Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Erratum : Differential Evolution : Difference Vectors and Movement in Solution Space

This technical report corrects errors in Table III in Section III-C of Differential Evolution: Difference Vectors and Movement in Solution Space [5]1 which appears in the proceedings of the 2009 Congress on Evolutionary Computation. The contents of that paper are reproduced here for ease of reference, but with corrections to Table III (now Table 3) and Section III-C (now Section 3.3), inclusion in an appendix of graphs relevant to Section III-E (now Section 3.5) and an altered conclusion given the corrected data presented in Section 3.3. In the commonly used DE/rand/1 variant of differential evolution the primary mechanism of generating new solutions is the perturbation of a randomly selected point by a difference vector. The newly selected point may, if good enough, then replace a solution from the current generation. As the magnitude of difference vectors diminishes as the population converges, the size of moves made also diminishes, an oft-touted and obvious benefit of the approach. Additionally, when the population splits into separate clusters difference vectors exist for both small and large moves. Given that a replaced solution is not the one perturbed to create the new, candidate solution, are the large difference vectors responsible for movement of population members between clusters? This report examines the mechanisms of small and large moves, finding that small moves within one cluster result in solutions from another being replaced and so appearing to move a large distance. As clusters tighten this is the only mechanism for movement between them. Additionally, with some problem instances the relative quality of such moves is considerably higher than those occurring via the expected mechanism.
Revisiting the radio interferometer measurement equation. II. Calibration and direction-dependent effects

Context. Paper I of the series re-derived the radio interferometry measurement equation (RIME) from first principles, and extended the Jones formalism to the full-sky case, incorporating direction-dependent effects (DDEs). Aims. This paper aims to describe both classical radio interferometric calibration (selfcal and related methods), and the recent developments in the treatment of DDEs, using the RIME-based mathematical framework developed in Paper I. It also aims to demonstrate the ease with which the various effects can be described and understood. Methods. The first section of this paper uses the RIME formalism to describe self-calibration, both with a full RIME, and with the approximate equations of older software packages, and shows how this is affected by DDEs. The second section gives an overview of real-life DDEs and proposed methods of dealing with them. Results. A formal RIME-based description and comparison of existing and proposed approaches to the problem of DDEs.
Prioritizing Areas for Habitat Conservation in the Face of Climate and Land-Use Change

v Résumé . vi List of Tables . vii List of Figures . viii General Introduction . 1 Chapter 1: Facilitating climate-change-induced range shifts across continental land-use barriers . 5 Abstract . 5 Introduction . 6 Climate Change, Range Shifts, and Habitat . 7 Designing Reserve Networks for Range Shifts . 9 Protection along Climate Change Trajectories . 10 Connectivity through Corridors, Stepping-Stones, and Translocation . 11 Climatic Refugia . 13 Local adaptation and dispersal . 14 Planning for Uncertainty . 17 Conclusion . 18 Figures . 20 Chapter 2: Assessing the shelf-life of cost-efficient conservation plans in Canada’s farmland . 24 Abstract . 24 Introduction . 25 Methods . 28 Study Region . 28 Simulating Cost-Efficient Conservation Solutions Using Marxan . 29 Land Price, Land Use Intensity, and Target Species Data . 30 Measuring Efficiency Gains of Cost-Explicit Planning . 33 Comparing Solution Arrangements, Cost, and Feasibility through Time . 34 Results . 35 Discussion . 38 Figures and Tables . 42 General Conclusion . 50 References . 52 Appendix A: Supplemental Methods . 64 Appendix B: Supplemental Results . 72
Transmission electron microscopy of organic microfossils from the late Precambrian Bitter Springs Formation of Australia; techniques and survey of preserved ultrastructure

The ultrastructure of microfossils from the late Precambrian Bitter Springs Formation has been studied using transmission electron microscopy (TEM); this is the first systematic investigation of the ultrastructure of ultrathin-sectioned, organic microfossils of Precambrian age. The procedure developed for preparing organic microfossils for ultramicrotomy and TEM involves i) acid maceration of a fossiliferous rock sample and ii) alcohol dehydration and resin embedment of the acid-resistant organic residue. Neither chemical fixation nor heavy-metal staining appear to affect the ultrastructure or electron opacity of the cells here studied. The relatively high electron opacity of unfixed and unstained Bitter Springs organisms suggests that they have been diagenetically "carbonized" or enriched in certain heavy elements. Ultrastructural detail was detected in structures interpreted as remnants of cell walls, mucilaginous envelopes, cytoplasmic material, organelles, and membranes. Walls appear as distinct, densely granular bands. Walls of prokaryotes (Myxococcoides, Palaeoanacystis, and Palaeolyngbya) generally are thinner, more homogeneous, and less frequently layered than walls of eukaryotes (Glenobotrydion). Wall contacts between all observed, contiguous cells appear to be fused. Mucilaginous envelopes occur as extracellular, particulate aggregates that parallel cell contours and appear to bind together colonial cells. Cytoplasm is preserved as intracellular, particulate aggregates of variable size, shape, and cellular position. The distinct intracellular bodies in cells of Glenobotrydion appear as densely granular, solid masses with sharply defined borders; these bodies are interpreted as remnants of cellular organelles, probably pyrenoids. Low opacity, threadlike structures, often appearing to be triple-layered, and to be attached to or to enclose the organelles, are interpreted as remnants of membranes, perhaps derived from chloroplasts. This study demonstrates that considerable ultrastructural detail can be preserved in organic microfossils of Precambrian age and that such detail can be useful for assessing the biological affinities and diagenetic histories of organically preserved microorganisms.
Code Injection Attacks on HTML5-based Mobile Apps

