Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Beyond Transparency: Exploring Algorithmic Accountability

Many of the ubiquitous algorithmic systems permeating society have come under scrutiny due to their lack of accountability. As algorithmic decision making increasingly affects our lives, calls to improve the transparency of these systems are met with social, legal and technical limitations that challenge whether transparency alone is the solution to algorithmic accountability. In my dissertation, I explore the role of algorithmic tranparency, algorithmic literacy and related issues as approaches towards holding algorithmic systems more accountable. Bridging HCI and STS communities, my work is grounded in a critical ethnography of algorithmic systems and their impact on its stakeholders. Through this approach, I aim to provide both theoretical insights and material solutions to the problem of accountability. By unpacking the complex socio-technical assemblage that make up these systems and employing both participatory and user-centred design principles, my goal is to co-design measures that support sense-making of algorithmic processes and allow holding these systems accountable.
Iranian Journal of Fuzzy Systems

This paper presents an adaptive neuro-fuzzy controller ANFIS (Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System) for a bilateral teleoperation system based on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). The proposed controller combines the learning capabilities of neural networks with the inference capabilities of fuzzy logic, to adapt with dynamic variations in master and slave robots and to guarantee good practical robustness against the disturbances, by adjusting neuro-fuzzy network output parameters in a short time, thanks to the computing power of FPGA and its high sampling frequency. The design methodology adopted to design the control algorithm aims to minimize the hardware resources used by the FPGA in order to optimize the execution and the design times, and this by using the Fixed-Point Tool and HDL Coder features of MATLAB-Simulink. The proposed controllers were experimentally validated on a teleoperation system comprising a pair of one degree of freedom. The experimental results clearly show that the proposed ANFIS control algorithm significantly outperformed the conventional control methods (PID).
Random Walk Based Sampling for Load Balancing in Multi-Server Systems

In multi-server systems, a classical job assignment algorithm works as follows: at the arrival of each job, pick d servers independently and uniformly at random and send the job to the least loaded server among the d servers. This model is known as the powerof- d choices algorithm. In this paper, we analyze a variant of this algorithm, where d servers are sampled through d independent non-backtracking random walks on a k-regular graph. The random walkers are periodically reset to independent uniform random positions. Under some assumptions on the underlying graph, we show that the system dynamics under this new algorithm converges to the solution of a deterministic ordinary differential equation (ODE), which is the same ODE as the classical power-of-d choices. We also show that the new algorithm stablizes the system, and the stationary distribution of the system converges to the stationary solution of the ODE. The new scheme can be considered as a derandomized version of power-of-d choices as it reduces the use of randomness while maintaining the performance of power-of-d choices.
Secondary task and situation awareness, a mobile application for semi-autonomous vehicle

Autonomous vehicles are developing rapidly and will lead to a significant change in the driver's role: he/she will have to move from the role of actor to the role of supervisor. Indeed, the driver will soon be able to perform a secondary task but he/she must be able to take over control in the event of a critical situation that is not managed by the autonomous system. This implies that the role of new interfaces and interactions within the vehicle is important to take into account. This article describes the design of an application that provides the driver with information about the environment perceived by his/her vehicle in the form of modules. This application is displayed as split screen on a tablet by which a secondary task can be performed. Initial tests were carried out with this application in a driving simulator. They made it possible to test the acceptance of the application and the clarity of the information transmitted. The results generally showed that the participants correctly identified some of the factors limiting the proper functioning of the autonomous pilot while performing a secondary task on a tablet.
Tactile and kinesthetic feedbacks improve distance perception in virtual reality

Research spanning psychology, neuroscience and HCI found that depth perception distortion is a common problem in virtual reality. This distortion results in depth compression, where users perceive objects closer than their intended distance. Studies suggested that cues, such as audio and haptic, help to solve this issue. We focus on haptic feedback and investigate how force feedback compares to tactile feedback within peripersonal space in reducing depth perception distortion. Our study (N=12) compares the use of haptic force feedback, vibration haptic feedback, a combination of both or no feedback. Our results show that both vibration and force feedback improve depth perception distortion over no feedback (8.3 times better distance estimation than with no haptic feedback vs. 1.4 to 1.5 times better with either vibration or force feedback on their own). Participants also subjectively preferred using force feedback, or a combination of force and vibration feedback, over no feedback.
GOOL: a generic object-oriented language

