Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The impact of corporate information technology infrastructure standards on enterprise and business unit in use

The need for corporate information technology (IT) standards is increasingly recognized as critical to maintaining compatibility among diverse organizational platforms and for maintaining control over escalating IT costs (Scott Morton 1991; Violino 1995; Weill 1993). Keen (1991) also notes the role of technology standards as important mechanisms in building enabling IT infrastructures. In spite of the considerable attention given to the importance of standards, empirical work that addresses their organizational impacts has been sparse. This study utilized a multi-site case approach to investigate the organizational impacts of corporate standards in three distinct areas: IT responsiveness to local business needs, IT responsiveness to enterprise-wide integration needs, and IT cost reduction. The nature of standards was conceptualized along two dimensions: scope and flexibility. Scope is the comprehensiveness, or depth and detail, of IT infrastructure standards for a particular IT-related domain. High scope implies that standards prescribe guidelines for the use of IT assets in greater detail. Flexibility refers to the discretion or latitude that standards provide individual decision-makers with for deviating from guidelines embodied in the standards. Multiple theoretical perspectives were drawn from to relate the use of standards to their associated impacts. Coordination Theory (Malone 1987) was used to describe how standards coordinate activities among various stakeholders to facilitate higher levels of enterprise-wide integration. The concept of economies of scope (Teece 1980) was used to describe how the recurrent use of common standards by organizational stakeholders may lead to enterprise-wide cost in areas related to IT purchasing, maintenance, training, and support activities. Finally, theories related to information processing (Simon 1976; Morgan 1986) were used to describe how IT standards may act as uncertainty reduction mechanisms to help facilitate IT responsiveness at local levels through the provision of decisional guidance. The researchers analyzed corporate IT standards from four firms to determine how variations in both scope and flexibility influenced the ability of organizations to reduce IT costs, to facilitate enterprise-wide integration, and to promote greater levels of local IT responsiveness. Multiple sources of data consisting of surveys, structured interviews, and archival analysis of standards were collected from a variety of respondents to measure each construct and to evaluate six research propositions. The findings suggest that IT infrastructure
Laboratory studies of the electrical conductivity of silicate perovskites at high pressures and temperatures

The electrical conductivities of two silicate perovskites and a perovskite-magnesiowustite assemblage, all having an atomic ratio of Mg to Fe equal to 0.88/0.12, have been measured with alternating current and direct current (DC) techniques at simultaneously high pressures and temperatures. Measurements up to pressures of 80 GPa and temperatures of 3500 K using a laser-heated diamond anvil cell demonstrate that the electrical conductivity of these materials remains below 10–3 S/m at lower mantle conditions. The activation energies for electrical conduction are between 0.1 and 0.4 eV (0.1–0.2 eV most probably) from our data, and we ascribe the conduction in these perovskites to an extrinsic electronic process. Our new measurements are in agreement with a bound that was previously obtained from DC measurements for the high PT conductivity of perovskite-dominated assemblages. The results show that the electrical conductivity of (Mg0.88Fe0.12)SiO3 perovskite differs significantly from that of Earth's deep mantle, as inferred from geophysical observations.
INFORMED AUDIO SOURCE SEPARATION

In this paper we tackle the problem of single channel audio source separation driven by descriptors of the sounding object’s motion. As opposed to previous approaches, motion is included as a softcoupling constraint within the nonnegative matrix factorization framework. The proposed method is applied to a multimodal dataset of instruments in string quartet performance recordings where bow motion information is used for separation of string instruments. We show that the approach offers better source separation result than an audio-based baseline and the state-of-the-art multimodal-based approaches on these very challenging music mixtures.
Igneous processes and closed system evolution of the Tharsis region of Mars

