Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Minimum Crossing Problems on Graphs

This thesis will address several problems in discrete optim ization. These problems are considered hard to solve. However, good approximation algorithms for these problems may be helpful in approximating problems in computational biology and computer science. Given an undirected graph G = (V,E) and a family of subsets of vertices S , the minimum crossing spanning tree is a spanning tree where the maximum number of e dges crossing any single set in S is minimized, where an edge crosses a set if it has exactly one endpoi nt in the set. The physical mapping problem in computational biology and the interval routing problem i n computer science can both be reduced to finding minimum crossing spanning trees. This thesis will prese nt two algorithms for special cases of minimum crossing spanning trees. The first algorithm is for the case where the sets of S are pairwise disjoint. It gives a spanning tree with the maximum crossing of a set being 2 ·OPT+2, whereOPT is the maximum crossing for a minimum crossing spanning tree. This algorithm is an extension of an approximation algorithm for the minimum degree spanning tree due to Fürer and Raghavachari (Journal of Alg rithms, 1994). The second algorithm is for the case where the sets of S form a laminar family. LetbS∈ Z+ be a bound for eachS∈S . If there exists a spanning tree where each set S∈S is crossed at most bS times, the algorithm finds a spanning tree where each set S is crossedO(bS · logn) times. From this algorithm, one can get a spanning tree with maximum crossing O(OPT· logn). This algorithm combines ideas from an approximation algorithm for multicommodity flows on trees due to Garg, Vazi r n , and Yannakakis (Algorithmica, 1997) and from an approximation algorithm for minimum degree mini um spanning trees due to Ravi, Marathe, Ravi, Rosenkrantz, and Hunt (Proceedings, ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 1993). The best known approximation algorithm for minimum crossin g spanning trees is due to Bilò, Goyal, Ravi, and Singh (Proceedings, International Workshop on Ap proximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, 2004). Their algorithm gives a spanni ng tree with maximum crossing O(OPT · logn+ log|S |). The first algorithm of this thesis has a better approximatio n when the sets of S are pairwise disjoint. The second algorithm of this thesis has an equivalent approximation (within a constant factor) when the sets ofS form a laminar family. However, their algorithm is probabil istic while the second algorithm of this thesis is deterministic. Given an undirected graph G = (V,E), and a family of subsets of vertices S , the minimum crossing perfect matching is a perfect matching where the maximum number of dges crossing any set in S is minimized. A proof will be presented showing that finding a minimum cross ing perfect matching is NP-hard, even for the special case where the graph is bipartite and the sets of S are pairwise disjoint.
Comparisons and asymptotics in the theory of portfolio optimization under fixed and proportional transaction costs

In this thesis we consider two portfolio optimization models under fixed and proportional transaction costs and investigate their asymptotic behavior. In the Black-Scholes framework of one bond and d ≥ 1 stocks the problem treated is to maximize the expected asymptotic growth rate with logarithmic utility of wealth, when transaction costs, consisting of a fixed part (proportional to the current portfolio value) and a proportional part (proportional to the trading volume) have to be paid. The first model, where the transaction costs are paid from the bond, was introduced and treated by Irle and Sass 2005 and 2006. An optimal strategy for the one-dimensional case was found in the class of constant boundary strategies given by four boundary constants a < α ≤ β < b ∈ ]0,1[, where ]a,b[ is the continuation region for the risky fraction process and α, β denote the states it is traded back to at each transaction. For the second model, where the fixed part of the costs is paid proportionally from each asset, the existence of a general optimal strategy was shown by Tamura 2006 and 2008 via a weak solution to a quasi-variational inequality. By establishing a maximum principle for this solution and additional information on the corresponding continuation region in the general case d ≥ 1, we first obtain the existence of an optimal constant boundary strategy for the second model in the one-dimensional case. The difference of the two models in terms of optimal boundaries and optimal asymptotic growth rates is then analyzed numerically. In the second part we investigate in the one-dimensional case the asymptotic behavior of these two models when the proportional part of the transaction costs tends to zero. The convergence to the model with only fixed costs, introduced by Morton and Pliska 1995, is established with regard to the optimal boundaries and asymptotic growth rates. Moreover the uniqueness of the optimal boundaries for the limit model is obtained. Finally, the convergence of the models, when the fixed costs tend to zero, is treated. A suitable model with purely proportional costs similar to that of Taksar, Klaas, and Assaf 1988 is introduced and an optimal strategy is shown to consist of keeping the risky fraction process in a unique interval [A, B] ⊆ ]0, 1[ with minimal effort. Furthermore, it is proved to be the limit model in terms of optimal boundaries, asymptotic growth rates and optimal risky fraction processes.
Active Power Decoupling by Closed-Loop Control of Power Oscillations for a Bidirectional Single-Phase DC–AC Converter