HTML5-based mobile apps become more and more popular, mostly because they are much easier to be ported across different mobile platforms than native apps. HTML5-based apps are implemented using the standard web technologies, including HTML5, JavaScript and CSS; they depend on some middlewares, such as PhoneGap, to interact with the underlying OS. Knowing that JavaScript is subject to code injection attacks, we have conducted a systematic study on HTML5-based mobile apps, trying to evaluate whether it is safe to rely on the web technologies for mobile app development. Our discoveries are quite surprising. We found out that if HTML5-based mobile apps become popular--it seems to go that direction based on the current projection--many of the things that we normally do today may become dangerous, including reading from 2D barcodes, scanning Wi-Fi access points, playing MP4 videos, pairing with Bluetooth devices, etc. This paper describes how HTML5-based apps can become vulnerable, how attackers can exploit their vulnerabilities through a variety of channels, and what damage can be achieved by the attackers. In addition to demonstrating the attacks through example apps, we have studied 186 PhoneGap plugins, used by apps to achieve a variety of functionalities, and we found that 11 are vulnerable. We also found two real HTML5-based apps that are vulnerable to the attacks.
Optimal Multiuser Transmit Beamforming: A Difficult Problem with a Simple Solution Structure [Lecture Notes]

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Optimal Multiuser Transmit Beamforming: A Difficult Problem with a Simple Solution Structure [Lecture Notes] Emil Björnson, Mats Bengtsson, Björn Ottersten
Visual Commonsense Graphs: Reasoning about the Dynamic Context of a Still Image

We provide detailed statistics about the VisualCOMET dataset including its language diversity, and qualitative examples of inferences made by various model variants. We also show results from additional experiments for varying decoding schemes and performance for event description and place generation. Figure 12 shows a snapshot of our Visual Commonsense Graphs. The three images show very distinct scenes, but the graph allows us to reason that the intent of the person sitting at a shack (bottom right image), the before event for the woman at an indoor bar (top left image), and the likely after event for the woman in the ballroom (bottom left) are identical – to “order a drink”. Each image is associated with several inferences of the three types: (i) intents at present, (ii) events before, and (iii) events after.
Neural networks based EEG-Speech Models

In this paper, we describe three neural network (NN) based EEG-Speech (NES) models that map the unspoken EEG signals to the corresponding phonemes. Instead of using conventional feature extraction techniques, the proposed NES models rely on graphic learning to project both EEG and speech signals into deep representation feature spaces. This NN based linear projection helps to realize multimodal data fusion (i.e., EEG and acoustic signals). It is convenient to construct the mapping between unspoken EEG signals and phonemes. Specifically, among three NES models, two augmented models (i.e., IANES-B and IANES-G) include spoken EEG signals as either bias or gate information to strengthen the feature learning and translation of unspoken EEG signals. A combined unsupervised and supervised training is implemented stepwise to learn the mapping for all three NES models. To enhance the computational performance, three way factored NN training technique is applied to IANES-G model. Unlike many existing methods, our augmented NES models incorporate spoken-EEG signals that can efficiently suppress the artifacts in unspoken-EEG signals. Experimental results reveal that all three proposed NES models outperform the baseline SVM method, whereas IANES-G demonstrates the best performance on speech recovery and classification task comparatively.
Winter Road Surface Condition Recognition Using A Pretrained Deep Convolutional Network