A quantitative petrologic model for the formation of the Tharsis rise of Mars has been developed that is consistent with global gravity and topography data. Partial melting of the mantle underlying the Tharsis plateau results in the depletion of basaltic chemical components in the source region. Iron is partitioned preferentially into the basaltic liquid, so that the density of the source region is lowered relative to surrounding unmodified mantle. Basalt is erupted to the surface and/or intruded at shallow levels in the crust, where it solidifies to low-pressure mineral assemblages or perhaps glass. These low-pressure materials are less dense than their mantle equivalents; hence the net volume of the Tharsis crust-mantle system is increased, resulting in the prominent topographic rise with no net gain or loss of mass. The distribution of densities with depth is quantitatively consistent with the isostatic models of Sleep and Phillips [1979, 1985]. Typical values of parameters that are constrained by the gravity and topography data are 150-km crustal thickness, 250-km elastic mantle thickness, 26% partial melting in the mantle source region, and 32% addition of intrusive material to the crust. This closed-system petrologic process is strictly constructional in nature, but shallow intrusion of magma into the crust can cause uplift of overlying strata, as advocated by R. J. Phillips and N. H. Sleep [submitted manuscript, 1987].
Part-dependent Label Noise: Towards Instance-dependent Label Noise

Learning with the instance-dependent label noise is challenging, because it is hard to model such real-world noise. Note that there are psychological and physiological evidences showing that we humans perceive instances by decomposing them into parts. Annotators are therefore more likely to annotate instances based on the parts rather than the whole instances, where a wrong mapping from parts to classes may cause the instance-dependent label noise. Motivated by this human cognition, in this paper, we approximate the instance-dependent label noise by exploiting part-dependent label noise. Speciﬁcally, since instances can be approximately reconstructed by a combination of parts, we approximate the instance-dependent transition matrix for an instance by a combination of the transition matrices for the parts of the instance. The transition matrices for parts can be learned by exploiting anchor points (i.e., data points that belong to a speciﬁc class almost surely). Empirical evaluations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate our method is superior to the state-of-the-art approaches for learning from the instance-dependent label noise.
Linear and Reed Solomon Codes Against Adversarial Insertions and Deletions

In this work, we study linear error-correcting codes against adversarial insertion-deletion (insdel) errors, a topic that has recently gained a lot of attention. We focus on two diﬀerent settings - codes over small alphabets and Reed-Solomon codes. Linear codes over small ﬁelds: We construct linear codes over F q , for q = poly(1 /ε ), that can eﬃciently decode from a δ fraction of insdel errors and have rate (1 − 4 δ ) / 8 − ε . We also show that by allowing codes over F q 2 that are linear over F q , we can improve the rate to (1 − δ ) / 4 − ε while not sacriﬁcing eﬃciency. Using this latter result, we construct fully linear codes over F 2 that can eﬃciently correct up to δ < 1 / 54 fraction of deletions and have rate R = (1 − 54 · δ ) / 1216. Cheng, Guruswami, Haeupler, and Li [CGHL21] constructed codes with (extremely small) rates bounded away from zero that can correct up to a δ < 1 / 400 fraction of insdel errors. They also posed the problem of constructing linear codes that get close to the half-Singleton bound (proved in [CGHL21]) over small ﬁelds. Thus, our results signiﬁcantly improve their construction and get much closer to the bound. Reed-Solomon codes: We prove that over ﬁelds of size n O ( k ) there are [ n, k ] Reed-Solomon codes that can decode from n − 2 k +1 insdel errors and hence attain the half-Singleton bound. We also give a deterministic construction of such codes over much larger ﬁelds (of size n k O ( k ) ). Nevertheless, for k = O (log n/ log log n ) our construction runs in polynomial time. For the special case k = 2, which received a lot
On Polynomial Approximations to AC^0

