Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Developing a Creative Idea Generation System for Innovative Software Reliability Research

Reliability is one of the important aspects of any software, which has been studied for decades with many techniques proposed and developed. In software engineering, software reliability cannot be ignored in any application. However, it is still hard to measure and difficult to ensure the reliability of software, which means that it is necessary to find new ways to study on the software reliability, especially for researchers. Naturally, idea generation has to be involved in the process of getting innovative ideas. Although a considerable number of applications and research studies have been made in the past years in order to increase the effectiveness of idea making process, it is lack of efforts working on creativity in the idea generation process particularly. Moreover, creative computing is suitable to be employed to enhance the innovation of research studies on the software reliability, as it emphasises being creative in the whole software lifecycle. Therefore, the objective of this research paper is to propose an idea generation process to inspire new studies on software reliability. This paper first represents an idea generation framework. Then, after critically reviewed the creativity features and attributes, three creativity elements are proposed with corresponding sub-dimensions to support on balancing new and value of the ideas. Formal algorithms are designed to calculate and incorporate the creativity elements and their sub-dimension. Furthermore, a prototype of the proposed idea generation system is developed that is named as Research Topics Generation System (RTGS), in which a set of new research topics on software reliability are generated to inspire further studies, whilst creative computing ontology is created as the basis of the idea generation.
A 124-Gb/s Decoder for Generalized Integrated Interleaved Codes

Generalized integrated interleaved (GII) codes have attracted much attention in distributed storage systems since they can reduce the overall redundancy by creating redundancy shared by the interleaves. The Berlekamp-Massey (BM) algorithm makes the GII decoding efficient by reusing the preceding results at each decoding stage. However, it also forms the speed bottleneck of GII decoders. The reformulated inversionless Berlekamp-Massey (riBM) algorithm is well known for its short critical path, but it is not generally suitable for GII decoding since its polynomials are difficult to be reused directly. In this paper, we address this issue by reinitializing the polynomials and propose a riBM-based GII decoding algorithm. In our simulations, slight performance degradation induced by the first-layer miscorrection is observed in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region. Hence, a subtle method is introduced to handle the miscorrected interleaves. Furthermore, the hardware architecture of the proposed decoding algorithm is developed and a high throughput decoder for the given example GII code is implemented. The synthesis results under TSMC 28-nm technology show that the decoder can achieve a throughput of up to 124 Gb/s. Moreover, the decoder has been implemented into a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to validate its error-correction performance.
A Study of Influential Factors on Effective Closely-Coupled Collaboration based on Single User Perceptions

The need for collaboration and cooperation across a distance is becoming equal to that between a co-located team. This means that cooperative working must be supported by systems that allow natural social human communication and interaction. A goal of telecollaboration is to reproduce the effectiveness of co-located teamwork across a distributed team. Although many of today’s systems support collaboration, only a subset can be said to support cooperation and no established solution comes close to reproducing the flexibility and efficiency of a face-to-face meeting. Previous work has demonstrated that accessing collaborative virtual environments through CAVE-like display systems provide a natural way of sharing space and objects within it that bring us closer to replicating a face-to-face meeting. Our previous research has demonstrated a link between level of immersion, task performance and feelings of collaboration and cooperation. It was, however, unclear if the advantage came from more natural interaction with objects or more natural interaction with others through objects. The aim of this paper is to understand the impact of using a CAVE-like display has on user-to-object interaction so that we can isolate this from previous results to find the advantage given to collaboration. Task performance was measured and a questionnaire was used to identify the perceived impact of various display factors . The results from this study indicate that the major impact of immersion is on cooperative tasks. Results showed further a disparity between perceived and actual performance, which is discussed.
Interference Alignment with Limited Feedback on Two-cell Interfering Two-User MIMO-MAC

In this paper, we consider a two-cell interfering two-user multiple-input multiple-output multiple access channel (MIMO-MAC) with limited feedback. We first investigate the multiplexing gain of such channel when users have perfect channel state information at transmitter (CSIT) by exploiting an interference alignment scheme. In addition, we propose a feedback framework for the interference alignment in the limited feedback system. On the basis of the proposed feedback framework, we analyze the rate gap loss and it is shown that in order to keep the same multiplexing gain with the case of perfect CSIT, the number of feedback bits per receiver scales as $B \geq (M\! -1\! )\! \log_{2}(\textsf{SNR})+C$, where $M$ and $C$ denote the number of transmit antennas and a constant, respectively. Throughout the simulation results, it is shown that the sum-rate performance coincides with the derived results.
Inequality and Investment