This paper investigates the application of the latest machine learning technique deep neural networks for classifying road surface conditions (RSC) based on images from smartphones. Traditional machine learning techniques such as support vector machine (SVM) and random forests (RF) have been attempted in literature; however, their classification performance has been less than desirable due to challenges associated with image noises caused by sunlight glare and residual salts. A deep learning model based on convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed and evaluated for its potential to address these challenges for improved classification accuracy. In the proposed approach we introduce the idea of applying an existing CNN model that has been pre-trained using millions of images with proven high recognition accuracy. The model is extended with two additional fully-connected layers of neurons for learning the specific features of the RSC images. The whole model is then trained with a low learning rate for fine-tuning by using a small set of RSC images. Results show that the proposed model has the highest classification performance in comparison to the traditional machine learning techniques. The testing accuracy with different training dataset sizes is also analyzed, showing the potential of achieving much higher accuracy with a larger training dataset.
Google Scholar as a Data Source for Research Assessment in the Social Sciences

The Web of Science (WoS) was the dominant bibliographical source for a long time until the launch of Scopus and Google Scholar (GS) in 2004. GS is an academic search engine different from WoS and Scopus in approach and scope. The fact that GS covers the social sciences more broadly compared to WoS and Scopus led the academy to use GS as a bibliometric data source for research assessment studies. This chapter aims to review the studies on “Google Scholar” related to social sciences. In doing so, we reveal the usefulness of GS in assessment exercises. First, the literature on “Google Scholar” retrieved from GS, Scopus, and WoS is described using Flourish. We visualize the literature retrieved from these three data sources using VOSviewer to show the scatter of the studies and their emphasis on social sciences. Second, we focus on the studies related to social sciences. We discuss the terms extracted from the titles and abstracts of these studies related to “social sciences”. This chapter concludes with the recommendation to use of GS in a careful way. GS is not a citation index but a search engine and various problems with data quality and its transparency are noted.
Influence and evolution: the development of the batten lug sail

Influence and Evolution: The Development of the Batten Lug Sail. (August 2006) Timothy Joseph Kane, B.S., University of California, Davis Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Luis Filipe Vieira de Castro With its ease of reefing, subtle control, and unmatched ability to generate thrust effectively in both severe and minimal weather, the Chinese batten lug is perhaps one of the most sophisticated sails in history. However, its development remains unclear, as its relatively sudden appearance in the iconographic record as a mature technology, and its seeming lack of affinity to other Chinese sails, gives no indication of a regional evolution. An analysis of the batten lug suggests that it likely descended from some simpler sail. As it is separated from the most rudimentary square rig by several key features, the batten lug’s development probably occurred in an incremental, or stepwise, fashion. But, no intermediate form representing such progression of the batten lug has yet been discovered in China, or even in the greater Pacific basin. An examination of iconographic evidence from India and the western reaches of the Roman Empire, however, suggests that sails bearing battens or possessing lug morphology existed in these regions prior to the emergence of the batten lug in China. The question therefore arises whether it is possible that these sails were ancestral to, or in some way influenced the development of, the more sophisticated Chinese sail.
On the Powerball Method for Optimization

We propose a new method to accelerate the convergence of optimization algorithms. This method simply adds a power coefficient γ ∈ [0, 1) to the gradient during optimization. We call this the Powerball method and analyze the convergence rate for the Powerball method for strongly convex functions. While theoretically the Powerball method is guaranteed to have a linear convergence rate in the same order of the gradient method, we show that empirically it significantly outperforms the gradient descent and Newton’s method, especially during the initial iterations. We demonstrate that the Powerball method provides a 10-fold speedup of the convergence of both gradient descent and L-BFGS on multiple real datasets.
L EVERAGING R EACTION - AWARE S UBSTRUCTURES FOR R ETROSYNTHESIS AND R EACTION P REDICTION

substructure. The direct N-alkylation of phthalimides with alcohols under Mitsunobu conditions and potassium phthalimide with alkyl halides (Gabriel Synthesis) are popular alternative approaches to phthprotected amines. As a protecting group, the substructure of phthalimide can be exacted by our method. The results show that these extracted substructures have chemical interpretability.
CODEs: Chamfer Out-of-Distribution Examples against Overconfidence Issue

We visualize the maximum confidences predicted on the images in various OOD datasets (e.g., MNIST, FMNIST, EMNIST, CIFAR-100, CIFAR-10, SVHN, GrayCIFAR-10, LSUN CR) by ResNet-18 trained for FMNIST, CIFAR-10, MNIST and SVHN using histograms (logarithmic scale) in Fig. 1. It could be seen that, by adopting our method, the confidence distributions made by Baseline are pulled to the left, with the number of samples in high confidence largely reduced. Particularly, the improvements are more significant on the model trained for CIFAR-10. 2. Ratio of Normal Images to CODEs
Quantum Simulation of Chemistry with Sublinear Scaling to the Continuum

