Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using powerful processors in a configurable systolic array architecture

This thesis develops a highly configurable array architecture for powerful processors, and shows that this architecture will be highly effective in supporting fault tolerance. The architecture uses a two-dimensional switch network and implements a mechanism called virtual channels, which is a deadlock-free mechanism for multiplexing physical connections to implement multiple logical connections for inter-processor communication. The architecture provides efficient utilization of redundant processors in an array, and allows various on-line testing schemes to be implemented for concurrent testing of the array during program execution. It also supports a program model which decouples the logical array seen by a program from the physical array it actually runs on. The architecture is evaluated for an array of Warp cells, using real application programs, and through extensive simulation. For small and medium size arrays (up to 16 x 16) with redundant processors, close to best possible survivability can be achieved with relatively little performance degradation. In particular, it is shown that a modest degree of multiplexing in physical connections (4-5) is sufficient to ensure successful mapping of a logical array onto a physical array as long as there are enough functional components. This modest degree of multiplexing leads to little or no performance degradation for most programs. It also implies that a modest switch would be sufficient to construct configurable arrays of various sizes and with various degrees of redundancy. It is shown that all or close to all of the redundant cells can be utilized for different on-line testing schemes while tolerating faulty components in the array. Moreover, it is shown that the impact of on-line testing schemes on the performance of a program would be small (around 5%) for most programs, and an on-line testing scheme like shadowing would provide significant fault coverage (around 98%) for faults which may cause errors in the output of a cell program like FFT. The thesis provides a broad attack on the problem of evaluating a system without building it. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.)
Reader's Response: Describing and Analyzing Quantitative Data

Excerpt: The work of Harris and Martin (2012) on student motivations for choosing to complete online courses provides information on an important area of development within post-secondary education. As noted by the authors, online learning is an expanding field and learning more about why students choose online courses and their experiences in such courses is critical to the development of online courses. The researchers had a sizable dataset (n = 644) and I looked forward to reading the results produced by such a large sample, but as a reader there were times when I was confused by the results. I think it is worth highlighting this confusion so that scholars publishing in IJ-SoTL can reflect on how to present quantitative data in ways that remain clear to all readers.
The PARADE Environment for Visualizing Parallel Program Executions: A Progress Report

This report describes the current status of the PARADE visualization environment. PARADE supports the design and implementation of software visualizations of parallel and distributed programs. It contains primary components for monitoring a program's execution , building the software visualization, and mapping the execution to the visualization. In this report we provide brief descriptions of many of the projects that comprise the PARADE environment, and we provide references to more detailed information on the projects.
41 Perception Tasks: Obstacle Detection

Obstacle detection is a widely studied field in the automotive industry because of the great importance it assumes in all systems that provide autonomous navigation of vehicles in an environment. Many different obstacle detection systems have been developed. The main differences between these systems are the types of algorithms and sensors employed. Many studies have focused on road obstacle detection in order to perform such tasks as pre-crash, collision mitigation, stop and go, obstacle avoidance, and inter-distance management. An important issue in ensuring the reliability of obstacle detection is the choice of sensors: digital cameras, infrared sensors, laser scanners, radar, and sonar are commonly used to provide a complete representation of the vehicle’s surrounding area, allowing interaction with the world. Inertial sensors like odometers, speed sensors, position sensors, accelerometers, and tilt sensors are used to monitor the motion of the vehicle, measuring its speed, orientation, and position. This chapter is structured in three main sections: The first will introduce a classification of all perception sensors that can be used in this field; a brief description of each sensor will be provided in order to underline pros and cons regarding the obstacle detection field. In the second section, the main algorithms of obstacle detection will be shown, classified by the kind of sensor (or sensors) employed. The third section presents obstacle detection systems that use sensory fusion combining artificial vision with distance detection sensors like laser or radar.
PREPARATION AND EVALUATION OF NATURAL HAIR COLORANT

Lots of people occasionally have the urge to change or enhance their hair color, but are unwilling to use the harsh and, in some cases, potentially harmful hair dying chemicals found in most commercial dyes and color rinses. Just as men and women have done for thousands of years, you can change your basic hair color, put new highlights in your locks or naturally darken gray strands using natural hair colors. From ancient days, various plant materials like Henna, Indigo, Chamomile, Shoe flower, Madder, Aloe etc are used to dye grey hair to get natural black color. But instead of getting black color shades of red to copper color are obtained. A need was felt to formulate a dye containing only plant products which is safe for use and does not have the problems of staining skin during use and hypersensitive reactions. In the present investigation the formulations are developed using different combinations of Henna and Aloe along with other herbs.
Coping with delays for real-time gaze control: the fall and rise of the Smith "Predictor"

