with the mechanisms within a generic, domain-independent framework that make selection of modalities possible in accordance with system capabilities and user preferences.
Who is more susceptible to phishing emails? : a Saudi Arabian study

Phishing emails cause enormous losses to both users and organisations. The goal of this study is to determine which individuals are more vulnerable to phishing emails. To gain this information an experiment has been developed which involves sending phishing email to users and collecting information about users. The detection deception model has been applied to identify users’ detection behaviour. We find that users who have less email experience and high levels of submissiveness have increased susceptibility. Among those, users who have high susceptibility levels and high openness and extraversion are more likely to carry on the harmful action embedded in phishing emails.
Effect of various dimension convolutional layer filters on traffic sign classification accuracy

The paper presents the study of an effective classification method for traffic signs on the basis of a convolutional neural network with various dimension filters. Every model of convolutional neural network has the same architecture but different dimension of filters for convolutional layer. The studied dimensions of the convolution layer filters are: 3 × 3, 5 × 5, 9 × 9, 13 × 13, 15 × 15, 19 × 19, 23 × 23, 25 × 25 and 31 ×31. In each experiment, the input image is convolved with the filters of certain dimension and with certain processing depth of image borders, which depends directly on the dimension of the filters and varies from 1 to 15 pixels. Performances of the proposed methods are evaluated with German Traffic Sign Benchmarks (GTSRB). Images from this dataset were reduced to 32 × 32 pixels in dimension. The whole dataset was divided into three subsets: training, validation and testing. The effect of the dimension of the convolutional layer filters on the extracted feature maps is analyzed in accordance with the classification accuracy and the average processing time. The testing dataset contains 12000 images that do not participate in convolutional neural network training. The experiment results have demonstrated that every model shows high testing accuracy of more than 82%. The models with filter dimensions of 9 × 9, 15 × 15 and 19 × 19 achieve top three with the best results on classification accuracy equal to 86.4 %, 86 % and 86.8 %, respectively. The models with filter dimensions of 5 × 5, 3 × 3 and 13 × 13 achieve top three with the best results on the average processing time equal to 0.001879, 0.002046 and 0.002364 seconds, respectively. The usage of convolutional layer filter with middle dimension has shown not only the high classification accuracy of more than 86 %, but also the fast classification rate, that enables these models to be used in real-time applications.
Aalborg Universitet User Influence on the Mean Effective Gain for Data Mode Operation of Mobile

The current paper presents statistics on the mean effective gain (MEG) for mobile handsets. The results are based on a large measurement campaign in an urban environment where the propagation channel from two different base stations to seven different handsets were measured in two bands (776 MHz and 2300 MHz). The handsets were of different types (bar, clamshell, smartphone), all had two antennas and were used in data (browsing) mode. All handsets were measured with twelve different users with both one-hand and two-hand grips. The body loss, the mean difference between the MEG in free space and with a user, was found to be up to about 15 dB with typical values below 6 dB. Further results are given in terms of mean values, standard deviations, and analyses for differences due to antenna location and user grip style. Finally, the body loss distribution is modeled and used for estimation of confidence intervals.
Learning a well-formed microtonal scale: Pitch intervals and event frequencies

Abstract This study investigates learning interval structure and pitch occurrence frequency of a microtonal scale by two groups of musicians (one experienced in Western tonal music only, the other in several microtonal systems) and non-musicians. While musically untrained participants could rapidly learn the pitch occurrence frequency of this scale, learning microtonal pitch intervals was slow in musicians. Interestingly, microtonal musicians were the slowest in responding to deviant pitch intervals and timbre changes in microtonal melodies amongst the musicians. These results extend our recent observation of non-musicians’ ability to learn aspects of microtonal pitch intervals, suggesting that paradoxically, musicians do not adjust their learned expectations to microtonal systems as quickly as non-musicians.
Complementary roles of the orbital prefrontal cortex and the perirhinal-entorhinal cortices in an odor-guided delayed-nonmatching-to-sample task

Continuing efforts toward designing odor-guided tasks for rats that are similar in memory demands to tasks used typically with primates have resulted in the development of a continuous delayed-nonmatching-to-sample (cDNM) task that is guided by olfactory stimuli. The results indicate that normal subjects acquire the cDNM task rapidly and that subsequent performance deteriorates with increases in memory delay or interitem interference. Moreover, different aspects of cDNM performance were shown to be differentially sensitive to selective lesions of the orbitofrontal and parahippocampal areas. Orbitofrontal cortex lesions disproportionately impaired cDNM acquisition; delay performance was impaired only under conditions of elevated levels of interitem interference. Combined perirhinal and entorhinal cortical lesions had no effect on cDNM acquisition but impaired cDNM performance at longer delays across all levels of interference. Fornix lesions did not impair either acquisition of cDNM or subsequent performance across long delays and increased interference. This pattern of impaired and spared capacities is similar to that observed in monkeys after lesions of analogous areas and is consistent with the notion that the prefrontal cortical system contributes preferentially to learning general task "rules" such as the nonmatching rule that is inherent in cDNM, whereas the perirhinal and entorhinal cortical areas are involved in the intermediate-term maintenance of memories for specific information.
Literature Of Information Systems And Information Technology Evaluation In Management Information Systems' Field

This paper investigates the famous streams in literature of information systems and information technology (IS/IT) evaluation. This theoretical review entails the user information satisfaction (UIS) models, the technology acceptance models (TAM) and Delone and McLean success model (D&M SM) (1992). The present paper represents a part from a study that has been undertaken to investigate the use of IS/IT in selected Algerian organizations and the perceived performance of both individuals and organizations
¿Puntos de partida y llegada simétricos? Una tipología basada en la relación educación-empleo

En el presente escrito se propone una tipología para clasificar y explicar la relación educación superior-empleo a partir de la conjunción de elementos asociables a la sociología de la juventud, la teoría del capital humano y la política de educación superior. Se empleó la metodología de análisis cualitativo comparado mediante el uso de lógica booleana para el análisis multidimensional. Se analizaron estudiantes de la carrera de Abogado de la Universidad de Guadalajara al ingreso y próximos al egreso. Como principal resultado se evidenció la heterogeneidad de estudiantes con respecto al empleo destacando su carácter dinámico durante el tránsito escolar.
Communication in Vertically Related Markets: Experimental Evidence

When an upstream monopolist supplies several competing downstream firms, it may fail to monopolize the market because of opportunistic behavior towards the downstream firms. We analyze this well-known commitment problem in an experiment where we extend previous research by allowing for communication. In one treatment, the upstream firm can bilaterally talk to either of two downstream firms. In a second treatment, all three firms talk together. We find that the treatment with bilateral communication leads to fewer rejections of offers and higher joint profits than a baseline treatment without communication, but output is still above the monopoly benchmark. Only the treatment where all three firms can communicate leads to complete monopolization. Such communication effectively works as a vertical restraint and should be regarding as potentially anticompetitive.