In a world where markets work perfectly, investment decisions should have very little to do with the income, wealth or social status of the decision maker. Whether or not a particular piece of investment should be undertaken ought to be determined by the returns it promises and the market price of capital, adjusted, if necessary, for the market price of the extra risk it entails. The logic is almost elementary: If someone has an opportunity to make money, then it really does not matter whether she herself has the money or not—she can always borrow what she needs, and if the risk bothers her, she can always sell shares in her business on the stock market and buy safer assets with the money she gets from the sale. If this were indeed the world we lived in, the distribution of wealth/income would have no direct influence on the pattern of investment. There may still be an indirect influence, coming from the effect of wealth or income on savings decisions: It has been suggested that the poor are less inclined to save than the rich, and as a result, aggregate savings as a proportion of aggregate income may go up if the rich gain at the expense of the poor. This could affect investment decisions through the effect of the supply of savings on the price of capital. Inequality, in this Kaldorian view of the world (after Nicholas Kaldor, the Cambridge economist), would enhance growth, through it might yet be a Pyrrhic victory: Kaldor worried about the inevitability of crises under capitalism, and faster growth accompanied by burgeoning inequality, he saw as a recipe for ongoing crises. The scope for a direct link between inequality and investment widens substantially once we give up the idea that markets, and especially asset markets, work anywhere close to perfectly. One of the great advances in development economics in the past fifteen years is the accretion of a substantial body of evidence on documenting how well (or badly) asset markets work in developing countries. It seems natural place to start with this evidence.
The Informal Economy and Poverty: Evidence and Policy Review

This review explores the relationship between the informal economy and poverty so as to understand whether the informal economy helps those who are poor to escape their poverty and how to address the informal economy in anti-poverty strategies.In particular, the report:• reviews the existing evidence on the size of the informal economy, who participates in and benefits from informal work as well as what type of work they do and why;• evaluates the range of policy options for dealing with the informal economy;• identifies best practice policy measures from other advanced economies that enable people in poverty to move from informal into formal work; and• reveals the need for changes in broader work and welfare systems so as to prevent people in poverty having to turn to the informal economy in order to make ends meet.
Point Based Rendering M. Tech Project 1st Stage Report

In recent years point-based geometry has gained increasing attention as an alternative surface representation, both for efficient rendering and for flexible geometry processing of highly complex 3D-models. Traditional geometry based rendering methods use triangles as primitives which make rendering complexity dependent on complexity of the model to be rendered. But point based models overcome that problem as points don’t maintain connectivity information and just represents surface information. Based on their fundamental simplicity, points have motivated a variety of research on topics such as shape modeling, object capturing, simplification, rendering and hybrid point-polygon methods. Rendering the points is inherently a big problem due to lack of connectivity information.But lack of connectivity introduces several artifacts while in the process of rendering like aliasing and holes in the rendered model. Several algorithms have been proposed for rendering point models efficiently and with high quality. The major challenge of point-based rendering (PBR) algorithms is to achieve a continuous interpolation between discrete point samples that are irregularly distributed on a surface. Furthermore, correct visibility must be supported as well as efficient level-of-detail (LOD) rendering for large data sets. In this report we will discuss the pros and cons of each of those algorithms and in particular discuss algorithms that can be applied based on requirement.
ResearchThe radiosensitizing effect of Ku 70 / 80 knockdown in MCF 10 A cells irradiated with X-rays and p ( 66 ) + Be ( 40 ) neutrons

Background: A better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of DNA repair after lowand high-LET radiations represents a research priority aimed at improving the outcome of clinical radiotherapy. To date however, our knowledge regarding the importance of DNA DSB repair proteins and mechanisms in the response of human cells to high-LET radiation, is far from being complete. Methods: We investigated the radiosensitizing effect after interfering with the DNA repair capacity in a human mammary epithelial cell line (MCF10A) by lentiviral-mediated RNA interference (RNAi) of the Ku70 protein, a keyelement of the nonhomologous end-joining (NHEJ) pathway. Following irradiation of control and Ku-deficient cell lines with either 6 MV X-rays or p(66)+Be(40) neutrons, cellular radiosensitivity testing was performed using a crystal violet cell proliferation assay. Chromosomal radiosensitivity was evaluated using the micronucleus (MN) assay. Results: RNAi of Ku70 caused downregulation of both the Ku70 and the Ku80 proteins. This downregulation sensitized cells to both X-rays and neutrons. Comparable dose modifying factors (DMFs) for X-rays and neutrons of 1.62 and 1.52 respectively were obtained with the cell proliferation assay, which points to the similar involvement of the Ku heterodimer in the cellular response to both types of radiation beams. After using the MN assay to evaluate chromosomal radiosensitivity, the obtained DMFs for X-ray doses of 2 and 4 Gy were 2.95 and 2.66 respectively. After neutron irradiation, the DMFs for doses of 1 and 2 Gy were 3.36 and 2.82 respectively. The fact that DMFs are in the same range for X-rays and neutrons confirms a similar importance of the NHEJ pathway and the Ku heterodimer for repairing DNA damage induced by both X-rays and p(66)+Be(40) neutrons. Conclusions: Interfering with the NHEJ pathway enhanced the radiosensitivity of human MCF10A cells to low-LET Xrays and high-LET neutrons, pointing to the importance of the Ku heterodimer for repairing damage induced by both types of radiation. Further research using other high-LET radiation sources is however needed to unravel the involvement of DNA double strand break repair pathways and proteins in the cellular response of human cells to high-
Refining the Performance of Sentinel Lymph Node Biopsy Post-neoadjuvant Chemotherapy in Patients with Pathologically Proven Pre-treatment Node-positive Breast Cancer: An Update for Clinical Practice.