We make progress on some questions related to polynomial approximations of AC^0. It is known, from the works of Tarui (Theoret. Comput. Sci. 1993) and Beigel, Reingold, and Spielman (Proc. 6th CCC 1991), that any AC^0 circuit of size s and depth d has an epsilon-error probabilistic polynomial over the reals of degree (log (s/epsilon))^{O(d)}. We improve this upper bound to (log s)^{O(d)}* log(1/epsilon), which is much better for small values of epsilon. We give an application of this result by using it to resolve a question posed by Tal (ECCC 2014): we show that (log s)^{O(d)}* log(1/epsilon)-wise independence fools AC^0, improving on Tal's strengthening of Braverman's theorem (J. ACM 2010) that (log (s/epsilon))^{O(d)}-wise independence fools AC^0. Up to the constant implicit in the O(d), our result is tight. As far as we know, this is the first PRG construction for AC^0 that achieves optimal dependence on the error epsilon. We also prove lower bounds on the best polynomial approximations to AC^0. We show that any polynomial approximating the OR function on n bits to a small constant error must have degree at least ~Omega(sqrt{log n}). This result improves exponentially on a recent lower bound demonstrated by Meka, Nguyen, and Vu (arXiv 2015).
How to Query Human Feedback Efficiently in RL?

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While RLHF has demonstrated practical success in ﬁne-tuning language models, existing empirical work does not address the challenge of how to efﬁciently sample trajectory pairs for querying human feedback. In this study, we propose an efﬁcient sampling approach to acquiring exploratory trajectories that enable accurate learning of hidden reward functions before collecting any human feedback. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that our algorithm requires less human feedback for learning the optimal policy under preference-based models with linear parameterization and unknown transitions, compared to the existing literature. Speciﬁcally, our framework can incorporate linear and low-rank MDPs with efﬁcient sample complexity. Additionally, we investigate RLHF with action-based comparison feedback and introduce an efﬁcient querying algorithm tailored to this scenario.
Preference aggregation with multiple criteria of ordinal significance

In this paper we address the problem of aggregating outranking situations in the presence of multiple preference criteria of ordinal significance. The concept of ordinal concordance of the global outranking relation is defined and an operational test for its presence is developed. Finally, we propose a new kind of robustness analysis for global outranking relations taking into account classical dominance, ordinal and classical majority concordance in a same ordinal valued logical framework.
User experience in using surface computing for collaborative decision making

Purpose – This paper aims to report work regarding the design, development and evaluation of a surface computing application to support collaborative decision making. The domain-independent application, the so-called Ideas Mapping, builds on the principle of affinity diagramming to allow participants to analyze a problem and brainstorm around possible solutions, while they actively construct a consensus artifact – a taxonomy of their ideas. Design/methodology/approach – Ideas Mapping was designed using a user-centred approach. During idea generation, Ideas Mapping replicates physical post-it notes on a multi-touch tabletop. Additional functionality supports student collaboration and interaction around the organization of ideas into thematic categories associated with the problem at hand. The tool was evaluated in two studies using quantitative and qualitative data. Findings – The paper reports on the functionality and user experience while interacting with the application. The paper also reports initial findings regarding the affordances of surface computing for collaborative decision making. Originality/value – The studies reported give insides regarding the affordances of multi-touch tabletops to support collaborative decision making. Information regarding the user experience in using such applications is reported.
An Anytime Algorithm for Reachability on Uncountable MDP