A control strategy for the active power decoupling in a single-phase full-bridge-based bidirectional dc–ac converter is proposed in this work. An ac-side auxiliary-circuit three-leg topology is used for the implementation. The proposal makes use of the instantaneous power theory for three-phase systems, applied to single-phase systems. A closed-loop control in the power domain is implemented, by matching the instantaneous power oscillations in the main circuit of the converter connected to the grid, with the instantaneous power oscillations in the auxiliary circuit. The control loop does not employ the measurement of the voltage or current on the dc-bus, nor the voltage on the auxiliary-circuit capacitor. Not requiring a calculation for the voltage reference on the auxiliary-circuit capacitor depending on the circuit parameters allows to eliminate the second harmonic power oscillations on the dc-bus even in the presence of parameteric uncertainty. Experimental and simulation results are presented to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the proposal.
"If I could do this, I feel anyone could: " The Design and Evaluation of a Secondary Authentication Factor Manager

Two-factor authentication (2FA) defends against account compromise by protecting an account with both a password—the primary authentication factor—and a device or resource that is hard to steal—the secondary authentication factor (SAF). However, prior research shows that users need help registering their SAFs with websites and successfully enabling 2FA. To address these issues, we propose the concept of a SAF manager that helps users manage SAFs through their entire life cycle: setup, authentication, removal, replacement, and auditing. We design and implement two proof-of-concept prototypes. In a between-subjects user study (N=60), we demonstrate that our design improves users’ ability to correctly and quickly setup and remove a SAF on their accounts. Qualitative results show that users responded very positively to the SAF manager and were enthusiastic about its ability to help them rapidly replace a SAF. Furthermore, our SAF manager prevented fatal errors that users experienced when not using the manager.
The most successful interviewers in income questions: A SHARE study

: Abstract : Item nonresponse is a signiﬁcant concern since the power of survey data can be overridden if the information requested in a questionnaire is not provided. Interviewers are pinpointed as important in inﬂuencing the item nonresponse rates of studies. However, the literature is highly inconsistent regarding the interviewer characteristics responsible for this inﬂuence, and there is limited research focusing on the importance of interviewers’ attitudes and behaviours. This study, therefore, aims to understand which characteristics of the interviewers working for the Survey of Health Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) (wave 6) are associated with income nonresponse. Multilevel logistic regression models were used to assess the association between income nonresponse and the interviewers’ sociodemographic characteristics, experience, attitudes, expectations and behaviour when asked about their income. Results show that income nonresponse is negatively associated with interviewer characteristics such as age, positive expectations and being less willing to report their income. These ﬁndings have implications for the recruitment, selection and training of interviewers.
Beyond the Standard Model: Neutrino Oscillations and the Search for New Physics

The interpretation that the positive and negative solutions of the Dirac equation are particles and antiparticles is a common and widespread one. In this paper, we would aim to extend the 0-Sphere Electron Model to explore the internal structure of neutrino oscillations. From another point of view, the positive and negative solutions could correspond to a process in which two particles emit and absorb energy. This paper proposes a new model for the internal structure of neutrinos. The model has been created in which the Lissajous curve arises from two energy oscillators obtained from the positive and negative solutions of the Dirac equation. This model, the 0-Sphere Neutrino Model, assumes the existence of oscillators with thermal energy that are converted into kinetic energy, and includes two oscillators with different vibrational frequencies that are described by Lissajous curves.
Model-Free Multi-Camera Calibration By Graph Pyramid Using 360° Pattern

Camera calibration should be easy to perform on the one hand and provide robust results on the other hand. These requirements motivate the proposed, "unusual" approach for multi-camera calibration. For camera calibration, common methods assume a geometrical model to correct distortion. Here, however, the proposed method introduses an approach that does not make any assumptions about the projection model of the lens and its parameters and thus allows nearly arbitrary distortions. This calibration procedure employs a special
Smart Parking Assistant: Integrating Ultrasonic Sensors and IoT for Enhanced Driver Experience