We present GOOL, a Generic Object-Oriented Language. GOOL shows that with the right abstractions, a language can capture the essence of object-oriented programs. GOOL generates human-readable, documented and idiomatic code in Python, Java, C#, and C++. In it, we can express common programming idioms and patterns.
Robust control of sensorless sliding mode controlled induction motor drive facing a large scale rotor resistance variation

The rotor resistance of induction motors is used to calculate the slip frequency, and this slip is used to calculate the angle between the stator and the rotor. This angle is the most important parameter in the vector control schemes. Thus, the change in temperature and saturation levels cause the variation of the rotor resistance value and hence the deterioration of the whole torque control characteristic. This research presents a simulation of induction motor behavior facing a sudden rotor resistance variation at very low speed basing on sliding mode perturbation rejection controllers, the rotor flux and speed are observed by an extended Kalman filter. Simulation results show that the proposed control provide good performance dynamic characteristics for a large scale rotor resistance variation. All simulations have been realized in MATLAB/Simulink.
Shift to digital gamification in political life (russian cases)

Authors analyzed the methods of gamification in the practices of civic and political participation, and identified research questions about the problems and prospects of this trend of social inclusion. Gamification creates a new experience of political actors, be it a leader, a political consultant or a representative of the masses; a review of the research allows us to clarify the actual "growth points" of social analytics of gamification. Particular attention is paid to cases related to game mechanics of public participation, immersive journalism and the use of digital resources by political technologists in election campaigns. The analysis of the scientific discussion about urban participatory democracy revealed that the success of these practices is influenced not only by the political will of the coordination potential of the local social structure but also by autonomy and financial capabilities of a political organization interested in civil participation and the design of the participation process. The possible examples of immersive journalism and its gamified product, newsgames, in Russian realities are such information resources as "Lentach" and "Meduza". New digital products are actively used by politicians and political technologists at the federal and regional levels. After the elections to the municipal authorities in Moscow, this process is referred to as "uberization of politics" or "politics without barriers" that is based on the principle of "open doors". Authors discussed political Internet technologies as the most popular services in the field of political consulting in modern Russia.
Tangible interactions for temporal navigation in a virtual environment: application to history of science and technology

In this article we introduce our work in progress aiming at providing tools of temporal navigation within a Virtual Environments by applying them to the field of history of science and technology. The objective of our work is to allow a user to navigate through time according to two scales (procedure and period) in order to observe changes in human activities over time.
Don't Drive Me My Way: Subjective Perception of Autonomous Braking Trajectories for Pedestrian Crossings

Autonomous vehicles will encounter all the traffic situations that current drivers are confronted with. These vehicles are expected to handle the situations at least as good as human drivers or even better. This "better" can be split up in various ways and address different facets of traffic: safety, efficiency, and cooperativity to name a few. The driving simulator study at hand investigated the effect of different braking trajectories of a fully autonomous vehicle (SAE Level 5) approaching a zebra crossing. Participants had to rate two aspects: (1) the perceived cooperativity and (2) the perceived criticality of the programmed braking trajectories, in addition to a replay of their own, manual approach, in a dynamic driving simulator. The results show significant differences between the approaches in terms of how critical and cooperative they were perceived. Remarkably, the participants' individual driving style was, on average, not the safest or most cooperative one. Participants favourized an approach with an early brake onset with gradually increasing and subsequent decreasing brake intensity (bell-shaped curve) until full stop in front of the pedestrian crossing.
Structural Analysis to Evaluate the Design of a Synthetic Mitral Valve Prosthesis

Synthetic heart valves restore the functioning of a diseased valve better than mechanical and biological valves. Its biocompatibility and superior flexibility ispreferred for the replacement of diseased mitral valve. Considering the anatomical and hemodynamic limitations of the mitral valve, synthetic valves will be able to perform better than mechanical or biological valves. In this computational study, models of segmented polyurethane valves with varying leaflet configuration were designed.The bileaflet, trileaflet and quadrileaflet modelswere subjected to linear structural analysis to determine its durability and flexibility. The leaflet models were simulated to operate against atransvavular pressure gradient of 30mmHg (systolic pressure) and 120mmHg (diastolic pressure). The output in the form of von Misesstress distribution pattern for each of the leaflet model was obtained. The trileaflet and quadrileaflet configurationshowed better functionality in comparison to bileaflet valve. The outcome of this study is the basis for the development of a low profiled, transcatheter mitral valve replacement device, with superior durability and flexibility.
Design of a Short Range Optical Pulse Transceiver System for Intruder Detection

