Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On Optimal Ordering in the Optimal Stopping Problem

Consider a player who can probe a sequence of n independent random variables X1, . , Xn with known distributions. After observing (the realized value of) Xi, the player needs to decide whether to stop and earn reward Xi, or reject the reward and probe the next variable Xi+1. The goal is to maximize the expected reward at the stopping time. This is an instance of the optimal stopping problem, which is a fundamental problem studied from many different aspects in mathematics, statistics, and computer science, and has found a wide variety of applications in sequential decision making and mechanism design. When the order in which the random variables X1,. ,Xnare probed is fixed, the optimal stopping strategy can be found by solving a simple dynamic program. Under this strategy, at every step i, the player would compare the realized value of the current random variable Xi to the expected reward (under the optimal strategy for the remaining subproblem) from the remaining variables Xi+1, . ,Xn, and stop if the former is greater than the latter. In this paper, we focus on the relatively less studied question of optimizing the order in which the random variables should be probed. Specifically, besides choosing a stopping strategy, if the player is free to choose the order in which the random variables are probed, then which ordering would maximize the expected reward at the stopping time? The optimal ordering problem has been previously studied in mathematics and statistics literature in the 80's (e.g., Gilat[6], Hill and Hordijk[8], and Hill[7]). However the focus there has been on analytically characterizing the optimal order for some special structured cases (like Bernoulli and exponential distributions). One difficulty in such a study is that the nature of this problem changes significantly depending on the type of distributions considered. For example, when distributions are Bernoulli or exponential, the optimal ordering can be found analytically [8], but, the problem remains nontrivial for uniform distributions.
The Proportion of Residences in European Countries with Ventilation Rates below the Regulation Based Limit Value

Abstract The rate of ventilation in buildings is regulated in most European countries to provide a sufficient exchange of clean air to maintain and ensure the health and comfort of building occupants. Information on the actual level of ventilation rates is needed to estimate the consequences of reduced ventilation on the potential increasing risk of health problems. Unfortunately only limited population based data are available on the measured ventilation rates of residences in European countries. To fill this data gap a model was developed that combines information from existing measurements, national legislation and building codes to estimate the probability distributions of ventilation rates in the residences of 26 European countries. These distributions were analysed against national building statistics to produce information on the number of residences which do not meet ventilation requirements as defined by the relevant national building codes. Earlier results suggest that the mean ± SD air change rate per hour (ac/h) in residences varies from 0.6±0.4 in northern Europe to 1.1 ± 0.8 in southern Europe, and the population weighted mean of the 26 European countries is 0.8 ± 0.5. Further analysis of the distributions indicated that, on average, 32% of the residences in the 17 European countries that have some regulations defining minimum ventilation rates have mean air change rates below the defined limits. This means that around 53 million residences in total with an estimated number of people living in these residences of approximately 126 million are under ventilated. At country level the percentage of residences having mean ventilation rate below the national limit varies from 7% in Bulgaria to 46% in the Netherlands. In addition, the proportion of residences with mean ventilation rates below three other limit values: 1) 8 L/s per person, 2) 0.5 ac/h based on the EN15251 standard, and 3) a limit value based on the ASHRAE 62.1 standard were estimated.
Jim Crow Guide: The Way It Was

"Jim Crow Guide" documents the system of legally imposed American apartheid that prevailed during what Kennedy calls "the long century from emancipation to the overcoming". The mock guidebook covers every area of activity where the tentacles of Jim Crow reached, dictating where and with whom one could live, study, work, travel, eat, sleep, play, assemble or marry. Drawing on primary and secondary written sources as well as unwritten custom and etiquette, Kennedy cites applicable strictures and typical individual experiences and includes accounts of punishment administered to violators. While Kennedy's focus is black-white relations, the guide also reports how Jim Crow relegated Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians and some religious minorities to second-class citizenship. From the texts of state statutes, municipal ordinances, federal regulations, and judicial rulings, Kennedy exhumes the legalistic skeleton of Jim Crow in a work for scholars and general readers.
A simulation‐free group sequential design with max‐combo tests in the presence of non‐proportional hazards

Non‐proportional hazards (NPH) have been observed in many immuno‐oncology clinical trials. Weighted log‐rank tests (WLRT) with suitable weights can be used to improve the power of detecting the difference between survival curves in the presence of NPH. However, it is not easy to choose a proper WLRT in practice. A versatile max‐combo test was proposed to achieve the balance of robustness and efficiency, and has received increasing attention recently. Survival trials often warrant interim analyses due to their high cost and long durations. The integration and implementation of max‐combo tests in interim analyses often require extensive simulation studies. In this report, we propose a simulation‐free approach for group sequential designs with the max‐combo test in survival trials. The simulation results support that the proposed method can successfully control the type I error rate and offer excellent accuracy and flexibility in estimating sample sizes, with light computation burden. Notably, our method displays strong robustness towards various model misspecifications and has been implemented in an R package.
Analog BiCMOS Design: Practices and Pitfalls