Parking Assistant is a solution that assists drivers to park their vehicles safely, using a variety of sensors that are installed strategically, such that the entire parking process is safe and easy. Sometimes drivers tend to hit the wall with their vehicles, because they cannot see what is in their blind spots or underestimate how far the wall is from their back. The garage might also be sometimes be too dark to safely park the vehicle. Therefore, building a system that can assist drivers by constantly notifying the distance between the back of the car and the wall, and can control the lighting can help reduce this risk, and assist them to park their vehicles safely. An ultrasonic sensor, such as the HC0SR04 can detect the distance from the sensor to a distant object, can be used for this purpose. A safe limit can be supplied to the program, and if the vehicle is found to be closer than the safe limit, then the driver is notified about the risk through the buzzer. Also, using relays, an automated garage automation system can be created, such that electricals in the garage can be controlled through a simple mobile application.
Towards Extracting and Utilising Entities in Task Specific Low Resource Settings

The task of entity extraction has been thoroughly explored in the NLP community over the last two decades. There is a myriad of downstream tasks for Natural Language Understanding that utilizes entity extraction ranging from Information Retrieval, Question Answering, Fact Extraction and Verification, Knowledge Graph Completion, etc. However, the datasets and domains that have been used for evaluation and benchmarking such entity extraction models have mostly been straightforward, structurally simple, semantically non-complex, and well-present across the breadth of training data. Most entity extraction tasks comprise of a significant overlap in entities across train and test sets. This does not mimic the real-world scenario, where rare emergent entities show a larger presence, and the entities themselves are often complex and semantically ambiguous. Our work investigates entity extraction in 2 settings in the domain of scientific research papers, and in the area of linguistically low-resource structurally complex settings. In the first scenario, we establish an end-to-end pipeline that extracts certain task-specific entities from research documents, that help in a meaningful mapping of the research landscape. We show that the domain of scientific documents is non-trivial for entity extraction tasks because scientific entities follow a long-tail distribution. We incorporate multiple strategies like Distant Supervision, Graph Ranking, and Sequence Labelling to solve this task. Furthermore, we introduce multiple human-annotated gold standard datasets for both modular and complete evaluation of this entire pipeline. In the second setting, we investigate the task of low-resource semantically ambiguous complex entities. We experiment with multiple transformer-based architectures and pre-training strategies to solve this task. Our work significantly outperforms the baseline and outperforms multiple ensemble and gazetteer-based systems. We hope that our work will help undertake further research in this critical area of Natural Language Processing.
Urban Heat Island Mitigation for CBD Areas With City Form and Ciy Function Approaches

Urban Heat Island is part of an increase in air temperature, but UHI can also be said to be part of the relative heat of the surface or material above it. UHI has an impact on human health and comfort, air pollution, energy balance, and urban planning. However, over time, UHI can be predicted as a UHI mitigation effort in urban areas by using Landsat 8 imagery. The type of this study is qualitative descriptive research with multiple linear regression analysis. Based on the results of Landsat 8 image processing, the temperature distribution in the CBD area ranges from 22.6 – 33.6 oC. While the results of multiple linear regression analysis obtained four variables that have a strong influence on the increase in UHI on the surface in the CBD area, namely Transportation Emissions (X5) with mitigation efforts in the form of encouraging bike and ride activities, encouraging car-free days activities, and building fast public mass transportation. The Residential Land Area (X6) with mitigation efforts is in the forms of implementing the Green and Clean concept, Urban Farming based on organic plants, and High and Rise Building at IMB. The Office Area (X2) with mitigation efforts is a form of implementing the concept of Urban Farming based on organic plants, High and Rise buildings, and the development of vertical land use. The length of the road that uses asphalt (X10) with mitigation efforts is the form of adding pedestrian lanes.
ON SHARP RATES AND ANALYTIC COMPACTIFICATIONS OF ASYMPTOTICALLY CONICAL KÄHLER METRICS

LetX be a complex manifold, and let S ,! X be an embedding of a complex submanifold. Assuming that the embedding is . k 1/-linearizable or . k 1/-comfortably embedded, we construct via the deformation to the normal cone a diffeomorphism F from a small neighborhood of the zero section in the normal bundle NS to a small neighborhood of S in X such that F is in a precise sense holomorphic up to the . k 1/th order. Using this F , we obtain optimal estimates on asymptotic rates for asymptotically conical (AC) Calabi–Yau (CY) metrics constructed by Tian and Yau. Furthermore, when S is an ample divisor satisfying an appropriate cohomological condition, we relate the order of comfortable embedding to the weight of the deformation of the normal isolated cone singularity arising from the deformation to the normal cone. We also give an example showing that the condition of comfortable embedding depends on the splitting liftings. We then prove an analytic compactification result for the deformation of the complex structure on an affine cone that decays to any positive order at infinity. This can be seen as an analytic counterpart of Pinkham’s result on deformations of cone singularities with negative weights.
Investigating the Role of Humidity on Indoor Wellness in Vernacular and Conventional Building Typologies

