Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How to evaluate the impacts of the extension of innovative farming systems at the regional scale? Scenario analysis of organic agriculture in the Camargue.

The Camargue, South of France, is an agricultural region highly multifunctional and with strong issues linking the environment and the society. Evaluating scenarios of alternative agricultural systems extension in this region imply to use tools that allow Prospective, Integrated, Multiscale and Participatory Assessment of Agricultural Systems (PIMPAAS). In this paper, we reviewed the use of three approaches (BEM, ABM and LUCC) for PIMPAAS. After a presentation of the three approaches, we analyzed their advantages and drawbacks, and possible complementarities. As it is not possible to implement the three approaches together at one time, our aim was to make a choice for the Camargue. We found LUCC to be the least suitable approach, mainly because it does not allow participatory processes at farm scale. BEM and MAS appeared to be the most suitable tools as they allow quantitative and ex-ante studies and are able to incorporate the three sustainability domains. Their ways of up-scaling are complementary: BEM seems efficient for up-scaling from field to farm and field to region, whereas MAS allow up-scaling without aggregation from farm to region. We believe that the combination of the two approaches will enable highly participatory evaluations of alternative farming systems. Using the results of this analysis, we recommend using a combination of MAS and BEM in a global framework. We are currently implementing a framework in the Camargue to test this combination and to evaluate its suitability for prospective, multiscale, multicriteria and participatory evaluation.
Enabling a virtual agent to join in laughing with a conversational partner using a similarity-driven audiovisual laughter animation

The AVLaughterCycle project aims at developing an audiovisual laughing machine, able to detect and respond to user’s laughs. Laughter is an important cue to reinforce the engagement in human-computer interactions. As a first step toward this goal, we have implemented a system capable of recording the laugh of a user and responding to it with a similar laugh. The output laugh is automatically selected from an audiovisual laughter database by analyzing acoustic similarities with the input laugh. It is displayed by an Embodied Conversational Agent, animated using the audio-synchronized facial movements of the subject who originally uttered the laugh. The application is fully implemented, works in real time and a large audiovisual laughter database has been recorded as part of the project. This paper presents AVLaughterCycle, its underlying components, the freely available laughter database and the application architecture. The paper also includes evaluations of several core components of the application. Objective tests show that the similarity search engine, though simple, significantly outperforms chance for grouping laughs Portions of this work have been presented in “Proceedings of eNTERFACE’09” [36]. J. Urbain ( ) · T. Dutoit · A. Moinet · B. Picart · J. Tilmanne Faculté Polytechnique de Mons, TCTS Lab, Université de Mons, 20, Place du Parc, 7000 Mons, Belgium e-mail: jerome.urbain@umons.ac. be R. Niewiadomski · E. Bevacqua · C. Pelachaud CNRS-LTCI UMR 5141, Institut TELECOM–TELECOM ParisTech, 37/39, rue Dareau, 75014 Paris, France J. Wagner Institut für Informatik, Human-Centered Multimedia, Augsburg University, Universitätsstr. 6a, 86159 Augsburg, Germany by speaker or type. This result can be considered as a first measurement for computing acoustic similarities between laughs. A subjective evaluation has also been conducted to measure the influence of the visual cues on the users’ evaluation of similarity between laughs.
Novel Schemes for Authentication

Authentication is one of the most basic process to provide security to any resource and application from unauthorized access. It covers two security goals confidentiality and integrity. Passwords are used as private identity for an individual. The password also has to be protected from several threats like stealing, shoulder surfing, eavesdropping and guessing. The most common method used for user Authentication is textual password using alphanumeric usernames and alphanumeric passwords. The issues which should be kept in mind while choosing a password is the how strong the password is and how good it is to memorize. Sometimes the stronger passwords are not easier to remember and easier passwords are not so secure. One more criteria for a good password, that should satisfy is, the password should be easy to type, such that any intruder, if any, is there beside you should not be able guess it or any camera behind you can’t capture the actual movements. To overcome the drawbacks of traditional textual schemes the new methods like graphical passwords are used. The easiness in remembering them and a strong resistance towards the brute force and dictionary attacks made them more popular. In this project, we have concentrated to protect our password from the above threats and to develop a system which has a strong resistant to above stated threats. We have implemented a varying password scheme which provides a better resistant to shoulder surfing, eavesdropping and guessing. This is an untraditional approach to use a not very complex and not very strong password in unsafe environments like public places. We have implemented the virtual keyboard and to make it more effective we are using multilingual keys. And also a hybrid system is designed by mixing three schemes: textual passwords, Recognition based passwords and Recall based password. All three are working together to remove the drawbacks of each scheme.
TOWARDS MATURE SOFTWARE PROCESS