The standard formalism for modelling systems with both non-deterministic and probabilistic behaviour are Markov decision processes (MDP) [1]. In the context of many applications such as cyber-physical systems, states and actions are used to model real-valued phenomena such as position or throttle. Consequently, the state space and the action space may be uncountably inﬁ-nite. For example, a (multi-dimensional) real interval [ a, b ] × [ c, d ] ⊆ R 2 can model a safe area for a robot to move in or a set of available control inputs such as acceleration and steering angle. This gives rise to MDP with potentially uncountable state-and action-spaces (sometimes called controlled discrete-time Markov Process or discrete-time Markov Control Process), with applications ranging from modelling a Mars rover [2, 3], over water reservoir control, warehouse storage management, energy control and many more. Although systems modelled by MDP are often safety-critical, the analysis of uncountable systems is so complex that practical approaches for veriﬁcation and controller synthesis are based on unreliable ‘best eﬀort’ learning techniques, for example reinforcement learning . While eﬃcient in practice, these methods guarantee, even in the best case, convergence to the true result only in the limit, e.g., [4], or for increasingly precise discretization, e.g., [5]. In line with the tradition of learning and to make the analysis more feasible, the typical objectives considered for MDP are either ﬁnite-horizon [6, 7] or discounted properties [8], together with restrictive assumptions. Note that when it comes to approximation, discounted properties eﬀectively are ﬁnite-horizon. In contrast, ensuring safety of a reactive system or a certain probability to satisfy its mission goals requires an unbounded horizon and reduces to optimizing the reachability probabilities. Moreover, the safety-critical context requires to give reliable bounds on the probability, not an approximation with unknown precision.
Structures and property distributions in the three oceans surrounding Canada in 2007: A basis for a long‐term ocean climate monitoring strategy

Abstract The panarctic region is tightly connected to subarctic regions by through‐flowing Atlantic and Pacific water masses and, as such, local changes in ice cover, ocean properties and ecosystem dynamics cannot be fully understood separately from large‐scale oceanographic structures and advective processes. The Canadian International Polar Year (IPY) project Canada's Three Oceans (C3O) and the related Joint Ocean Ice Study (JOIS) have collected oceanographic data along a transit extending around northern North America to establish an initial, large‐scale baseline against which present and future changes can be gauged. Special focus was given to the shelf and the basin regions of the Canada Basin and the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. We use the first results from physical and geochemical data obtained during the summer of 2007 to discuss linkages between the Arctic and Subarctic domains and trace the cascade of key processes that affect contemporary ocean structure. A review of the literature, combined with these observations, is used to identify early signs of ongoing change throughout the three oceans surrounding northern North America including ocean warming and freshening, sea‐ice melting, increased hypoxia, reduced pH and altered biogeography.
Fundamental tradeoff between computation and communication in distributed computing

We introduce a general distributed computing framework, motivated by commonly used structures like MapReduce, and formulate an information-theoretic tradeoff between computation and communication in such a framework. We characterize the optimal tradeoff to within a constant factor, for all system parameters. In particular, we propose a coded scheme, namely “Coded MapReduce” (CMR), which creates and exploits coding opportunities in data shuffling for distributed computing, reducing the communication load by a factor that is linearly proportional to the computation load. We then prove a lower bound on the minimum communication load, and demonstrate that CMR achieves this lower bound to within a constant factor. This result reveals a fundamental connection between computation and communication in distributed computing - the two are inverse-linearly proportional to each other.
BUPT-MCPRL at TRECVID 2011

In this paper, we describe BUPT-MCPRL systems for TRECVID 2011. Our team participated in five tasks: semantic indexing, known-item search, instance search content-based copy detection and surveillance event detection. A brief introduction is shown as follows: A. Known-item search In this year, we proposed two different methods: one based on text and another is bio-inspired method. All 2 runs we submitted are described in Table 1. Table 1. KIS results and descriptions for each run
Lidar Measurements of the Vertical Distribution of Aerosol Optical and Physical Properties over Central Asia

The vertical structure of aerosol optical and physical properties was measured by Lidar in Eastern Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, from June 2008 to May 2009. Lidar measurements were supplemented with surface-based measurements of PM2.5 and PM10 mass and chemical composition in both size fractions. Dust transported into the region is common, being detected 33% of the time. The maximum frequency occurred in the spring of 2009. Dust transported to Central Asia comes from regional sources, for example, Taklimakan desert and Aral Sea basin, and from long-range transport, for example, deserts of Arabia, Northeast Africa, Iran, and Pakistan. Regional sources are characterized by pollution transport with maximum values of coarse particles within the planetary boundary layer, aerosol optical thickness, extinction coefficient, integral coefficient of aerosol backscatter, and minimum values of the Angstrom exponent. Pollution associated with air masses transported over long distances has different characteristics during autumn, winter, and spring. During winter, dust emissions were low resulting in high values of the Angstrom exponent (about 0.51) and the fine particle mass fraction (64%). Dust storms were more frequent during spring with an increase in coarse dust particles in comparison to winter. The aerosol vertical profiles can be used to lower uncertainty in estimating radiative forcing.
Importance of poroelastic coupling in dynamically active aquifers of the Po River Basin, Italy