Moisture in air is essential for human life. It drives all physiological processes and determines occupant wellness. As a crucial parameter of Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ), it is regulated by building typology and its constituent materials. Besides affecting heating and cooling energy requirements, indoor moisture also determines occupants' comfort and health. Occupant comfort, commonly referred to as thermal comfort, is paramount for building and indoor environment design. Currently available building simulation tools majorly incorporate temperature-related comfort models like PMV, PPD, and adaptive thermal models. In conjunction with temperature, indoor moisture levels impact occupants' skin-related and respiratory comfort, resulting in health issues such as skin irritation, allergies, respiratory infections, asthma, etc. Humidity has not been adequately dealt with in comfort studies. This study proposes a novel computational approach derived from an existing model to explain and assess humidity-related comfort in buildings. The study also involves real-time monitoring of in-door-outdoor temperature and humidity and occupant comfort-votes. The hygroscopic properties of building materials impact the regulation of indoor moisture, thereby impacting occupant comfort and health. This article examines humidity-related comfort aspects between conventional and vernacular building typologies. Results from the simulation have been used to explain the comfort votes obtained from an on-field survey of occupants. Skin temperature and wettedness derived through energy balance between the human skin and the indoor air parameters can be used as an indicator to assess skin-related comfort in indoor environments.
Assessing the Performance of a Simplification Algorithm for Urban Building Energy Modeling in Multi-Objective Optimization

Urban Building Energy Modeling and Multi-Objective Optimization are two very computationally intensive applications of Building Performance Simulation. In this research, a simplification algorithm developed to speed up thermal simulations at urban scale was tested to assess its performance in optimization studies. Since the algorithm showed good accuracy at the individual building level, it was applied to standalone buildings, considering a set of energy efficiency measures and all the possible combinations of four objectives, i.e., heating and cooling needs, thermal comfort and costs. The algorithm showed adequate performance in finding the optima with the same inputs for most of the considered buildings and combinations of objectives in different climatic conditions, allow-ing the simulation time to be reduced to one third.
External Validation of Simple Role Risk (SRRisk) of Malignancy in Adnexal Masses Based on IOTA Simple Rules

Background: One technique in order to categorize adnexal cancers as benign or malignant is International Analysis of Ovarian Tumors (IOTA) basic guidelines. It has been suggested that there is a new malignancy risk based on these guidelines, therefore we thought it was important to assess how well it predicts malignancy. Aim: To assess the new risk of cancer using the straightforward IOTA criteria. Patients and methods: Patients of this observational cohort study had at least one adnexal mass (ovarian, paraovarian, or tubal). They were chosen by the surgery physician in the Ultrasound and Fetal Medicine Unit of Obstetrics and Gynecology Department, Faculty of Medicine, Zagazig University. Women with big masses that could not be completely seen by the transvaginal technique underwent transabdominal sonography. Serum CA-125 levels were measured. IOTA's Simple Rules were used. Results: Nine of the 23 benign instances identified by IOTA were benign according to the histopathological report. In identifying benign instances, IOTA displayed sensitivity (100%), specificity (64.1%), PPV (39.13%), NPV (100%) and accuracy (70.83%). In the histology report, 10 of the 10 malignant instances from the IOTA findings were malignant. In detecting malignant cases, IOTA demonstrated sensitivity (26.3%), specificity (100%) and accuracy (41.6%). Conclusion: The IOTA simple principles distinguish between benign and malignant adnexal masses. With C 125, they performed better than the IOTA Simple Rules alone in terms of diagnostic accuracy.
Study on energy conservation in experimental facilities by changing users’ behavior

In 2021, Japan announced its aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 46% in FY2030 than in FY2013, and universities were expected to contribute to the conservation of energy. The current study focused on ventilation systems in laboratories, which are among the most energy-intensive areas in universities, with the aim of reducing overall electricity consumption. The amount of electricity consumed by the draft chamber in a laboratory was determined based on the chamber opening. Result confirmed that the amount of electricity consumed by the 12 draft chambers to be 63,263 kWh/year. Using the relationship between chamber opening degree and power consumption by air conditioners and exhaust fans, we implemented a method to induce users of the draft chamber to take action toward controlling the chamber opening degree, using real-time information on chamber opening degree. A screen was set up to provide information to draft-chamber users in the laboratory using real-time monitors, and the induction of behavior was investigated over a 5-week period. Results confirmed that information displayed on the tablet device indeed reduced the chamber opening, the reduction rate being 21–48% compared to that before the information was displayed.