DEVICES Introduction Silicon Conductivity pn Junctions Diode Current Bipolar Transistors MOS Transistors DMOS Transistors Zener Diodes EpiFets DEVICE MODELS Introduction Bipolar Transistors MOS Transistors Simple Small Signal Models for Hand Calculations CURRENT SOURCES Current Mirrors in Bipolar Technology Current Mirrors in MOS Technology VOLTAGE REFERENCES Simple Voltage References Vbe Multiplier Zener Voltage Reference Temperature Characteristics of Ic and Vbe Bandgap Voltage Reference AMPLIFIERS The Common-Emitter Amplifier The Common-Base Amplifier Common-Collector Amplifiers Two-Transistor Amplifiers CC-CE and CC-CC Amplifiers The Darlington Configuration The CE-CB Amplifiers or Cascode Emitter-Coupled Pairs The MOS Case: The Common-Source Amplifier The CMOS Inverter The Common-Source Amplifier with Source Degeneration The MOS Cascode Amplifier The Common Drain (Source Follower) Amplifier Source-Couple Pairs COMPARATORS Comparator with Vbe -Dependent Hysteresis The Bandgap Reference Comparator Operational Amplifiers A Programmable Current Reference A Triangle-Wave Oscillator A Four-Bit Current Summing DAC The MOS Case AMPLIFIER OUTPUT STAGES The Emitter Follower: A Class A Output Stage The Common-Emitter Configuration as a Class A Output Stage The Class B (Push-Pull) Output The Class AB Output Stage CMOS Output Stages Overcurrent Protection PITFALLS IR Drops Lateral pnp npn Transistors Comparators Latchup Floating Tubs Parasitic MOS Transistors DESIGN PRACTICES Matching Electrostatic Discharge Protection (ESD) ESD Protection Circuit Analysis INDEX Each chapter also includes exercises
LAS REDES NEURONALES Y LA EVALUACIÓN DEL RIESGO DE CRÉDITO

A pesar del escepticismo del mundo academico sobre los avances de la inteligencia artificial, las redes neuronales han abierto un campo de exploracion bursatil que aun tiene mucho por investigar. Atendiendo a las ventajas del uso de las redes neuronales artificiales (ANN, por sus siglas en ingles) y a su capacidad para estimar modelos no lineales, en este articulo se muestra la aplicacion de las redes neuronales a la cuantificacion del riesgo de credito. Ademas, se hace el desarrollo teorico de los fundamentos basicos de las redes neuronales. Para presentar las metodologias de medicion de riesgo de credito basados en redes neuronales, y aplicarlas a la base de datos de una cartera comercial, fue necesario elaborar un analisis exploratorio de cada una de las variables e investigar la correlacion entre ellas. El objetivo del analisis es encontrar algunas relaciones para grupos determinados de la poblacion, de acuerdo con sus caracteristicas particulares. Por tanto, se cruzan variables de cada cliente, del credito y del comportamiento contra la variable default (fallidos y no fallidos). Variable que establece un procedimiento de clasificacion, y permite determinar las ponderaciones necesarias y, ademas, establece la probabilidad de fallido.
The Best Value ICT Industry

The ICT industry has struggled with performance in the last 10 years. Tools, processes, and techniques have been developed in attempts to improve performance. Three of the most recent proposed solutions which have shown previous results of success include decreasing the size of projects, using agile project management, and using the best value approach. This paper will focus on differentiating between the three approaches and introduces the latest solution, the best value approach. After analyzing the three approaches, the paper proposes that the best value approach is the only one that requires the utilization of expertise. Using a case study of Schuberg Philis, the paper proposes that the Schuberg Philis model uses the agile approach but has most of the characteristics of the best value approach. In the course of the study and analysis, the Schuberg Philis company has moved from the agile approach to the Best Value approach.
The Challenge of Maintaining or Replacing an Aging Airlift Fleet: A Cost/Capability Analysis for the Brazilian Air Force Mobility System.

Abstract : Despite the high Operational and Support costs incurred, the Brazilian Air Force's (BAF) declining budget has led to the establishment of conservative policies that favor short run solutions for a critical BAF airlift problem of operating an aging fleet. As a result of this policy, service life extensions of older airlift aircraft are the preferred solution. Using an equal airlift capacity approach to examine the Brazilian Air Force mobility system, this research performs a cost comparison analysis between two aircraft currently in operation at Brazilian's airlift command: C-130 Hercules and C-95 Bandeirante. To accomplish the cost analysis, this research develops an Operation and Support aircraft cost model adapted to the Brazilian's airlift system requirements. Assuming the same level of annual flying hours for the next 20 years, the research cost analysis concludes that the proposed alternative of acquiring C-130 aircraft to replace the older C-95 could result in savings of at least 25 percent, without reducing the BAF mobility capacity.
Coordinated Management of Processor Configuration and Cache Partitioning to Optimize Energy under QoS Constraints

