Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Geography of Housing Subsidies

We investigate the spatially heterogeneous impact of the US federal mortgage interest deduction (MID) on the location and tenure decisions of households. We develop a general-equilibrium model at the county level featuring an endogenous itemization of housing subsidies. Despite being an important tax expenditure, repealing the MID would only slightly lower homeownership rates while leaving welfare mostly unchanged. The policy is ineffective because it targets locations with congested housing markets, creating a spatial shift of the housing demand toward areas that capitalize the subsidy into higher prices. We provide evidence that a repeal of the MID is to be preferred to an increase of standard tax deductions as recently implemented under President Trump's administration.
Behavioral Modeling of a C-Band Ring Hybrid Coupler Using Artificial Neural Networks

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) gained importance on the RF microwave (MW) design area and behavioral modeling of MW components in the past few decades. This paper presents a cost effective neural network (NN) approach to overcome design, modeling and optimization problems of an 180 ring hybrid coupler operating in C-Band. The proposed NN model is trained by data sets obtained from electromagnetic (EM) simulators and neural test results are compared with simulator findings to determine the network accuracy. Moreover, necessary trade-offs are applied to improve the networks’ performance. Finally correlation factors, which are defined as comparison criteria between EM-simulator and proposed neural models, are calculated for each trade-off case.
Action Source Task Target task Encoder Decoder Encoder Discriminator Policy Embeddings

Deep Reinforcement learning is a powerful machine learning paradigm that has had significant success across a wide range of control problems. This success often requires long training times to achieve. Observing that many problems share similarities, it is likely that much of the training done could be redundant if knowledge could be efficiently and appropriately shared across tasks. In this paper we demonstrate a novel adversarial domain adaptation approach to transfer state knowledge between domains and tasks on the Atari game suite. We show how this approach can successfully transfer across very different visual domains of the Atari platform. We focus on semantically related games that involve returning a ball with the user controlled agent. Our experiments demonstrate that our method reduces the number of samples required to successfully train an agent to play an Atari game.
Development of a Tree Growth Difference Equation and Its Application in Forecasting the Biomass Carbon Stocks of Chinese Forests in 2050

Global climate change has raised concerns about the relationship between ecosystems and forests, which is a core component of the carbon cycle and a critical factor in understanding and mitigating the effects of climate change. Forest models and sufficient information for predictions are important for ensuring efficient afforestation activities and sustainable forest development. Based on the theory of difference equations and the general rules of tree growth, this study established a difference equation for the relationship between the ratio of tree diameter at breast height (DBH) to the tree height and age of age of China’s main arbor species. A comparison with equations that represent the traditional tree growth models, i.e., Logistic and Richards equations, showed that the difference equations exhibited higher precision for both fitting and verification data. Moreover, the biomass carbon stocks (BCS) of Chinese forests from 2013 to 2050 were predicted by combining the 8th Chinese Ministry of Forestry and partial continuous forest inventory (CFI) data sets. The results showed that the BCS of Chinese forests would increase from 7342 to 11,030 terra grams of carbon (Tg C) in 2013–2050, with an annual biomass C (carbon) sink of 99.68 Tg C year−1, and they indicated that the Chinese land-surface forest vegetation has an important carbon sequestration capability.
Design of Integrated Flexible Transit Service with Given Fixed-Route Services

The increased use of private cars has caused many negative environmental, social and economic effects. Local authorities always do efforts to encourage the travellers to use the existing public transport services to reduce the negative effects of the increased personal mobility. Offering flexible transit services can compete with the flexibility of private cars and attract the travellers to use the public transport. However, these type of services has high operating costs which require subsidies to maintain running the service. In this paper, we present an integrated service between the flexible transit services and the existing fixed-route services with the aim of reducing the total costs and maintaining a suitable level of service for the travellers. Two exact formulations for the proposed integrated service are presented and analysed. Computational results on a set of instances provide a clear understanding of the capability of integrated service in reducing the total costs while maintaining a suitable level of service for the travellers.
Universitet Roadmap on all-optical processing

