Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Introduction to Mediated Reality

Personal Cybernetics and Humanistic Intelligence are new and rapidly growing fields of research in the area of human-computer interaction. These areas of research involve personal wearable imaging devices with intelligence that arises from the existence of a human user in the feedback loop of a computational process, in which the human user and the computational process are inextricably intertwined. Unlike the typical goal of Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is to emulate human intelligence with computers, Humanistic Intelligence (HI) creates a close synergy in which Intelligent Signal Processing is used to harness the processing power of the human brain. HI gives rise to a symbiosis between human and computer in which each uses the other within a closely coupled signal processing feedback loop. The computer performs basic low-level signal processing functions, using data obtained from a first person perspective (wearable camera, microphones, miniature wearable radar, biosensors, etc.), while the human performs high-level cognitive tasks, providing a computationally “mediated reality. ” Personal Cybernetics and HI form a basis for augmenting, deliberately diminishing, or otherwise mediating the visual perception of reality. Although the visual modality is most often used in mediated reality systems based on current technology, other modalities such as touch, taste, and olfaction may be mediated as well. In the visual domain, a system that can augment, diminish, or otherwise alter the visual perception of reality is called a “Reality Mediator” (RM). By way of explanation, “virtual reality” creates a completely computer-generated environment, “augmented reality” uses an existing, real-life environment, and adds computer-generated information (virtual objects) thereto, “diminished reality” filters the environment (i.e., it alters real objects, replaces them with virtual ones, or renders them imperceptible), and mediated reality combines augmented and dimin
Return Period and Risk of Hydrologic Events. II: Applications

A mathematical formulation to estimate return periods and risks of failure of complex hydrologic events such as those arising from dependent floods and droughts have been examined in the first part of this paper. Specifically, some relationships and algorithms for computing return periods and associated risks for runs arising from independent and dependent events assuming that dependence is represented by a two-state Markov chain have been proposed. The applicability of these procedures is illustrated herein, considering several types of hydrological events with emphasis on those where dependence is important. First, meteorological droughts based on annual precipitation are considered as examples of events consisting of runs in independent trials. Then, minimum streamflows and maximum annual lake outflows are included as examples of dependent events, assuming that dependence is represented by a simple Markov chain. Also, hydrological droughts based on annual streamflow series are considered. In addition, .
Reconnaissance potassium–argon geochronology of the Suregei–Asille district, northern Kenya

Abstract Potassium–argon dating of 44 samples of basalt lavas and pantelleritic ignimbrites provides a provisional chronology for the 1900-metre thick Cenozoic succession of the Suregei–Asille district, northeast of Lake Turkana. Volcanic rocks of the Asille Group range in age from late Oligocene (Chattian) to late Miocene (Tortonian). Data obtained from conventional K–Ar total-rock analysis of basalt samples are appraised statistically to indicate the presence of three periods of enhanced volcanism centred around 27, 17 and 11.5 Ma. Equivalent ages obtained from the pyroclastic pantellerites by conventional K–Ar total-rock analysis and 40Ar/39Ar analysis of sanidine concentrates indicate that basic and acid eruptions were closely spaced in time. Continental tholeiite flood lavas belonging to the Gombe Group are of Pliocene age, but are difficult to date precisely because of their young ages and relatively high atmospheric contamination occurring as a result of the secondary alteration in the ubiquitous glass mesostasis. Those ages involving least atmospheric correction are considered most reliable, and are closely similar for the Chen Alia and Harr formations at around 4.85 Ma, although later flood eruptions may have occurred to the south and west of the Suregei–Asille district at about 3.85 Ma.
Enhanced absorption of UV radiation due to multiple scattering in clouds: Experimental evidence and theoretical explanation

Measurements of spectral ultraviolet-B irradiance under optically thick clouds show strongly enhanced attenuation by molecular and particulate absorbers. The atmospheric photon path is enhanced owing to the presence of a highly scattering medium, leading to an amplification of absorption by tropospheric ozone and aerosol. Calculations with discrete ordinate and Monte Carlo models show that photon paths in realistic water clouds may be enhanced by factors of 10 and more compared to cloudless sky. Model calculations further show that UV spectra measured under thick clouds can be well simulated within 10%, indicating that the involved processes are quantitatively described by current models. These findings are of important consequence for all ground-based remote sensing applications which take advantage of measuring scattered radiation in order to infer atmospheric trace gas abundances. These algorithms, for example, the calculation of total ozone from global irradiance or zenith sky radiance, are subject to large errors, when neglecting the influence of cloud scattering on the derived data. In the present study, errors of more than 300 Dobson Units (DU) have been found, if such methods were applied without care in the presence of thick clouds.
Plio-Quaternary stress regime in Eşen Çay Basin, SW Turkey