In this paper we describe how to cope with the delays inherent in a real time control system for a steerable stereo head/eye platform. A purposive and reactive system requires the use of fast vision algorithms to provide the controller with the error signals to drive the platform. The time-critical implementation of these algorithms is necessary, not only to enable short latency reaction to real world events, but also to provide sufficiently high frequency results with small enough delays that controller remain stable. However, even with precise knowledge of that delay, nonlinearities in the plant make modelling of that plant impossible, thus precluding the use of a Smith Regulator. Moreover, the major delay in the system is in the feedback (image capture and vision processing) rather than feed forward (controller) loop. Delays ranging between 40 msecs and 80 msecs are common for the simple 2D processes, but might extend to several hundred milliseconds for more sophisticated 3D processes. The strategy presented gives precise control over the gaze direction of the cameras despite the lack of a priori knowledge of the delays involved. The resulting controller is shown to have a similar structure to the Smith Regulator, but with essential modifications.
Performance Analysis and Optimization of the Hurricane File System on the K42 Operating System

Performance Analysis and Optimization of the Hurricane File System on the K42 Operating System David Tam Master of Applied Science Graduate Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Toronto 2003 The performance scalability of the Hurricane File System (HFS) is studied under the context of the K42 Operating System. Both systems were designed for scalability on large-scale, shared-memory, non-uniform memory access multiprocessors. However, scalability of HFS was never studied extensively. Microbenchmarks for reading, writing, creating, obtaining file attributes, and name lookup were used to measure scalability. As well, a macrobenchmark in the form of a simulated Web server was used. The unoptimized version of HFS scaled poorly. Optimizations to the meta-data cache in the form of (1) finer grain locks, (2) larger hash tables, (3) modified hash functions, (4) padded hash list headers and cache entries, and (5) a modified block cache free list, resulted in significant scalability improvements.
Analysis of shot boundary detection techniques on a large video test suite

This thesis investigates how content-based indexing and retrieval systems can be used to analyse digital video. We focus particularly on the challenge of applying colour-analysis methods to large amounts of heterogeneous television broadcast video. Content-based systems are those which attempt to automatically analyse image or video documents by identifying and indexing certain features present in the documents. These features may include colour and texture, shape, and spatial locations. Digital video has become hugely important through the widespread use of the Internet and the increasing number of digital content providers supplying the commercial and domestic markets. The challenge facing the indexing of digital video information in order to support browsing and retrieval by users, is to design systems that can accurately and automatically process large amounts of heterogeneous video. The basic segmentation of video material into shots and scenes is the basic operation in the analysis of video content. Although many published methods of detecting shot boundaries exist, it is d ifficult to compare and contrast the available techniques. This is due to several reasons. Firstly, full system implementation details are not always published and this can make recreation of the systems difficult. Secondly, most systems are evaluated on small, homogeneous sequences of video. These results give little indication how such systems would perform on a broader range of video content types, or indeed how differing content types can affect system performance. As part of an ongoing video indexing and browsing project, our research has focused on the application of different methods of video segmentation to a large and diverse digital video collection. A particular focus is to examine how different segmentation methods perform on different video content types. With this information, it is hoped to develop a system capable of accurately segmenting a wide range of broadcast video. Oilier areas addressed in this thesis include an investigation of evaluation methods for digital video indexing systems, and the use of adaptive thresholds for segmentation of video into shots and scenes.
Visual semantic segmentation and its applications