Recent advancement in wireless technology enables free transmission between devices and automatic operation within the home areas. In this paper, we develop, design and implement an optical pulse transmitter and receiver systems to create the real ubiquitous communication link. To show the reality of the design, the optical pulse transceiver system is configured to allow detection of an intruder within a secured laboratory in Botswana International University of Science and Technology (BIUST) using a wireless link. In implementing the design, two sets of circuits, a transmitter circuit for transmitting information in the form of a signal from the source input and a receiver circuit for receiving the transmitted signal were designed. We achieved this by integrating analog component on two circuit boards. The system was simulated using Multisim, and simulation results were per the design specifications.
Balanced landmark-based graph partitioning with application in navigating with limited resources

We study the problem of graph partitioning balanced on weight vertex where we aim to maximize the average weight of the obtained subgraphs. Our proposed approach is to partition the graph by a graph Voronoi diagram where the Voronoi nodes, considered as landmarks, are carefully selected in some special manner for achieving the mentioned targets. We also introduce a direct application for this problem, namely navigating with limited resources, where one would like to produce an inexpensive navigation device that is although short of battery and of limited memory but still is capable to help showing directions in a long hiking journey in the wilderness. This is achieved by using a specialized map (for navigating) created based on our proposed graph partitioning. We introduce two different heuristic techniques in selecting the landmarks in such a mentioned desired manner. Initial experiments with our proposed algorithms show encouraging results where we can successfully construct a 0.5-balanced partition for all tested graphs.
Misuse of prescription drugs and overdose deaths

Abstract Aims. This study examined overdose deaths involving benzodiazepines and prescription opioids, and studied associated factors. Methods. In a retrospective registry study of drug-overdose deaths (n = 167) with post-mortem toxicological findings of benzodiazepines and/or opioids/carisoprodol (strong analgesics) in Oslo, Norway, from 2006 to 2008, prescribing and dispensing patterns were investigated, and factors associated with benzodiazepines and/or strong analgesics in post-mortem toxicology where these medications were not prescribed were identified. Results. Among deceased with toxicological findings of only benzodiazepines, 28.1% (20.7–36.9) had been dispensed benzodiazepines four weeks prior to death; only strong analgesics, 33.3% (13.0–61.3) had been dispensed strong analgesics; both benzodiazepines and strong analgesics, 58.3% (36.9–77.2) had been dispensed benzodiazepines and/or strong analgesics. Also, 33.0% of the deceased had five or more different prescribing physicians of either benzodiazepines or strong analgesics in the year prior to death. Doses of both dispensed benzodiazepines and strong analgesics were higher than recommended. Younger age and residing outside Oslo were associated with having benzodiazepines and/or strong analgesics in the toxicological findings when these medications had not been dispensed (p = 0.006 and p = 0.039, respectively). Conclusion. The majority of benzodiazepines and strong analgesics detected in overdose deaths were non-prescribed and/or associated with less than optimal prescribing practices by some treating physicians.
XDL: an industrial deep learning framework for high-dimensional sparse data

With the rapid growth of data and computing power, deep learning based approaches have become the main solution for many artificial intelligence problems such as image classification, speech recognition and computer vision. Several excellent deep learning (DL) frameworks including Tensorflow, MxNet and PyTorch have been made open-sourced, further accelerating the advance of the community. However, existing DL frameworks are not designed for applications involving high-dimensional sparse data, which exists widely in many successful online businesses such as search engine, recommender systems and online advertising. In these industrial scenarios, deep models are typically trained on large scale datasets with up to billions of sparse features and hundreds of billions of samples, bringing great challenges to DL framework. In this paper, we introduce a high-performance, large-scale and distributed DL framework named XDL which provides an elegant solution to fill the gap between general design of existing DL frameworks and industrial requirements arising from high-dimensional sparse data. Since 2016, XDL has been successfully deployed in Alibaba, serving many productions such as online advertising and recommender system. Running on hundreds of GPU cards in parallel, XDL can train deep models with tens of billions parameters within only several hours. Besides its excellent performance and flexibility, XDL is also friendly to developers. Algorithm scientists in Alibaba can develop and deploy new deep models with only several lines of simple codes. The XDL API and a reference implementation were released as an open-source package under the Apache 2.0 license in December, 2018 and are available at https://github.com/alibaba/xdeeplearning.
Supporting citizen participation with adaptive public displays: a process model proposal