Abstract The Plio-Quaternary Eşen Çay Basin is situated at the junction of Hellenic and Cyprus arcs in southwestern Turkey. The basin is important for understanding the tectonic evolution of the region in relation to the Hellenic and Cyprus arcs. Fault data from unconsolidated Pliocene and Quaternary deposits, as well as from pre-Pliocene lithologies, are analysed in order to reconstruct the evolution of the stress field evolution from Pliocene onwards. Inversion of measured fault slip vector data identifies two main stress states: extensional and strike-slip. Both states are characterized by a NE–SW-trending minimum horizontal stress axis (σHmin=σ3). The mean R value is 0.67, indicating a triaxial state of stress. The inversion also indicates the existence of extensional and strike-slip faulting characterized by a NW–SE-trending σ3 axis. This indicates a change in the direction of the minimum horizontal stress axis (σ3) from a NW–SE-trending σ3 that dominated prior to Quaternary to a NE–SW-trending σ3 that dominated during Quaternary up to actual time.
Eastward propagating ∼2‐ to 15‐day equatorial convection and its relation to the tropical intraseasonal oscillation

Anomalies of outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) in 1980–1989 were examined in a narrow latitude band about the equator to elucidate the propagation and interaction of tropical intraseasonal oscillations (TIOs) and synoptic-scale convective activity. Hovmoller diagrams of OLR data reconstructed from two frequency bands (corresponding to periods of ∼30–60 days and ∼2–15 days, respectively) revealed a clear distinction between the phase speed of eastward moving TIOs (3–7 m s−1) and that of eastward synoptic-scale convection (10–13 m s−1). Coherent propagation of TIOs from the Indian to the western Pacific Oceans was often observed with temporary diminution of amplitude over the maritime continent. Propagation of high-frequency anomalies was generally confined to an individual basin. Dominance of eastward propagating synoptic-scale convection in the equatorial zone contrasts sharply with the westward propagation of off-equatorial convergence zones. Interaction between the TIO and high-frequency activity resolved by daily OLR was visible as a modest enhancement of eastward synoptic-scale events (and of high-frequency activity in general) during the convectively active phase of the TIO.
Optimizing Interactive Systems with Data-Driven Objectives

Effective optimization is essential for interactive systems to provide a satisfactory user experience. However, it is often challenging to find an objective to optimize for. Generally, such objectives are manually crafted and rarely capture complex user needs in an accurate manner. We propose to infer the objective directly from observed user interactions. These inferences can be made regardless of prior knowledge and across different types of user behavior. It is promising if we model the objectives directly from the user interactions which we use to optimize interactive systems, which will improve user experience and dynamically reacts to user actions.
Production and accumulation of calcium carbonate in the ocean: Budget of a nonsteady state

Present-day production of CaCO3 in tne world ocean is calculated to be about 5 billion tons (bt) per year, of which about 3 bt accumulate in sediments; the other 40% is dissolved. Nearly half of the carbonate sediment accumulates on reefs, banks, and tropical shelves, and consists largely of metastable aragonite and magnesian calcite. Deep-sea carbonates, predominantly calcitic coccoliths and planktonic foraminifera, have orders of magnitude lower productivity and accumulation rates than shallow-water carbonates, but they cover orders of magnitude larger basin area. Twice as much calcium is removed from the oceans by present-day carbonate accumulation as is estimated to be brought in by rivers and hydrothermal activity (1.6 bt), suggesting that outputs have been overestimated or inputs underestimated, that one or more other inputs have not been identified, and/or that the oceans are not presently in steady state. One “missing” calcium source might be groundwater, although its present-day input is probably much smaller than that of rivers. If, as seems likely, CaCO3 accumulation presently exceeds terrestial and hydrothermal input, this imbalance presumably is offset by decreased accumulation and increased input during lowered sea level: shallow-water accumulation decreases by an order of magnitude with a 100 m drop in sea level, while groundwater influx increases because of heightened piezometric head and the diagenesis of metastable aragonite and magnesian calcite from subaerially exposed shallow-water carbonates.
An Analysis of the Implicit Assumptions of the Methodology of Seismic Sequence Stratigraphy: Chapter 21: Sea-Level and Seismic Stratigraphic Studies

Much of the theory and practice of seismic sequence stratigraphy has never been explicitly described. This report is an analysis of the implicit assumptions behind the methodology of seismic sequence stratigraphy. These assumptions are divided into four groups: (1) seismic stratal geometry identification, (2) the depositional sequence model, (3) the inverse model used to make sequence interpretations of seismic data, and (4) the global correlation model used in construction of the Exxon cycle chart. In a geologic area using a particular set of seismic data, some of these assumptions will be valid and others will be questionable. Focused research on the critical assumptions of the sequence stratigraphic hypothesis should generate an advanced methodology that provides incre sed-confidence seismic interpretations.
Determining water content and saturation from dielectric measurements in layered materials