OF DISSERTATION VISUAL SEMANTIC SEGMENTATION AND ITS APPLICATIONS This dissertation addresses the difficulties of semantic segmentation when dealing with an extensive collection of images and 3D point clouds. Due to the ubiquity of digital cameras that help capture the world around us, as well as the advanced scanning techniques that are able to record 3D replicas of real cities, the sheer amount of visual data available presents many opportunities for both academic research and industrial applications. But the mere quantity of data also poses a tremendous challenge. In particular, the problem of distilling useful information from such a large repository of visual data has attracted ongoing interests in the fields of computer vision and data mining. Structural Semantics are fundamental to understanding both natural and manmade objects. Buildings, for example, are like languages in that they are made up of repeated structures or patterns that can be captured in images. In order to find these recurring patterns in images, I present an unsupervised frequent visual pattern mining approach that goes beyond co-location to identify spatially coherent visual patterns, regardless of their shape, size, locations and orientation. First, my approach categorizes visual items from scale-invariant image primitives with similar appearance using a suite of polynomial-time algorithms that have been designed to identify consistent structural associations among visual items, representing frequent visual patterns. After detecting repetitive image patterns, I use unsupervised and automatic segmentation of the identified patterns to generate more semantically meaningful representations. The underlying assumption is that pixels capturing the same portion of image patterns are visually consistent, while pixels that come from different backdrops are usually inconsistent. I further extend this approach to perform automatic segmentation of foreground objects from an Internet photo collection of landmark locations. New scanning technologies have successfully advanced the digital acquisition of large-scale urban landscapes. In addressing semantic segmentation and reconstruction of this data using LiDAR point clouds and geo-registered images of large-scale residential areas, I develop a complete system that simultaneously uses classification and segmentation methods to first identify different object categories and then apply category-specific reconstruction techniques to create visually pleasing and complete scene models.
Mobile agent planning problems

Mobile agents have received much attention recently as a way to efficiently access distributed resources in a low bandwidth network. Planning allows mobile agents to make the best use of the available resources. This thesis studies several planning problems that arise in mobile agent information retrieval and data-mining applications. The general description of the planning problems is as follows: We are given sites at which a certain task might be successfully performed. Each site has an independent probability of success associated with it. Visiting a site and trying the task there requires time (or some other cost matrix) regardless of whether the task is completed successfully or not. Latencies between sites, that is, the travel time between those two sites also have to be taken into account. If the task is successfully completed at a site then the remaining sites need not be visited. The planning problems involve finding the best sequence of sites to be visited, which minimizes the expected time to complete the task. We name the problems Traveling Agent Problems due to their analogy with the Traveling Salesman Problem. This Traveling Agent Problem is NP-complete in the general formulation. However, in this thesis a polynomial-time algorithm has been successfully developed to solve the problem by adding a realistic assumption to it. The assumption enforces the fact that the network consists of subnetworks where latencies between machines in the same subnetwork are constant while latencies between machines located in different subnetworks vary. Different versions of the Traveling Agent Problem are considered: (1) single agent problems, (2) multiple agent problems (multiple agents cooperate to complete the same task) and (3) deadline problems (single or multiple agents need to complete a task without violating a deadline constraint at each location in the network). Polynomial and pseudo-polynomial algorithms for these problems have been developed in this thesis. In addition to the theory and algorithm development for the various Traveling Agent Problems, a planning system that uses these algorithms was implemented. Descriptions of the mobile agent planning system with its supporting components such as network sensing system, directory service system, and clustering system, are also given in this thesis.
Galileo - The European satellite navigation system

On 20 December the European Union Transport Council will consider whether to develop a European, civilian satellite navigation system (Galileo). The two main current systems are run by the US and Russia, under military control, raising issues for Europe of sovereignty and security. This briefing describes satellite navigation, examines the case for Galileo and considers topics such as its funding and management.
A survey of e-book awareness and usage amongst students in an academic library

This paper reports on an online survey of e-book awareness and usage level in a British academic library. The main objectives of this survey were to: (a) assess students' awareness of the availability of e-books in their academic library; (b) measure the level of e-book usage among the students; and (c) identify the reasons why students do or don't use e-books. A self-selected sampling method was employed to generate a sample of students consisting of undergraduate and postgraduate instructional students registered with the University of Strathclyde for academic year 2005/6. An announcement email was posted to the student web portal for a period of three weeks inviting them to participate in the survey. A total of 1372 of responses were returned representing just under 10% response rate. In general, this survey found that e-book awareness was low as was the level of e-book usage amongst the students: 57% of students were not aware of the availability of e-books from the library and 60% of them had not used an e-book. Non-users commented that e-books were not widely advertised or promoted which has most probably contributed to this lack of awareness and non usage. Despite the low levels of e-book awareness and usage, non e-book users indicated their desire to learn more about e-books.
Issues of Materialized Views in Datawarehousing for Efficient Management of Information