Software process maturity is strongly linked to the success or failure of the projects. It is also closely related with the quality of the products and the efforts necessary to develop them. Soft-ware process improvement and certification is very important for Lithuanian IT companies seeking to increase the export of their software products and services. Public procurement of IT products and services desiderates impartial criteria for supplier selection. This paper provides analysis of current situation in Lithuania and the initiatives taken in the software process improvement area. Special attention is paid for the project performed by Vilnius University, Kaunas University of Technology together with leading Lithuanian IT companies Alna and Sintagma seeking to provide methodology and tools supporting assessment, definition and implementation of mature software process.
Turbo Coding, Turbo Equalisation and Space-Time Coding

Against the backdrop of the emerging 3G wireless personal communications standards and broadband access network standard proposals, this volume covers a range of coding and transmission aspects for transmission over fading wireless channels. It presents the most important classic channel coding issues and also the exciting advances of the last decade, such as turbo coding, turbo equalisation and space-time coding. It endeavours to be the first book with explicit emphasis on channel coding for transmission over wireless channels. Divided into 4 parts: Part 1 - explains the necessary background for novices. It aims to be both an easy reading text book and a deep research monograph. Part 2 - provides detailed coverage of turbo conventional and turbo block coding considering the known decoding algorithms and their performance over Gaussian as well as narrowband and wideband fading channels. Part 3 - comprehensively discusses both space-time block and space-time trellis coding for the first time in literature. Part 4 - provides an overview of turbo equalisations, also referred to as turbo demodulation. The book systematically converts the lessons of Shannon's information theory into design principles applicable to practical wireless systems. It provides overall design performance studies, giving cognizance to the contradictory design requirements of bit error rate, implementational complexity, coding and interleaving delay, effective throughput, coding rate and other related systems design aspects in a comprehensive manner.
PERANCANGAN DAN IMPLEMENTASI MAIL SERVER PADA CV. SANJAYA ANUGERAH SEJAHTERA (ISP JOGJARINGAN) BERBASIS OPEN SOURCE

The use of email or electronic mail service is a new alternative media as one of the supporting medium of any communication activity between co-workers in the company or merely exchanging information in their daily lives to make a work activity more quickly and efficiently. The design and implementation of the mail server on the CV. Sanjaya Anugerah Sejahtera (ISP Jogjaringan) based on open source systems to support the company's work and provide a new solution to communicate between kariyawan Jogjaringan to use the services on the system mail server, mail server with the system is expected to memberbaiki system work and be able to compile systematically from each division of the company. Making the system's mail server using Ubuntu 10:04 64 bit server as a server operating system and Zimbra Open Source Edition Colaboration Suite as a Mail Transfer Agent. The use of open source-based system has to meet the needs of companies where the Zimbra mail server with fiture reminder service work, note any work activities, live chat services, social media, and with the ease of data sharing is to meet the needs of the working system Jogjaringan. In making diawalai mail server system with manufacturing systems with ubuntu 10.04 server 64 bit later to give naming server system supporting the necessary elements such as Domain Name System bind9 which serves as a system that provides the addressing on the server system, after the end of the installation process zimbra mail transfer agent, so that the system can mail servers running optimally is better in the server there is only one server sitem only.
A Study of Green Space and its Changes in Hong Kong Using NDVI

The green space of Hong Kong was studied using a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from SPOT images. Spatial patterns of the magnitude and variability of 'greenness' were analyzed based on the mean and entropy of NDVI at the tertiary planning unit (TPU) level. Continuous loss of green space due to urban encroachment and hill fires was identified in many parts of the territory between 1987 and 1995. However, establishment of green belts and improved landscaping, as found in many new development projects, such as the Tsang Kwan O new town, resulted in the continuous gain in green space or percentage of woodland in a few locations.
METHODS FOR KEY PHRASE EXTRACTION FROM DOCUMENTS

The word keyphrase implies two features: phrase- ness and informativeness. It is the process of obtaining the keyphrases which are available in the body of the text docu- ment. Single document keyphrase extraction usually make use of only the information contained in the specified document. It is used to extract most frequent words which are significant with respect to the applications. This technique is most fre- quently used in search engines for advertisement. This paper discusses various algorithms and tools for keyphrase extrac- tion from documents. Application areas are also discussed.
Leveraging symmetric multiprocessors and system area networks in software distributed shared memory