The ability to process optical signals without passing into the electrical domain has always attracted the attention of the research community. Processing photons by photons unfolds new scenarios, in principle allowing for unseen signal processing and computing capabilities. Optical computation can be seen as a large scientific field in which researchers operate, trying to find solutions to their specific needs by different approaches; although the challenges can be substantially different, they are typically addressed using knowledge and technological platforms that are shared across the whole field. This significant know-how can also benefit other scientific communities, providing lateral solutions to their problems, as well as leading to novel applications. The aim of this Roadmap is to provide a broad view of the state-of-the-art in this lively scientific research field and to discuss the advances required to tackle emerging challenges, thanks to contributions authored by experts affiliated to both academic institutions and high-tech industries. The Roadmap is organized so as to put side by side contributions on different aspects of optical processing, aiming to enhance the cross-contamination of ideas between scientists working in three different fields of photonics: optical gates and logical units, high bit-rate signal processing and optical quantum computing. The ultimate intent of this paper is to provide guidance for young scientists as well as providing research-funding institutions and stake holders with a comprehensive overview of perspectives and opportunities offered by this research field.
Forensics: Food Authentication Using MtDNA

There is a clear trend in the food international market towards labelling products with information about their composition and quality. Due to the increase in international trade in seafood and seafood products, authentication has become a necessity. There is a need for suitable methods of identification to ensure compliance with the labelling regulations and thereby to prevent the substitution of fish species.
Some Problems in Writing Dissertations of Liberal Arts

There are five problems in writing dissertations of liberal arts: 1. "the virgin land cultivation" and "the peak climbing" in topic selecting;2.the macroscopic grasp and the microcosmic research in writing dissertations;3.the originate of dissertations' point of views and the full and accurate materials;4. "looking up" or "looking down" the research objects;5.selection the proper research methods on the base of the research objects.If these problems can be properly solved,the dissertations of liberal arts in our country will certainly enter into a new stage and get new results.
Modeling Physical Interactions through Dyadic Communication Needs for Recognition and Expression 吉岡源太

Communication begins when a consignor uses a signal for communication needs and a receiver recognizes the signal. Communication is one of the elements of constructing relations with others. An expression by language is effective to begin communication with others. However, this expression may produce social risks. This is because an expression by language is an explicit signal that ignores the communication needs of the receiver. For example, fatigue caused by social networking is one of these social risks. This risk poses an obstacle to the construction of amicable relations. On the other hand, people also communicate through nonverbal expressions. These expressions provide vague information but can reduce the social risk described above. In this study, our goal is to analyze physical interactions based on the individual’s communication needs and to build a corresponding model. This model contributes to building more sustainable relations.
Identification of Fresh Shrimp and Frozen-Thawed Shrimp by

Shrimp is an important breeding and export aquatic product in china. It is of great significance to do the identification of fresh shrimp and frozen-thawed shrimp. Vis/NIR spectral analysis technology combined with chemometrics methods have been applied in this study. Discriminant Analysis (DA), Discriminant partial least-squares (DPLS), Least Squares-Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM), three different pattern discrimination methods combined with different spectral preprocessing methods were used to establish qualitative models for differentiating these two kinds of shrimps. The result shows that spectra collected on the first and the third point after Savizky-Golay 19 point smoothing, DA model can realize correct classification of all samples. DPLS combined with Savizky-Golay 7 point smoothing can realize correct classification of all samples.
Geomorphologic and allometric variations in the populations of adult cocoa moth , Ephestia cautella ( Lepidoptera : Pyralidae ) from Southwestern Nigeria

Damage by the tropical warehouse moth, Ephestia cautella (Walker) to stored plant products especially dried cocoa beans is enormous. This is expressed in holing with frass and webbing of the beans leading to nutritional loss; turning the valuable commodity into powder and reducing the value in the export-import market. Effective management of the pest is contingent upon correct identification and bioecological expressions in relation with the host(s) and other environmental influences. Therefore, the morphological traits (phenotypic) variability between sexes and populations of E. cautella across different locations in Southwestern Nigeria were investigated with a view to identifying the population structure of E. cautella in the region. Thirty-two ecotypes of E. cautella (16 male; 16 female) populations (n = 10/ecotype) were evaluated for eight morphometric traits including forewings (length and width), hind-wings (length and width), body length, antenna length and abdominal dimension (length and width). Significant variations (P ≤ 0.05) occurred among the 32 E. cautella ecotypes for the eight measured traits with respect to sexes, locations and the interactions of the two sources of variation (sex by location). By magnitude, the females had significantly (P ≤ 0.05) higher mean for the fore and hind wings (length and width), body length and abdominal dimension; however, the antenna length was longer in males than in females’ samples. The overall mean Gower genetic distance for the 32 E. cautella ecotypes was 0.656, with the range of 0.273 to 0.968. At 0.1 level of similarity index, four clusters (I, II, III, IV) emerged; with the membership of 7, 8, 12, and 5 respectively. This study showed that four ecotypes of E. cautella exist in south-western Nigeria with sex by location assessment and this can be useful in control programmes of the pest.
A Strenous Macroanalysis on the Substratals of Securing Bluetooth Mobile Workforce Devices