BACKGROUND Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) has become the standard treatment regimen for locally advanced breast cancer and has recently been incorporated into the treatment of early breast cancer. It allows down-staging of tumors favoring breast-conservative surgery over mastectomy. Furthermore, NAC results in nodal conversion in about 40% of patients. This favorable outcome has complicated the decision-making regarding the best approach in managing the axilla post-treatment; especially in pathologically proven nodal disease prior to NAC. Axillary lymph node clearance is still the standard-of-care for this group of patients; however, it is clearly an over-treatment in a substantial number of patients. Given the high accuracy of sentinel lymph node biopsy (SLNB) post-NAC in clinically node-negative cases prior to treatment, substantial research has been carried out in order to validate the feasibility of post-NAC SLNB in pathologically proven node-positive cases. The results so far are still inconclusive, yet promising. MATERIALS AND METHODS We performed a computer-aided review of the literature for relevant articles on the performance of SLNB post-NAC in pathologically proven node-positive patients prior to chemotherapy. We also targeted studies on important factors that can refine the accuracy of SLNB in this group of patients, as well as elements favoring pathological complete response. All studies focusing on post-NAC SLNB in pre-treatment node-positive cases including randomized controlled trials, retrospective and prospective series, review articles, and two meta-analyses were included. RESULTS The review established a false-negative rate of 14-15.1% and an IR of 89-92.3%. Several technical enhancements, as well as imaging modalities, may be incorporated to improve the performance of SLNB. Furthermore, selected patients with more likelihood of pathological complete response represent the best candidates for this technique. CONCLUSION SLNB is a valid option after NAC in patients with pathologically proven node-positive breast cancer, given the high node-conversion rate. The literature demonstrated a false-negative rate that is slightly higher than that of patients initially node-negative which although might increase the locoregional recurrence in theory, has no effect on chemotherapy-decision making, and will most probably have no impact on overall survival. We identified several measures to refine its accuracy.
A Digital Output Piezoelectric Accelerometer using Pattenrned Pb(Zr, Ti)O3 Thin Films Electrically Connected in Series

We propose a digital output piezoelectric accelerometer for chicken health monitoring. The accelerometer has patterned Pb(Zr, Ti)O3 (PZT) thin films electrically acc connected in series, which accompany CMOS switches. The elerometer converts acceleration into number of on-state CMOS switches, which can be called as "digital output". Since the accelerometer are based on piezoelectric effect, does not need voltage amplifier and A/D converter, ultra low power consumption is expected. We have fabricated the digital output piezoelectric accelerometer through sol-gel deposition of PZT thin films and MEMS micro fabrication process. The output voltage has increased with the number of connected PZT thin films, which indicate the potential to realize the proposed digital output piezoelectric accelerometer.
GPU Register Packing: Dynamically Exploiting Narrow-Width Operands to Improve Performance

Graphics processing units(GPUs) have been increasingly used to accelerate general purpose computations. By exploiting massive thread-level parallelism (TLP), GPUs can achieve high throughput as well as memory latency hiding. As a result, a very large register file (RF) is typically required to enable fast and low-cost context switching between tens of thousands of active threads. However, RF resource is still insufficient to enable all thread level parallelism and the lack of RF resources can hurt performance by limiting the occupancy of GPU threads. Moreover, if the available RF capacity can not fit the requirement of a thread block, GPU needs to fetch some variables from local memory which may lead to long memory access latencies. By observing that a large percentage of computed results actually have fewer significant bits compared to the full width of a 32-bit register for many GPGPU applications, we propose a GPU register packing scheme to dynamically exploit narrowwidth operands and pack multiple operands into a single fullwidth register. By using dynamically register packing, more RF space is available which allows GPU to enable more TLP through assigning additional thread blocks on SMs (Streaming Multiprocessors) and thus improve performance. The experimental results show that our GPU register packing scheme can achieve up to 1.96X speedup and 1.18X on average.
Loss Aversion, Instant Endowment and Risk-Bearing: The Relation between Stock-Based Compensation and Managerial Risk-Seeking Behavior

