Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pronouncing printed words : investigating a semantic contribution to adult word reading

When considering print-to-sound word reading, orthography and phonology are obviously involved. However, another system, that of semantic memory, might also be involved in orthography-to-phonology computation. Whether this occurs is debated in the literature both in the interpretation of behavioural results (e.g., Monaghan & Ellis, 2002; Strain et al., 1995) and in the implementation of semantic memory within computational models of word reading (Coltheart et al., 2001; Plaut et al., 1996). The central aim of this thesis was to investigate whether there is a semantic contribution to orthography-to-phonology computation in healthy adult word reading. Experiments 1-4 used a semantic priming design in which a picture prime was followed either two trials later (Experiments 1, 3, and 4) or one trial later (Experiment 2) by a word target, and this investigated priming of various word types. Regression investigations explored whether semantic features and imageability were unique significant predictors of ELexicon single word reading reaction times while statistically controlling for age-of-acquisition. The two ERP experiments (Experiments 5 and 6) investigated the neurocorrelates of imageability and semantic features and whether there are semantic effects early in the time-course of low frequency word reading. Experiments 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 and the regression investigations show evidence of a semantic contribution to low frequency regular and low frequency exception word reading. There is also some suggestion of a semantic contribution to high frequency word reading (Experiment 2 and Regression analyses). From the results of the three lines of investigation, it is concluded that semantic information is involved in healthy adult word reading, and these results are best accommodated by the connectionist triangle model of word reading. These investigations also provide information concerning various word types and factors that contribute to “easy” and “difficult” words, semantic memory models and their accounts of priming, and the measures, age-of-acquisition, imageability, and semantic features.
DRM & Security Enabling Mechanisms Leveraging User Centric Multimedia Convergence

The book "Cutting Edge Research in New Technologies" presents the contributions of some researchers in modern fields of technology, serving as a valuable tool for scientists, researchers, graduate students and professionals. The focus is on several aspects of designing and manufacturing, examining complex technical products and some aspects of the development and use of industrial and service automation. The book covered some topics as it follows: manufacturing, machining, textile industry, CAD/CAM/CAE systems, electronic circuits, control and automation, electric drives, artificial intelligence, fuzzy logic, vision systems, neural networks, intelligent systems, wireless sensor networks, environmental technology, logistic services, transportation, intelligent security, multimedia, modeling, simulation, video techniques, water plant technology, globalization and technology. This collection of articles offers information which responds to the general goal of technology - how to develop manufacturing systems, methods, algorithms, how to use devices, equipments, machines or tools in order to increase the quality of the products, the human comfort or security. following:
Business Models for E-Commerce

Electronic commerce over the Internet may be either strategic investment option to traditional business or represent a whole new line of business. In either case, in view of the new features of the Internet, critical questions to be answered include (a) Business model(s) for E-commerce as a strategic investment option (b) Business model(s) for E-commerce as a new line of business This paper addresses both by providing a framework for the classification of Internet electronic commerce business models. This framework has been developed on the basis of current commercial Internet business and traditional business practices in India. There are no standard models available for an existing business to leverage the benefits of e-commerce to enhance the business capabilities. This paper gives guidelines for an existing business to leverage such technological advancements.
Combining Associational and Causal Reasoning to Solve Interpretation and Planning Problems

This report describes a paradigm for combining associational and causal reasoning to achieve efficient and robust problem-solving behavior. The Generate, Test and Debug (GTD) paradigm generates initial hypotheses using associational (heuristic) rules. The tester verifies hypotheses, supplying the debugger with causal explanations for bugs found if the test fails. The debugger uses domain-independent causal reasoning techniques to repair hypotheses, analyzing domain models and the causal explanations produced by the tester to determine how to replace faulty assumptions made by the generator. We analyze the strengths and weaknesses of associational and causal reasoning techniques, and present a theory of debugging plans and interpretations. The GTD paradigm has been implemented and tested in the domains of geologic interpretation, the blocks world, and Tower of Hanoi problems.
TCP/IP and ATM over LEO Satellite Networks