Uncoupling between the flow field and the stress field in pumped aquifers is the basis of the classical groundwater hydrology. Recently, some authors have disputed the assumption of uncoupling with regard to both fluid dynamics and porous medium deformation. The issue is very important as it could undermine the traditional approach to simulate subsurface flow, analyze pumping tests, and predict land subsidence caused by fluid withdrawal. The present paper addresses the problem of coupling versus uncoupling in the Po river plain, a normally consolidated and normally pressurized basin which has experienced in the last 50 years a pronounced pore pressure drawdown because of water and gas removal and where a large hydromechanical database is available from the ground surface down to 4000 m depth. A numerical study is performed which shows that the matrix which relates flow to stress is very similar to the capacity matrix of the uncoupled flow equation. A comparison of results obtained with the finite element integration of the coupled and uncoupled models indicates that pore pressure is rather insensitive to coupling anywhere within the pumped formation while in the adjacent aquitard‐aquifer units, coupling induces a slight overpressure which quickly dissipates in time with a small initial influence on medium deformation, and specifically on land subsidence. As a major consequence the uncoupled solutions to the fluid dynamic and the structural problems appear to be fully warranted on any timescale of practical interest in a typical normally consolidated and pressurized basin.
Efficient one-scan-back PDAF for target tracking in clutter

In this paper we present an efficient one-scan-back Probabilistic Data Filter (PDAF). Regarding the general case of an N-scan-back PDAF, it has been noted in the literature that with each additional scan back, there is a considerable increase in computational load while the amount of improvement in tracking performance diminishes. We therefore have designed a filter that aims to benefit at a minimal increase in computational cost from the one-scan-back architecture that effectively rules out unlikely measurement pairings. In this filter, we use the measurements in previous scan only to produce better weights for the measurements in the present scan. Thus, as compared to a "full" one-scan-back PDAF, we considerably reduce the number of updating and merging steps each scan. For the proposed filter, and the closely related "standard" (zero-scan-back) PDAF and "full" one-scan-back PDAF, we provide the theoretical background, numerical implementation, and simulation results.
Assessing the Relative Roles of Initial and Boundary Conditions in Interannual to Decadal Climate Predictability

The relative importance of initial conditions and boundary conditions in interannual to decadal climate predictability is addressed. A simple framework is developed in which (i) ensembles of climate model simulations with changing external forcing can be measured against climatology to get an estimate of the timescale on which changing boundary conditions can provide predictive skill, and (ii) the rate of spread of ensembles of simulations with small perturbations to the initial conditions can be measured against climatology to assess the timescale at which the information in the initial conditions is degraded by chaotic error growth. A preliminary test of the method on a limited number of climate model simulations is presented.
Monitoring the spatial extent of coastal wetlands using ERS-1 SAR data

Being highly dynamic by nature due to their changing hydrological regime and to the encroachment of urbanization, inductrialization and changing patterns in agriculture, reliable and timely information about the extent, nature, spatial distribution and temporal behaviour of wetlands is a prerequisite for their effective management. Optical remote sensing data have been used extensively to generate such information. In this study the European Remote Sensing (ERS-1) Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data collected during April 1993 were used to study the temporal behaviour of the coastal wetlands of the Sunderban delta of West Bengal, India. Account was also taken of the Landsat MSS data of 1973. Shrinkage in the wetlands on the periphery of Calcutta due to the encroachment of urbanization and the development of new islands in the active coastal zone have been observed over a period of 20 years.