Clusters of workstations have long provided a cost-effective, large-scale parallel computing platform. A Software Distributed Shared Memory (SDSM) system simplifies programming on these platforms by presenting the illusion of shared memory. SDSM performance has historically been limited by the high cost of inter-processor communication overhead. Recent hardware trends, such as commodity symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs) and system area networks, can be used to potentially lower this overhead. The Cashmere SDSM has been designed for clusters of SMPs connected by a low-latency, remote-memory-access system area network. Cashmere introduces several novel techniques to leverage SMP hardware coherence and also to exploit remote-memory-access and other special features found in today's emerging system area networks. The results of our prototype implementation show that the Cashmere design leads to an average improvement of 25% over a comparable protocol version that does not leverage the SMP hardware coherence. The results also isolate the performance impact of various network features, thereby providing network designers with an informative application study. In addition, we have investigated the impact of these new hardware trends on the most fundamental aspect of SDSM design: the coherence granularity. Our findings show that recent hardware trends help reduce the performance gap between fine and coarse granularity SDSM. We also provide additional techniques for further reducing the gap.
Contextual Advertising through Entity Extraction

Contextual Advertising is a type of Web advertising Content match has greater potential for content providers, publishers and advertisers, because users spend most of their time on the Web on content pages. In past researches, Contextual targeting technology works by searching the website and looks up relevant keywords But Nowadays, In contextual advertising, matching is determined automatically by the page content, which complicates the task considerably. We Proposed a System which can target the large group of consumer on internet. In Our system we make contextual targeting more relevant with Extraction of relevant entities from the web page. We extract the entities from web page, which is of interest to the consumer. We target the interest of internet user and put up the ads according to their interest. The system is designed in such a way that it can extract entities (Name, Place, Title, Location, date etc) from web page and ad publisher put up a advertise on that page which include those entities which are extracted from page. This Process will extract different types of entities, which will identify by different patterns prepared by the rules based approach. The described system able to find out the entities in many context using pattern identification. Once pattern will match entities are extracted and used by ad publisher for publishing the ads according to the context of entities. The above described method is more relevant and effective and it will target more consumers and generate revenue by advertising.
CSPC: A Context-Sensitive Personalized Collaborative Location Privacy Preserving Method

This paper proposes a decentralized cloaking region creation approach to protecting location privacy. The cloaking region is formed through collaboration to hide the precise position of the location based service requestor. A mobile user can set personalized anticipated and minimum privacy requirements respectively according to different contexts. The anticipated parameters will be satisfied if the time is allowed. Otherwise, the system will pursue the minimum standards for privacy requirements. This approach can satisfy k -anonymity, l -diversity and cloaking granularity simultaneously for privacy preserving.
A Reliable Routing Approach For In-Network Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are deployed densely in close proximity to the phenomenon to be monitored accurately in different applications. As these networks are highly populated, the data generated will be enormous. Since communication is the most expensive activity in terms of energy, Data aggregation technique should be made use of while transmitting data to the sink to save energy. With data fusion the size and number of packets transmitted can be reduced by aggregating the messages from sources in the intermediate nodes, thus decreasing communication cost, data traffic and energy consumption. For the network using data aggregation, the routing of data to the sink is an important and critical part in the processing, as the loss of aggregated data packets will have immense impact for data inference at the sink. Moreover, the routing technique used should be capable of reliable data transmission in all situations. In this paper, a novel data routing approach for in-network aggregation called DRINA (Data Routing for In-Network Aggregation) is proposed, that has the features such as reduced number of messages for setting up the routing tree, maximized number of overlapping routes, high aggregation rate and reliable data transmission even in the nodes failure situation. DRINA is compared with two other known methods: Information Fusion- based Role Assignment (InFRA) and Shortest Path Tree (SPT) algorithms using Network Simulator and is proved to be outperforming in all the evaluated scenarios. The future work will incorporate method to reduce the network overhead and to improve the aggregation rate.
An experimental approach to find a suitable simulation method in business economics

The main goal of this paper is to compare the results of an agent-based and Monte Carlo simulation experiments in business process negotiation between sellers and customers of a simple trading commodity. The motivation of the presented research is to find suitable method for predicting key performance indicators of a business company. The intention is to develop a software module in the future which might help the management of business companies to support their decisions. Microeconomic demand functions were used as a core element in the negotiation. Specifically, Marshallian demand function and CobbDouglas utility functions is introduced. The paper firstly presents some of the principles of agent-based and Monte Carlo simulation techniques, and demand function theory. Secondly, we present a conceptual model of a business company in terms of a simulation framework. Thirdly, a formalization of demand functions and their implementation in a seller-to-customer negotiation is introduced. Lastly, we discuss some of the simulation results in one year of selling commodities. The results obtained show that agent-based method is more suitable than Monte Carlo in the presented domain, and the demand functions could be used to predict the trading results of a company in some metrics.
High performance semi lagrangian fluid solver