With growing number of users relying on the Internet and communication via computer network, computers are no longer regarded as a technical tool for engineers and office workers. Today, large numbers of people use personal computers at home to communicate via e-mail, searching for information via the World Wide Web (WWW). In the near future, a wider range of services will to be available. Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) as the main protocol suite for the Internet and computer networks has established itself as one of the essential parts of today's computer communications and is an important area of research. To support various types of communication services, the concept of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) has been proposed as the transport platform for global system. ATM offers the flexibility to handle and transfer advanced broadband services ( also called multimedia services including voice, data, video) at high transfer rates. Combining TCP/IP and ATM is therefore seen as a fundamental combination. Adding the satellite communication concept to the above discussion, the result is a single global coverage networks, providing services such as voice, data, video to users anywhere within the intended coverage areas. This research has studied important technical issues involving such integration. It has identified that the combination of TCP/IP, ATM and satellite networks will play an important part of the future global network. Various problems from physical layer, satellite channel conditions, up to the transport layer, the unsuitability of some TCP algorithms, mean that achieving high performance with such system can be a difficult task. Background research into this area has been conducted and summarised to identify the current important findings of the topic. The two most important factors that cause the low efficiency of the system are long propagation delay of Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellite networks, directly effecting TCP, and the high bit error rate of the satellite channel which effect both ATM and TCP. With the concept of using non-GEO satellite constellations, such as LEO, the problem of long delays via satellite network can be minimised. From the simulation results obtained during the research, we can finally indentify and see the wider prospect of TCP and its applications protocols such as FTP and HTTP in satellite networks. Instead of contantly trying to improve TCP algorithms for GEO satellite environments, LEO satellite constellations can provide an alternative option. This research provide the first indepth study and analyse of the performance of Internet traffic and TCP via LEO satellite network, compared with GEO satellite constellations. It provides an optional solution so that TCP with minimal changes can give higher throughput level in non-GEO satellite networks with lower delay and thereofre should be considered as part of the on going research to finalise the possibility of high performance Internet via satellite networks. Simulation method using the OPNET modelling package has been used for network modelling and simulations.
Organizational Cybernetics: The Ecology of Change in a Norwegian Shipyard

Develops elements in what is called heterarchical logic in a study of the ecology of change in a Norwegian shipyard. The heterarchical logic is not in accordance with traditional understanding of rationality in organizations. Considers on what type of management this type of logic is based. Both “heterarchical logic” and the new type of management, joint management, partly answer Jackson’s criticism of the use of cybernetical models in organizations. This also is a contribution to organizational cybernetics with regard to Flood and Carson’s demand that the question of how autonomous work groups should be organized should be incorporated in organizational cybernetics.
Communicative criteria for processing time/space-varying information

Describes our on-going project for investigating the communicative criteria for human-robot face-to-face communication like that with animated or robotic talking-heads. We assume that people recover linguistic and affective meaning not from static or nearly static configurations such as still pictures or short sound segments, but in the temporal and spatial patterns of the visible and/or audible information associated with the face and the surrounding environment. Based on this assumption, we discuss what spatio-temporal patterns convey communicative information and introduce some of our preliminary attempts using animated and robotic talking-heads.
Dual resolution two-dimensional color barcode

In this paper, a QR code is presented with a dual resolution structure. It contains a high resolution layer that is coded in luminance and is in consistency with the conventional QR code, and a low resolution layer providing additional error checking information, that is coded in chrominance and is robust to blurring. The proposed QR code is compatible to its underlying conventional black and white barcode as it can be read by their decoders. Its advantage is additional reliability when a color decoder is used. In particular, it enhances the decoding accuracy for devices such as mobile devices for barcodes printed in small sizes.
Optimal acoustic model complexity selection in polish medical speech recognition

In the paper, the method of acoustic model complexi ty level selection for automatic speech recognition is proposed. Selection of the appropriate model comple xity affects significantly the accuracy of speech r ecognition. For this reason the selection of the appropriate comple xity level is crucial for practical speech recognit ion applications, where end user effort related to the implementation of speech recognition system is important. We inve stigated the correlation between speech recognition accuracy and two popular information criteria used in statistic al model evaluation: Bayesian Information Criterion and Akai ke Information Criterion computed for applied acous tic models. Experiments carried out for language models related to general medicine texts and radiology diagnostic reporting in CT and MR showed strong correlation of speech recognition accuracy and BIC criterion. Using this depende ncy, the procedure of Gaussian mixture count selection for a coustic model was proposed. Application of this pro cedure makes it possible to create the acoustic model maximizing th e speech recognition accuracy without additional co mputational costs related to alternative cross-validation appro ach and without reduction of training set size, whi ch is unavoidable in the case of cross-validation approach.
A Petri net with negative tokens and its application automated reasoning