Objectives: Bluetooth is extending to the blooming Internet of Things (IoT). This article provides an extensive literature survey on the security mechanisms; operational range of Bluetooth. Statistical Analysis: The user can achieve 3 Mbps data rate across an operational range of 100 meters. Bluetooth is a pretty impressive technology that connects and controls all the devices over a distance by using an IoT enabled APP due to which is there is a high possibility of Bluetooth charging for its services like the Internet Service Provider (ISP). Bluetooth 4.0 features reliable pairing and encryption whereas the earlier versions had less importance on security. Findings: In spite of the inherent security in Bluetooth, insidious security issues remain around Bluetooth transfer. Most of the problems were identified and rectified but still as the usage and technology improves, undiscovered problems bloom. There is no software in Bluetooth that has zero security vulnerabilities. Security threats can be overcome by generating a random key. This key is generated in random by combining the significant features of the device along with the customized features of the person. Improvements: Security can be upgraded by improving the strength of Authentication; Encryption algorithm; Augmenting Range of Bluetooth by making it IoT Enabled.
STOCHASTIC SEDIMENT DEPOSITION PROCESSES OF LARGE RESERVOIRS IN JAPAN

Sediment deposition and its accumulation as a function of time in years in a large reservoir depend on the flow and sediment hydrographs. In this paper, a stochastic sediment deposition in Japanese reservoirs is discussed. In Japan, sediment deposition in large reservoirs has been measured annually since the 1930. Such long-term annual sedimentation records are unique and represent some of the most useful global data to assess temporal trends in total sediment yields from larger catchments. There are two objectives to use that small probability of the huge extreme event of sediment in: predicting and design the operation and to propose new countermeasure. Among several probability distribution models, GEV (Generalized Extreme Value) model is the best goodness of fit to actual annual sedimentation records and each extreme sedimentation records has been evaluated by return period of 1/50-1/200 yrs.
Rule-Based Standard Arabic Phonetization at Phoneme , Allophone , and Syllable Level

Phonetization is the transcription from written text into sounds. It is used in many natural language processing tasks, such as speech processing, speech synthesis, and computer-aided pronunciation assessment. A common phonetization approach is the use of letter-to-sound rules developed by linguists for the transcription from grapheme to sound. In this paper, we address the problem of rule-based phonetization of standard Arabic. 1 The paper contributions can be summarized as follows: 1) Discussion of the transcription rules of standard Arabic which were used in literature on the phonemic and phonetic level. 2) Improvements of existing rules are suggested and new rules are introduced. Moreover, a comprehensive algorithm covering the phenomenon of pharyngealization in standard Arabic is proposed. Finally, the resulting rules set has been tested on large datasets. 3) We present a reliable automatic phonetic transcription of standard Arabic at five levels: phoneme, allophone, syllable, word, and sentence. An encoding which covers all sounds of standard Arabic is proposed, and several pronunciation dictionaries have been automatically generated. These dictionaries have been manually verified yielding an accuracy higher than 99 % for standard Arabic texts that do not contain dates, numbers, acronyms, abbreviations, and special symbols. The dictionaries are available for research purposes. 1 This paper is an extension of an already published conference contribution [1]. Compared to the conference paper, however, it contains more details and presents new major contributions. Fadi Sindran, Firas Mualla, Tino Haderlein, Khaled Daqrouq & Elmar Nöth International Journal of Computational Linguistics (IJCL), Volume (7) : Issue (2) : 2016 24
Problem Difficulty in Arithmetic Cognition: Humans and Connectionist Models

In mathematical cognition, problem difficulty is a central variable. In the present study, problem difficulty was operationalized through five arithmetic operators --- addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and modulo --- and through the number of carries required to correctly solve a problem. The present study collected data from human participants solving arithmetic problems, and from multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) that learn arithmetic problems. Binary numeral problems were chosen in order to minimize other criteria that may affect problem difficulty, such as problem familiarity and the problem size effect. In both humans and MLPs, problem difficulty was highest for multiplication, followed by modulo and then subtraction. The human study found that problem difficulty was monotonically increasing with respect to the number of carries, across all five operators. Furthermore, a strict increase was also observed for addition in the MLP study.
Percival : Blinded Searching of a Secret Split Archive