We present a quantum algorithm for simulating quantum chemistry with complexity $\tilde{O}(η^{8/3} N^{1/3})$, where $η$ is the number of electrons and $N$ is the number of plane wave orbitals. In comparison, the most efficient prior algorithms for simulating electronic structure using plane waves (or any other basis) have complexity $\tilde{O}(N^2)$. We achieve our scaling in first quantization by performing simulation in the rotating frame of the kinetic operator using recent interaction picture techniques. Our algorithm is far more efficient when $N \gg η$ (i.e. when scaling towards the continuum limit), as is needed to suppress discretization error when representing molecules in the plane wave basis.
Secure Biometrics : Concepts , Authentication Architectures & Challenges

BIOMETRICS are an important and widely used class of methods for identity verification and access control. Biometrics are attractive because they are inherent properties of an individual. They need not be remembered like passwords, and are not easily lost or forged like identifying documents. At the same time, biometrics are fundamentally noisy and irreplaceable. There are always slight variations among the measurements of a given biometric, and, unlike passwords or identification numbers, biometrics are derived from physical characteristics that cannot easily be changed. The proliferation of biometric usage raises critical privacy and security concerns that, due to the noisy nature of biometrics, cannot be addressed using standard cryptographic methods. In this article we present an overview of ”secure biometrics”, also referred to as ”biometric template protection”, an emerging class of methods that address these concerns. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributions to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproduction, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright c ©Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc., 2013 201 Broadway, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Evolutionary game dynamics in a growing structured population

We discuss a model for evolutionary game dynamics in a growing, network-structured population. In our model, new players can either make connections to random preexisting players or preferentially attach to those that have been successful in the past. The latter depends on the dynamics of strategies in the game, which we implement following the so-called Fermi rule such that the limits of weak and strong strategy selection can be explored. Our framework allows to address general evolutionary games. With only two parameters describing the preferential attachment and the intensity of selection, we describe a wide range of network structures and evolutionary scenarios. Our results show that even for moderate payoff preferential attachment, over represented hubs arise. Interestingly, we find that while the networks are growing, high levels of cooperation are attained, but the same network structure does not promote cooperation as a static network. Therefore, the mechanism of payoff preferential attachment is different to those usually invoked to explain the promotion of cooperation in static, already-grown networks.
Repair optimal erasure codes through hadamard designs

In distributed storage systems that employ erasure coding, the issue of minimizing the total communication required to exactly rebuild a storage node after a failure arises. This repair bandwidth depends on the structure of the storage code and the repair strategies used to restore the lost data. Designing high-rate maximum-distance separable (MDS) codes that achieve the optimum repair communication has been a well-known open problem. In this work, we use Hadamard matrices to construct the first explicit 2-parity MDS storage code with optimal repair properties for all single node failures, including the parity nodes. Our construction relies on a novel method of achieving perfect interference alignment over finite fields with a finite file size, or number of symbol extensions.
AUTOMATIC DETECTION OF OBSTRUCTIVE SLEEP APNEA USING SPEECH SIGNAL ANALYSIS

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a sleep disorder associated with several anatomical abnormalities of the upper airway. Our hypothesis is that it is possible to distinguish between OSA and non-OSA subjects by analyzing particular speech signal properties using an automatic computerized system. The database for this research was constructed from 90 male subjects who were recorded reading a one-minute speech protocol immediately prior to a full polysomnography study; specific phonemes were isolated using closed group phoneme identification; seven independent Gaussian mixture models (GMM)-based classifiers were implemented for the task of OSA \ non-OSA classification; a fusion process was designed to combine the scores of these classifiers and a validation procedure took place in order to examine the system’s performance. Results of 91.66% specificity and 91.66% sensitivity were achieved using a leave one out procedure when the data was manually segmented. The system performances were somewhat decreased when the automatic segmentation was used, resulting in 83.33% specificity and 81.25% sensitivity.
Adaptive Encoding for Optimization

This report describes a general method for rendering search coordinate system independent, Adaptive Encoding (AE). Adaptive Encoding is applicable to any continuous domain search algorithm and includes (incremental) changes of the coordinate system, that is, changes of the representation of solutions. One attractive way to change the representation within AE is derived from the Covariance Matrix Adaptation (CMA). We prove that adaptive encoding recovers the CMA Evolution Strategy, when suitably applied to an evolution strategy with cumulative step-size control. The proof implies that adaptive encoding provides the means to apply CMA-like representation changes to any search algorithm in continuous domain.
EUDAT: A New Cross-Disciplinary Data Infrastructure for Science

The EUDAT project is a pan-European data initiative that started in October 2011. The project brings together a unique consortium of 25 partners – including research communities, national data and high performance computing (HPC) centres, technology providers, and funding agencies – from 13 countries. EUDAT aims to build a sustainable cross-disciplinary and cross-national data infrastructure that provides a set of shared services for accessing and preserving research data.