Measurements of the dielectric constant in regions of the subsurface are commonly made to determine water content and in turn to determine water saturation. The accuracy with which water content or saturation information can be obtained from dielectric data is very dependent upon the model used to relate dielectric constant to water content or saturation. Most models assume that the material can be described as a homogeneous mixture of solids and fluids. While this may be valid in the interpretation of laboratory data, we suggest that in the interpretation of field data, improved accuracy in water content and saturation estimates can be obtained by accounting for the presence of layering. We present three relationships for determining water content or saturation from dielectric constant for layered materials. These three layered averages take into account both the layer thickness and measurement direction. We numerically model the relationship between the dielectric constant and both the fine fraction and water content or saturation in sand‐fine systems. We calculate dielectric constant as a function of water content or saturation using these three relationships for layered systems and compare the results to those calculated using two relationships for homogeneous systems. There are considerable differences between the dielectric constants predicted from the relationships for layered and homogeneous media. There are also differences between the individual relationships for the layered media due to the geometries of the systems. The numerical results illustrate the inaccuracy that can result in water content and especially saturation estimates if an inappropriate relationship is used to interpret dielectric data from a layered system.
The Caledonides of northern Norway: relation between preferred orientation of quartz lattice, strain and translation of the nappes

Summary In the area of Birtavarre (eastern Troms) evidence of nappe tectonics exist at all scales. The preferred orientation of the c-axis of quartz shows a monoclinic symmetry and consists of a girdle containing Y and oblique to Z. The obliquity of the girdle-angle ϑ between the c-axis girdle and the YZ plane-is interpreted in terms of simple shear, and the strain is calculated from these data. The results from this study are: (1) almost all the quartz-bearing samples give a consistent sense of simple shear (movement towards the SE) except for some gneisses supposed to be allochthonous Precambrian. (2) the calculated strain is too low to explain the displacement of the nappes (more than 40 km for a 2 km thick unit): X/Z ratio is less than 10 on the average. Possible reasons for this are discussed.
Approximate Query Service on Autonomous IoT Cameras.

Today's analytics-powered cameras are still limited to urban, residential areas where power/network resources abound. To expand them to more diverse environments, especially those are off-grid and highly network-constrained, the cameras shall be ``autonomous'', i.e., independent from external power supply and compute infrastructure. Can autonomous cameras do any useful analytics? Our response is iCam, a runtime for autonomous cameras, that is capable of producing useful analytics results with frugal camera resources. iCam is built atop two novel techniques: (1) For the first time, iCam explores the joint tradeoff from both sampling strategy and wide selection of NN choices, and unifies the errors from both sources into one single bounded error. (2) Observing the disparate video characteristics across different time windows, iCam employs a learning-based planner that judiciously decides the sampling action at runtime. We test iCam with more than 1,000 hours of videos. On typical embedded hardware, iCam continuously generates object counts that are only within 11% of the true counts. Alongside the counts, iCam presents narrow error estimation which are shown to be bounded. It achieves up to 3.4x smaller bounded error over baselines.
Integrating Inland and Coastal Water Quality Data for Actionable Knowledge

Water quality measures for inland and coastal waters are available as discrete samples from professional and volunteer water quality monitoring programs and higher-frequency, near-continuous data from automated in situ sensors. Water quality parameters also are estimated from model outputs and remote sensing. The integration of these data, via data assimilation, can result in a more holistic characterization of these highly dynamic ecosystems, and consequently improve water resource management. It is becoming common to see combinations of these data applied to answer relevant scientific questions. Yet, methods for scaling water quality data across regions and beyond, to provide actionable knowledge for stakeholders, have emerged only recently, particularly with the availability of satellite data now providing global coverage at high spatial resolution. In this paper, data sources and existing data integration frameworks are reviewed to give an overview of the present status and identify the gaps in existing frameworks. We propose an integration framework to provide information to user communities through the the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) AquaWatch Initiative. This aims to develop and build the global capacity and utility of water quality data, products, and information to support equitable and inclusive access for water resource management, policy and decision making.
Robust Optimization-Based Energy Storage Operation for System Congestion Management