A modified Petri-net model is introduced with negative tokens for automated reasoning programs. In this model, Horn and non-Horn clauses are represented by transitions and predicate symbols by places. UR-resolution is simulated by either forward or background firing of a transition and demodulation by a transition which rewrites tokens. This model is intended to provide a means to analyze structural properties of automated reasoning programs and an operational semantics of programs. <<ETX>>
Wide-area Internet traffic patterns and characteristics

The Internet is rapidly growing in number of users, traffic levels, and topological complexity. At the same time it is increasingly driven by economic competition. These developments render the characterization of network usage and workloads more difficult, and yet more critical. Few recent studies have been published reporting Internet backbone traffic usage and characteristics. At MCI, we have implemented a high-performance, low-cost monitoring system that can capture traffic and perform analyses. We have deployed this monitoring tool on OC-3 trunks within the Internet MCI's backbone and also within the NSF-sponsored vBNS. This article presents observations on the patterns and characteristics of wide-area Internet traffic, as recorded by MCI's OC-3 traffic monitors. We report on measurements from two OC-3 trunks in MCI's commercial Internet backbone over two time ranges (24-hour and 7-day) in the presence of up to 240,000 flows. We reveal the characteristics of the traffic in terms of packet sizes, flow duration, volume, and percentage composition by protocol and application, as well as patterns seen over the two time scales.
Theoretical Survey on Secure Hash Functions and issues

Security is a very important issue, which has attracted the interest of the research community, at a great factor. Hash functions belong to the category of encryption algorithms and are included in almost all cryptographic schemes and security protocols for providing authentication services. Cryptographic hash functions are primitives and building blocks that are used to provide information security. A cryptographic hash function is one which converts an input data of arbitrary length into a fixed-length output. Bloom filters are hash based structures which have a certain degree of accuracy for considerable savings in memory. Research is being done to increase the performance by modifying the structure of hash functions and enabling it to operate in the increasing network speeds, thus variant Hashing algorithms are being introduced. The aim of this paper is to survey the cryptographic hashing algorithms and applications to benefit the research community.
Adaptação de stream de vídeo em veículos aéreos não tripulados

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being increasingly used in several countries, both in the military and civilian areas. In this study we consider an UAV equipped with a camera, capturing video for a real-time transmission to a ground-base using wireless network. The problem is that it’s not possible to ensure a continuous transmission rate, with stable bandwidth. That occurs due to factors like the speed of the aircraft, irregularities of terrain, or the weather (as storms, heat and fog, for instance, can interfere with RF transmission). Finally, the movements that the UAV can perform in flight (Roll, pitch and yaw) can impair link availability. Thus, it is necessary to perform an adaptation of video according to the available bandwidth. When the link quality is degraded, a reduction in the resolution of the video must be performed , avoiding interruption of the transmission. Additionally, adaptation must also provide that all the available bandwidth is used, avoiding sending the video with lower quality that would be possible for a given value bandwidth. In this work we propose a system which can vary the total amount of data being transmitted, by adjusting the compression parameters of the video. We manage to produce a system which uses the range from 8 Mbps up to zero. We use the H.264/AVC Codec, with scalable video coding.
ENREGISTERMENT!IN!HISTORICAL!CONTEXTS:!! NINETEENTH!CENTURY!YORKSHIRE!DIALECT!

In this paper I argue that textual data from historical periods can be evidence of indexicality (Silverstein 2003) and enregisterment (Agha 2003), and that repertoires of enregistered features can be identified in historical contexts. Using a corpus of nineteenth K century Yorkshire dialect material, I discuss a repertoire of features that was enregistered as “Yorkshire” to nineteenth century audiences. I do this by comparing data from a corpus of modern Yorkshire dialect material and an online survey of current speakers’ perceptions of Yorkshire dialect. I suggest that similar patterns as those seen in the modern Yorkshire dialect data can be observed in analogous data from the nineteenth century. I argue that we can therefore make ‘use of the present to explain the past’ following Labov (1977:226) and infer that features of Yorkshire dialect which occur frequently in the historical corpus and metapragmatic discourse were enregistered in the nineteenth century.
A formal system for specifying and verifying program performance

Formal techniques for specifying performance properties of programs (e.g., execution time) and for verifying the correctness of these specifications are developed. These techniques are extensions of well-known predicate transformer techniques for specifying and verifying purely functional properties of programs. This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant MCS77-03883. Table of
Survey on Semantic Concept Detection