We examine the extent to which the behavioral agency model describes the relation between stock-based compensation and managerial risk-seeking behavior. The behavioral agency model, which incorporates prospect theory, predicts that while managers are more risk-seeking in the loss decision context than in the gain decision context because of loss aversion, such risk-seeking behavior in the loss context is mitigated because managers instantly endow stock-based compensation (i.e., wealth at stake), which increases their risk-bearing. We find that in general, managers are more risk-seeking in the loss context than in the gain context, consistent with prospect theory. Contrary to prospect theory, however, we find that managers endowed with in-the-money stock options are less risk-seeking than managers endowed with at-the-money stock options. This finding is also contrary to agency theory which generally predicts that stock options encourage risk-seeking behavior. We also explore whether managers' subjective valuation of stock options is associated with risk-seeking behavior. We find evidence consistent with managers valuing stock options more than restricted stock of similar objective value. Overall, our results support the propositions based on the behavioral agency model. Moreover, managers appear to consider both risk-bearing as well as subjective valuations of stock-based compensation in their decision-making process. Our findings are important for those using and evaluating the efficacy of different types of stock-based compensation in inducing firm value-increasing risk-seeking behavior.
The Use of Post-Purchase Communication to Reduce Dissonance and Improve Direct Marketing Effectiveness

T business communication literature has, in the last few years, substantially neglected the role of communication in direct sales and mass marketing. This is very surprising since business communication has roots in direct mail advertising. Mail solicitation was in its infancy in 1900 when Sherwin Cody helped to nurture it (see Daniel, 1982). Cody, an early pioneer in the field, influenced many in the area to think about psychological elements in direct mail marketing and business communication. Perhaps the most recent example, even tangentially related, is Sherblom's (1988) article dealing with electronic mail, in which he investigated the type of mail sent in an organization and the presence / absence of a signature. Sherblom found that vertically directed mail was more restricted than horizontal and that mail sent vertically or interdepartmentally was more likely to have a signature. Furthermore, a review of business communication textbooks indicates little attention paid to theories of persuasion which are often used as a basis for understanding marketing and advertising (persuasive communications) phenomenon. Shelbry (1986) synthesized a number of basic theories of persuasion in an attempt to encourage a more theoretical view of communication. Among the four approaches she feels are useful to the discipline is the contingency approach which focuses on the relationship between a stimulus and the receiver's frames of reference. One of the most popular contingency theories of persuasion is Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance. Festinger's work is the theoretical foundation upon which this present research is based. Festinger postulated:
Impact of Corporate Governance Regulation on Market Risk

In case of public limited companies, there has been a separation of ownership from management. There is a lack of congruence between the interests of shareholders and managers. Shareholders always believe in maximizing their wealth while managers may invest the funds provided by shareholders in projects which may increase the size of the company but may provide inadequate returns to the shareholders. Managers are better informed than shareholders about the prospects of the company. Thus, there is an information asymmetry between shareholders and managers. This leads to agency cost. The system should be designed in such a way that it reduces the information asymmetry between them. One of the means in which information asymmetry can be reduced between shareholders and managers is to impose an effective regulation on the companies such that the shareholders are better informed about the prospects of the company. Mandatory disclosures on corporate governance means equity investors in a company have access to more information about the current performance and future prospects of the company. This information effect of corporate disclosures provides better estimates to the investors regarding the expected future cash flows. The reduction in the degree of uncertainty regarding the estimates of the firm�s future cash flows lowers beta (market risk) of the firm. Thus, from a theoretical point of view, the impact of corporate governance regulation has an inverse impact on market risk To achieve the same objective, SEBI, a regulator of the Indian capital market, imposed a regulation for the listed public limited companies with effect from March 31, 2001. This paper attempts to analyse whether the corporate governance regulation has reduced the market risk of the Indian A-Group companies of BSE. To investigate the impact of the regulation on market risk, a sample carrying more than thirteen years time period from March 1995 to August 2008, has been chosen. The results show that neither the corporate governance regulation imposed on March 31, 2001 nor the amendments on the same brought on January 1, 2006 has been able to significantly reduce the market risk of A-Group companies of BSE. However, the investors consider the information content provided in the amendments more genuine and simpler than the information content provided in the original regulation.