Secret splitting across independent sites has been proposed for data storage in archival systems as an approach that removes the issues surrounding key management resulting from fixed key encryption. However, the inherent security of such an archive precludes it from being directly searched; as a result, applications for secret split archives have been limited in the general environment. In this paper, we present a novel method to perform blinded search across a secret-split archive, which we call Percival. We leverage pre-indexing, keyed hashing and Bloom filters to enable blinded searching, blinding the archive from knowing what terms are being queried. The addition of chaff during ingestion and search operations not only keeps an attacker blind to the data in the archive, but also precludes correlating search results that could potentially reveal which shares are needed for reconstruction. While chaff increases the number of false positives at the archive site, the client can quickly filter most of them. This makes reconstruction of results by the client relatively efficient, keeping the bulk of the computational burden on the repositories.
Simulation of Fluid-Structure Interaction between injection medium and balloon catheter using ICFD

Cardiovascular disease is one of the leading causes of death worldwide [1]. It is commonly caused by arteriosclerosis, the accumulation of plaque at the inner wall of the blood vessel. Arteriosclerosis induces stenosis, the hardening and narrowing of the vessels, resulting in a disruption of the blood supply to the heart. The fatal consequence of this may be a stroke. Nowadays, coronary stenosis is mainly treated by the implantation of a stent, a small wire meshed tube. During surgery, a stent crimped onto a balloon catheter is inserted minimally invasive into the stenotic artery using a guide wire. Once the balloon is accurately positioned at the stenosis, a fluid is injected into the balloon to inflate it up to a certain target diameter. The deployment of the balloon leads to the compression of the plaque and the widening of the blood vessel’s lumen as well as to the expansion of the stent. Thereupon, the balloon is deflated and removed from the vessel whereas the expanded stent remains at the vessel wall to keep it open. In this way the blood flow through the vessel is restored.
Invariance and Matching Market Outcomes

The selection of mechanisms to allocate school seats in public school districts can be highly contentious. At the same time the standard statistics of student outcomes calculated from districts’ data are very similar for many mechanisms. This paper explains this puzzle as being driven by the invariance properties of the standard outcome statistics, thus contributing to the debate on mechanism selection. ∗U. Zürich. For their comments, I would like to thank the audiences at U. Melbourne, LSE, Essex, UCLA Summer Workshop, U Zurich, 2016 CIREQ Montreal Microtheory Conference, 2016 NY Abu Dhabi Mechanism Design Conference, MATCH-UP 2017, NYU 2017 Econometrics Meets Theory Conference, Matching-in-Practice 2017, SSE, Bonn, 2017 Barcelona JOCS Talk, UPV/EHU, EUI, Oxford, FU/ESMT/TU/HU Berlin, U Zielona Gora, Chicago Econ and Booth, as well as Estelle Cantillon, Denis Chetverikov, Federico Echenique, Lars Ehlers, Fuhito Kojima, David Levine, Shengwu Li, Jacob Leshno, Jay Liu, Krzysztof Oleszkiewicz, and Utku Unver. For their generous support of this work, I would like to thank the UCLA Department of Economics, the William S. Dietrich II Economic Theory Center, and Department of Economics at Princeton University.
A NOVEL METHOD FOR ISAR IMAGING OF MULTIPLE MANEUVERING TARGETS

For inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) imaging of multiple targets, range profiles of different targets are sometimes coupled together, resulting in the ineffectiveness of traditional imaging method, while the couplings in range domain may behave differently in time-frequency domain, and the Doppler histories of different targets are potentially separable. Then the time-frequency analysis method can be utilized for signal separation of multiple targets. Notice that the nonuniform motions of targets may make the time-frequency curves changeful, and accordingly some preprocessing are needed. In this paper, a novel ISAR imaging method based on modified keystone transform (MKT), shorttime Fourier transform (STFT), and Hough transform (HT) is proposed. The radar echoes of multiple targets are approximated to a second-order polynomial. The MKT is firstly utilized to correct the range curvatures. Secondly, the signal in each range cell is transformed into time-frequency domain through the STFT. Meanwhile, HT theory and mask matrix are adopted in time-frequency curves’ separation of different targets. Thirdly, after inverse STFT, the separated time-frequency curves are respectively back to the range domain, and the range profiles of different targets are successfully separated. Eventually, with further motion compensation and precise imaging, focused ISAR images of different targets are achieved. Simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.