Incompressible fluid simulations are widely used by the industry in a great deal of applications such as wind tunnel tests or flow studies. The main objective of these simulations is to achieve the greatest possible precision in the smaller possible time. This arise a problem since more accurate results means that the granularity of the problem has to decrease and as a consequence the simulation time is increased. In this dissertation we introduce a new implementation of a well-known already existing algorithm, the Back and forth error compensation and correction (BFECC), that in some scenarios is able to increase the accuracy of the results while not sacrificing performance in the process. Thesis Supervisor: Pooyan Dadvand Title: Associate Professor Thesis Supervisor: Marisa Gil Title: Associate Professor
Evaluating the Integration of Online, Interactive Tutorials into a Data Structures and Algorithms Course

OpenDSA is a collection of open source tutorials for teaching data structures and algorithms. It was created with the goals of visualizing complex, abstract topics; increasing the amount of practice material available to students; and providing immediate feedback and incremental assessment. In this thesis, I first describe aspects of the OpenDSA architecture relevant to collecting user interaction data. I then present an analysis of the interaction log data gathered from three classes during Spring 2013. The analysis focuses on determining the time distribution of student activity, determining the time required for assignment completion, and exploring " credit-seeking " behaviors and behavior related to non-required exercises. We identified clusters of students based on when they completed exercises, verified the reliability of estimated time requirements for exercises, provided evidence that a majority of students do not read the text, discovered a measurement that could be used to identify exercises that require additional development, and found evidence that students complete exercises after obtaining credit. Furthermore, we determined that slideshow usage was fairly high (even when credit was not offered), and skipping to the end of slideshows was more common when credit was offered but also occurred when it was not. Acknowledgments While this project would not have been possible without the efforts of many people, there are several individuals who deserve special thanks. First, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Clifford A. Shaffer, both for his guidance and his work managing and creating content for the OpenDSA project, and Drs. Stephen H. Edwards and T. Simin Hall for serving on my thesis committee. University in Finland for creating the JavaScript Algorithm Visualization (JSAV) library upon which many of the OpenDSA exercises are based. I would also like to show my appreciate to the National Science Foundation who partially supported my work through grants DUE-1139861 and IIS-1258571, and Virginia Tech for providing me a Graduate Research Assistantship. Thanks to my friends and family for their support, and special thanks to my girlfriend Caitlyn Kingry, not only for her support but also for her help as a data analysis consultant. Finally, I would like to extend my thanks to Dwight Barnette, Dr. Yang Cao, and Dr. Hicham Elmongui for incorporating OpenDSA into their classes, and to all the students who used OpenDSA.
Design of Quantizers for DPCM Coding of Picture Signals

Visual thresholds play an important role in the process of incorporating properties of the human visual system in encoding picture signals. They tell us how much the picture signal can be perturbed without the perturbations being visible to human observers. We describe psychovisual experiments to determine the amplitude thresholds at a single edge having a given slope and then present methods to incorporate the visual threshold data directly into the design of quantizers for use in Differential Pulse Code Modulation (DPCM) systems. In the first class of methods, quantizer characteristics are obtained such that the quantization error is kept below the visual threshold as determined by the slope at a picture element and either (a) the number of quantizer levels, or (b) the entropy of the quantized output is minimized. In the second class of methods, different measures of the suprathreshold quantization error are minimized for a fixed number of levels, or for a given constraint on the entropy of the quantized signal. We present empirical relationships between the various distortion measures and the subjective quality of the pictures rated on a five point impairment scale. We then discuss the structure of the quantizers obtained by the above mentioned optimization methods, evaluate their performance on real pictures, and compare them with the ones described in the literature.
Quantization noise effects in the complex LMS adaptive algorithm-linearization using dither

The insertion of dither at the input to a quantizer is a well-known technique for extending the dynamic range of that operation. Employment of this technique requires that some method be used to reduce or eliminate the effects of the dither signal on the system. A common method is to shape the spectrum of the dither so that it will be rejected. In this paper, dither is used to "linearize" the rounding quantizer at each accumulator input of the vector complex LMS adaptation algorithm, and the effects of dither and quantization noise on steady-state mean square error are studied. It is shown that if the dither vector is temporally white, then the increase in steady-state mean square error due to dither is larger than that due to quantization noise, regardless of the spatial properties of the dither vector. However, it is also shown that the affects of dither can be made neglegible compared to that of quantization noise by properly shaping the temporal spectrum of the dither vector.