In recent years, public displays have been studied as a way to foster citizen participation. However, their surroundings and users are prone to high variability, which makes it tedious to accommodate different contexts with an optimal participation experience. In this paper, we propose adaptive public displays as a lead for solution in tackling this issue. From a review of the motivators and barriers affecting citizen's interaction with public displays we defined a process model destined to serve as a guide for designers of such systems.
Oral Disintegrating Tablets: A Future Compaction

Recent advances in novel drug delivery (NDDS) aims to enhance safety and efficacy of drug molecule by formulating a convenient dosage form for ease of administration and to achieve better patient compliance. One such approach is oral disintegrating tablets (ODTs). ODTs are solid unit dosage forms, which disintegrates or dissolves rapidly in the mouth without the general requirement for swallowing, the chewing and water. An oral disintegrating tablet provides an advantage particularly for pediatric and geriatric populations and is who have difficulty in swallowing conventional tablets and capsules. This review depicts the various formulation aspects, technologies developed, ingredients used, evaluation tests and marketed formulations
Holding patterns: detecting handedness with a moving smartphone at pickup

People often switch hands while holding their phones, based on task and context. Ideally, we would be able to detect which hand they are using to hold the device, and use this information to optimize the interaction. We introduce a method to use built-in orientation sensors to detect which hand is holding a smartphone prior to first interaction. Based on logs of people picking up and unlocking a smartphone in a controlled study, we show that a dynamic-time warping approach trained with user-specific examples achieves 83.6% accuracy for determining which hand is holding the phone, prior to touching the screen.
Which tangible control for which visual task?

Many parameters may impact the performance of users while engaged in tangible user interaction. In this paper, we explore the impact of the combination of the tangible control and the visual display on the performance of a 1D target acquisition task. We consider three tangible controls: a slider, a knob and a wheel, and two visual displays for the same 1D target acquisition task: a circular cursor and a linear cursor. We found that matching the visual and motor task has an impact on the performance. This work has implications ranging from current design of Tangible User Interfaces to research on shape-changing Tangible User Interfaces.
Quality of service enhancement in wireless networks based on location approaches

In a smart environment, mobile devices collect all important information and share knowledge between them or with the cloud to manage resources and assets. The overhead generated by the routing protocol affects drastically the exchange of data packets between nodes, especially in dense networks. In a network without infrastructure, as sensor or mobile ad hoc networks, reducing the overhead constitutes the major reason to build a reliable and efficient network. In this paper, we present the Zone-Geographic Forwarding Rules (Z-GFR) that combines two zoning strategies to enhance the performances of mobile communication. We will study and compare the impact of the Z-GFR technique with optimized link state routing (OLSR) protocol using different partitioning methods. We will show by simulations that it scales down the overhead while it ensures a good dissemination of the topology.
YOLOv3-VD: A sparse network for vehicle detection using variational dropout

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are currently state-of-the-art methods in many important AI tasks. However, DNNs usually contain a lot of parameters that make them prone to overfitting and slow in inference. In this paper, we apply variational dropout to sparsify YOLOv3 network for vehicle detection. We then prune redundant layers and compress the network to reduce the memory size and accelerate the inference speed of the model. Experiments show that we can eliminate up to 91% weights in the original YOLOv3 with a negligible decrease of accuracy
Design and Preliminary Evaluation of OpenACC Compiler for FPGA with OpenCL and Stream Processing DSL

FPGA has emerged as one of the attractive computing devices in the post-Moore era because of its power efficiency and reconfigurability, even for future high-performance computing. We have designed an OpenACC compiler for FPGA to generate the kernel code by using stream processing Domain Specific Language (DSL) called SPGen, with OpenCL. Although, recently, the programming for FPGA has been improved dramatically by High-Level Synthesis (HLS) frameworks such as OpenCL and HLS C, yet it is still too difficult for HPC application developers, and the directive-based programming models such as OpenACC should be supported even for FPGA. OpenCL can be used as a portable intermediate code for OpenACC for FPGA. However, the generation of hardware from OpenCL is not easy to understand and therefore requires expert knowledge. SPGen is a DSL framework for generating stream processing HDL modules from the description of a dataflow graph. The advantage of our approach is that the code generation with SPGen enables more comprehensive low-level optimization in the OpenACC compiler. The preliminary evaluation results show that, for some kernels, the proposed method, which translates the OpenACC C code into OpenCL and SPGen codes, can perform optimization in the lower level more explicitly than the OpenCL-only method, which translates the OpenACC C code into the OpenCL code only. We also observed that more resources might be consumed in the proposed method. However, implementations of both methods are preliminary. We believe improving code generation will fix the problems such as high resource consumption.