Power system operation faces an increasing level of uncertainties from renewable generation and demand, which may cause large-scale congestion under an ineffective operation. This article applies energy storage (ES) to reduce system peak and the congestion by the robust optimization, considering the uncertainties from the ES state-of-charge (SoC), flexible load, and renewable energy. First, a deterministic operation model for the ES, as a benchmark, is designed to reduce the variance of the branch power flow based on the least-squares concept. Then, a robust model is built to optimize the ES operation with the uncertainties in the severest case from the load, renewable energy, and ES SoC that are converted into branch flow budgeted uncertainty sets by the cumulant and Gram–Charlier expansion methods. The ES SoC uncertainty is modeled as an interval uncertainty set in the robust model, solved by the duality theory. These models are demonstrated on a grid supply point to illustrate the effectiveness of a congestion management technique. Results illustrate that the proposed ES operation significantly improves system performance in reducing the system congestion. This robust optimization-based ES operation can further increase system flexibility to facilitate more renewable energy and flexible demand without triggering the large-scale network investment.
Depositional Environments of Lower Cretaceous McMurray Formation, Athabasca Oil Sands, Alberta

Most of the bitumen resources in the Athabasca oil sands deposit are contained in upward-fining channel sands of the Lower Cretaceous McMurray Formation. The channels were part of a northward-flowing fluvial drainage system that was being encroached upon by the rising Clearwater Sea. The lower member of the formation, present only in the deepest valleys on the underlying Devonian limestone surface, is dominantly fluvial in character. Rising sea level during middle member deposition resulted in a decreased gradient and a change from the shallow (5-10 m or 15-30 ft), commonly coarse-grained channels of the lower member to the deep (20-30 m or 65-100 ft), narrow, sinuous, high suspended-load channels of the middle member. Although there is evidence for some marine influence in the middle member channels, the processes of channel formation appear to be dominantly fluvial. In off-channel areas of the middle member, rising sea level resulted in the development of widespread subaqueous conditions and rapid vertical aggradation. Thick sequences of mud accumulated in lacustrine and brackish-bay environments that existed contemporaneously with the channels. Coal beds and rooted zones, common in the lower and upper members, are notably absent from the middle member. The upper member of the McMurray Formation was deposited during a time of slower aggradation and increased marine influence. It is characterized by smaller scale sedimentation units, commonly small upward-coarsening sequences interpreted as splay deposits of nearby large channels. In northern and western parts of the study area, open-marine conditions existed in upper member time, and upward-coarsening, offshore marine bar sands developed at the top of the formation.
Semantically-smart disk systems

Robust and efficient storage of data is a prerequisite of current and future computer systems. To keep pace with rapid changes in technology and increasing demands from applications and users alike, storage systems must evolve in new and interesting ways. Unfortunately, storage systems today have a problem: the range of functionality they can provide is fundamentally limited, despite the presence of significant processing power within them. The main reason for this limitation is that storage systems communicate with the outside world through a narrow block-based interface today, and therefore lack higher-level “semantic” understanding about how they are being used. This thesis proposes a solution to this fundamental problem. It presents a new class of storage systems called “semantically-smart disk systems” (SDS's); such disk systems are capable of providing entirely new classes of functionality by exploiting information about the system above. An SDS does so by carefully monitoring the low-level stream of block reads and writes, and inferring higher-level behaviors of the system above. Importantly, an SDS does so without any changes to the existing block-level storage interface, taking a pragmatic approach that enables ready deployment in existing computing environments. In this thesis, we present a variety of techniques used by an SDS to track semantic information underneath modern file systems, demonstrating how to transform an I/O request stream into a source of useful high-level information for the underlying disk system. We also demonstrate the utility of semantic information within the disk system by presenting new improvements to the availability, security, and performance of storage. For example, we have built a storage system that exhibits much better availability under multiple failures by keeping semantically-meaningful data available. In another case study, we show that semantic knowledge within the storage system can enable reliable secure deletion of data. Such innovations are impossible to implement in the current storage infrastructure, but become possible with the acquisition and careful use of semantic information. Finally, we present a new logic framework for reasoning about file systems and their interaction with storage systems, and use this logic to prove properties about inference within a semantically-smart disk system.
Asynchronous Distributed Bayesian Optimization at HPC Scale

—Bayesian optimization (BO) is a widely used approach for computationally expensive black-box optimization such as simulator calibration and hyperparameter optimization of deep learning methods. In BO, a dynamically updated computationally cheap surrogate model is employed to learn the input-output relationship of the black-box function; this surrogate model is used to explore and exploit the promising regions of the input space. Multipoint BO methods adopt a single manager/multiple workers strategy to achieve high-quality solutions in shorter time. However, the computational overhead in multipoint generation schemes is a major bottleneck in designing BO methods that can scale to thousands of workers. We present an asynchronous-distributed BO (ADBO) method wherein each worker runs a search and asynchronously communicates the input-output values of black-box evaluations from all other workers without the manager. We scale our method up to 4,096 workers and demonstrate improvement in the quality of the solution and faster convergence. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for tuning the hyperparameters of neural networks from the Exascale computing project CANDLE benchmarks.