Multiple Views can be formed and materialized from a data warehouses per the user requirements specified in the queries being generated against the information contained in the warehouse. Selecting Views to be materialized is one of the most important decisions in designing a warehouse. Due to change in user requirements and constraints over time View definitions stored in a data warehouse are dynamic in nature. This paper focus on the issues of materialized views in Data warehousing to enable efficient Information Management. The issues include selection, maintenance and updating of Materialized views and how these issues create an impact in Business scenarios.
The Relationship of Social Media to Computer Graphics

Incorporating the theory, practicality, usability, and potential of social media into a computer graphics line of study may open doors to more opportunities for individuals in the computer graphics field. Social media, also known as social networking, involves blogging, Internet forums, podcasts, instant messaging, and music sharing on web sites such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. These forms of media are consistent with practices in the computer graphics field. The use of social media is said to be a process of trying to make one’s content available to a wider audience, however it is also currently used by corporate public relations departments to gain clientele. An examination of the practices of social media in several different applications should help determine what relationship to computer graphics technology exists. I. Understanding the Social Media Phenomenon Social media is a moderately new form of networking and reaching out to people. It is anything from blogging to posting pictures for friends, family, and even perfect strangers to see. “It is an umbrella term that encompasses the technologies and the activities that people use to share experiences, ideas, and information with each other” (Burchill, 2008). “The term ‘social media’ most often refers to activities that integrate technology, social (or human) interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos, and audio— better known as ‘user generated content’ an example of UGC would be YouTube” (Burchill, 2008). This social spider web of networking referred to as “Social Media”, (SM). Social Media is an Internet tool used for sharing information among many different types of individuals. In the United States alone, leading consumer social networking sites attract more than 110 million unique monthly visitors according to ComScore Inc. (Vascellaro, 2007). It is an integration of person-toperson communication with technology. II. Networking to Develop a “Super-Net” Social media has evolved from a source of casual communication and entertainment to a professional source of networking for business and industry. There are many branches of social media, as well as many concerns with the validity of using such media for marketing and public relations on a professional level. “Social networking sites provide a way to organize an egocentric social network” (Donath, 2008). It’s being questioned whether the sites are a passing fad, or the up and coming future of human relationship. Social ties provide many benefits, including companionship, access to information, and emotional and material support” (Donath, 2008). Without the spider web of networking via the Internet, these ties were limited, but now it is possible to generate a super-net of contacts. Social networking is very important in many different fields; one example is the medical field. Often now in medicine, a diagnosis is not made in the doctor’s lounge, but on sites such as Sermo.com, a
Cross-language study of voicing contrasts of stop consonants in Asian languages

This thesis examines some of the cross-language differences and similarities of voicing contrasts of stop consonants in six Asian languages and explores ways of explaining their phonetic characteristics. The languages investigated are Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Korean, Burmese, Thai, and Hindi, and the examination is mainly based on the acoustic analysis of initial stops in these languages. The thesis consists of ten chapters. Chapter 1 deals with the background for the study, the scope of the study, and general experimental procedure. Some of the articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual characteristics of stop consonants are examined. Chapters 2 to 7 present the results of acoustic analysis in each language. In each chapter, the general properties of stop consonants and linguistic materials analyzed are presented, and acoustic characteristics such as voice onset time (VOT), fundamental frequency (Fo) and the curve, spectral properties, and onset frequency of the first formant (F1) are examined in detail. Chapter 8 examines cross-language characteristics based on the acoustic analysis. It can be said that languages in the present study use several acoustic features for distinguishing voicing categories in different ways, and "same" or similar sounds in these languages show some language-specific properties as well as features which are common to many languages. VOT functions for distinguishing voicing categories of stops if they are based on the timing events of glottal and supralaryngeal movements, and if other laryngeal features are involved, other acoustic dimensions are necessary for making a distinction. Furthermore, cross-language characteristics in acoustic dimensions such as Fo and the curve, spectral properties and the F1 onset frequency are examined. Chapter 9 examines some theoretical issues in cross-language phonetics. A model was proposed in which cross-language differences can be expressed as differences in phonological features. Some generalized phonetic patterns which are shared by these languages are presented, and the underlying articulatory mechanisms and the implications