Concept detection plays an important role in digital image processing. This paper is based on the survey of various techniques used in the semantic concept detection. One of the main opportunities to improve the performance in concept detection is feature extraction and matching image. In semantic concept detection explains the concept detection in the video shots. For getting the accurate video shots, there are different types of techniques used. Most of the papers are explained about various techniques that used in concept detection. Each technique has got its own advantages as well as disadvantages.
Avatar to Depict Sign Language: Building from Reusable Hand Animation

An essential component of an automatic speech‐to‐sign translator is a method of representing and depicting the target language. Unlike many spoken languages, sign languages do not have a universally‐ accepted written form, and depicting it convincingly is an open question. The goal of our work is to develop a representation capable of synthesizing novel utterances of American Sign Language (ASL) as realistic and believable 3D animations. Any representation must be flexible enough to modify vocabulary algorithmically so that it conforms to the grammatical structure of ASL. Additionally, realism is necessary because a viewer should not be distracted by differences between animations signed by an avatar and video of utterances produced by a human signer. Animations signed by an avatar should be as easy to understand as video of a human signer. A survey of the state of the art for modeling, rigging and animating a 3D character reveals a well‐ established body of knowledge used in films and computer games for over twenty years. Likewise, linguistic scholars have made great strides in characterizing sign language since Stokoe first discovered that the visual/gestural system of communication he observed at Gallaudet was a true language in its own right. Using conventional techniques to represent phonemes have yielded promising results, but user studies show that the resulting animations fall short of the goal of realism. User feedback has shown that the standards for physical accuracy in depicting ASL are far higher than that required for film or games. The motion for a movie, once created, never changes, and for a game, is limited to a small number of choices. In contrast, subtle changes in sign production result in vastly different perceptions, requiring an improved approach to animation reusability. To address the modeling and rigging issues, we have developed a more accurate behavior for the human thumb, created internal handshape movement, and improved the positioning of the arms via " JK " mathematics. This, coupled with a user interface that facilitates positioning via linguistic terms, allowed us to synthesize grammatically correct sentences involving agreement verbs and to retarget signs to different avatar geometries. To address the challenge of nonmanual signals, we created dynamically interacting sets of texture maps to portray the forehead and introduced a rubber band rig for a more natural mouth. The internal representation accommodates multiple linguistic processes that co‐occur on the face. The current system stores this information in a parameterized, …
Component-oriented software technology

Modern software systems are increasingly required to be open and distributed. Such systems are open not only in terms of network connections and interoperability support for heterogeneous hardware and software platforms, but, above all, in terms of evolving and changing requirements. Although object-oriented technology offers some relief, to a large extent the languages, methods and tools fail to address the needs of open systems because they do not escape from traditional models of software development that assume system requirements to be closed and stable. We argue that open systems requirements can only be adequately addressed by adopting a component-oriented as opposed to a purely object-oriented software development approach, by shifting emphasis away from programming and towards generalized software composition.
Timing control for delay-constrained data aggregation in wireless sensor networks: Research Articles

Timing control for delay-constrained data aggregation is critical for improving the performance of a wireless sensor network. In this paper, we propose an adaptive timing control (ATC) mechanism to determine the proper time for data aggregation and forwarding. Given the maximum delay requirements of an application, the ATC mechanism determines the aggregation time for sensor nodes based on both the locations of the nodes and the number of children in the data aggregation tree. The nodes with more children are allocated a longer waiting time. The ATC mechanism maximizes the opportunity for data aggregation and ensures sufficient time to process data from the children. Analytical and simulation results show that the ATC mechanism leads to a higher data delivery rate and lower energy costs compared with existing similar algorithms. Moreover, since a lot of data packets can arrive at the sink earlier, the ATC mechanism is capable of responding more quickly to users. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Stratégies d'approvisionnement d'un omnivore : l'ours noir oriente-t-il sa recherche de nourriture vers les jeunes cervidés?

The main objective of this study was to evaluate how habitat selection and foraging strategies of black bears, a major predator of ungulate neonates, shape encounter probability with these prey. We first demonstrated that the interpretation of the various types of habitat selection analyses depends on the resource-use strategy adopted by the species of interest. We showed that the combined use of multiple statistical approaches can not only identify resource selection, but also inform on the mechanisms behind this selection. We applied this framework to evaluate the foraging behaviour of black bears during the period of ungulate neonate vulnerability. Our results show that bears select plant food patches in spring by moving selectively and frequently between plant-rich areas. Such frequent interpatch movements could result in high rates of fortuitous encounters with neonates, even if bears are not actively searching for them.