An effective way to improve energy efficiency is to throttle hardware resources to meet a certain QoS target, specified as a performance constraint, associated with all applications running on a multicore system. Prior art has proposed resource management (RM) frameworks in which the share of the last-level cache (LLC) assigned to each processor core and the voltage-frequency (VF) setting for each core is managed in a coordinated fashion to reduce energy. A drawback of such a scheme is that, while one core gives up LLC resources for another core, the performance drop must be compensated by a higher VF setting which leads to a quadratic increase in energy consumption. By allowing each core to be adapted to exploit instruction and memory-level parallelism (ILP/MLP), substantially higher energy savings are enabled.This paper proposes a coordinated RM for LLC partitioning, processor adaptation, and per-core VF scaling. A first contribution is a systematic study of the resource trade-offs enabled when trading between the three classes of resources in a coordinated fashion. A second contribution is a new RM framework that utilizes these trade-offs to save more energy. Finally, a challenge to accurately model the impact of resource throttling on performance is to predict the amount of MLP with high accuracy. To this end, the paper contributes with a mechanism that estimates the effect of MLP over different processor configurations and LLC allocations. Overall, we show that up to 18% of energy, and on average 10%, can be saved using the proposed scheme.
Agent-Oriented Software Engineering III: Third International Workshop, AOSE 2002, Bologna, Italy, July 15, 2002, Revised Papers and Invited Contributions

Modeling, Specification, and Validation. - Specifying Electronic Societies with the Causal Calculator. - Modeling Agents and Their Environment. - Validation of Multiagent Systems by Symbolic Model Checking. - Patterns,Architectures,and Reuse. - Patterns in Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. - Concurrent Architecture for a Multi-agent Platform. - Re-use of Interaction Protocols for Agent-Based Control Applications. - Architecting for Reuse: A Software Framework for Automated Negotiation. - Multi-agent and Software Architectures: A Comparative Case Study. - UML and Agent Systems. - Using UML State Machine Models for More Precise and Flexible JADE Agent Behaviors. - Generating Machine Processable Representations of Textual Representations of AUML. - A UML Profile for External Agent-Object-Relationship (AOR) Models. - Extending Agent UML Sequence Diagrams. - Methodologies and Tools. - The Tropos Software Development Methodology: Processes, Models and Diagrams. - Prometheus: A Methodology for Developing Intelligent Agents. - Tool-Supported Process Analysis and Design for the Development of Multi-agent Systems. - Assembling Agent Oriented Software Engineering Methodologies from Features. - Positions and Perspectives. - Agent-Oriented Software Technologies: Flaws and Remedies.
Fabrication of SOI structures by uniform zone melting recrystallization for high voltage ICs

We present new experimental results about a method for creating thick silicon films on localized buried oxide layers, by superficial melting and solidification using a bank of tungsten halogen lamps. The purpose of this technique is to obtain cost-effective "partially SOI" substrates for high voltage smart power applications. Chemical defect revelation has been carried out in the SOI and seeded regions. N-channel MOSFETs have also been fabricated. It appears that crystallographic and electrical quality is sufficient for device processing.
Understanding the Effects of Blast Wave on the Intracranial Pressure and Traumatic Brain Injury in Rodents and Humans Using Experimental Shock Tube and Numerical Simulations

Abstract : Blast induced neurotrauma (BINT) has been designated as the signature injury to warfighters in the recent military conflicts. In the past decade, conflicts in Iraq (operation Iraqi freedom) and Afghanistan (operation enduring freedom) as well as the increasing burden of the terrorism around the world resulted in an increased number of cases with blast Traumatic Brain Injury (bTBI). Recently, a lot of research has been done to study the neurological and neurochemical degenerations resulting from BINT using animal models especially rat models. However, it is not clear how and whether the biological outcomes from animal models can be translated to humans; this work is aimed to address this issue. In this dissertation, the criteria for achieving a standardized methodology to produce shock blast waves are identified. Firstly, shock tube adjustable parameters (SAPs) such as breech length, type of gas and membrane thickness were used for controlling and producing desired blast waves by manipulating shock wave parameters (SWPs). Secondly, using a surrogate head model, the data from the laboratory experiments were compared with experimental data obtained from the field explosions data to show the validity of the laboratory experiments. Finally, effect of test section location on the fidelity of the rat model in simulating field conditions was studied. Through these steps a standardized and accurate method of replicating the field blast was established. Using the standardized methodology to model blast waves, the intracranial pressure for various incident pressures on the rat model was studied. Furthermore, to understand the mechanisms of loading and to study the influence of field variables, a finite element model of rat along with the simple ellipsoidal model was developed.
Vertebrobasilar Artery Geometry and Bisilar Artery Plaques: A High-Resolution Magnetic Resonance Imaging Stydy

Background Atherosclerotic plaques are often present in regions with complicated flow patterns. Vascular morphology plays a role in hemodynamics. In this study, we investigate the relationship between the geometry of the vertebrobasilar artery system and the basilar artery (BA) plaque prevalence.Methods We enrolled 290 patients with posterior circulation ischemic stroke. We distinguished four configurations of the vertebrobasilar artery: Walking, Tuning Fork, Lambda, and No Confluence. The diameter of the vertebral artery (VA) and the number of bends in the intracranial VA segment was assessed using three-dimensional time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography. We differentiated between multi-bending (≥ 3 bends) and oligo-bending (< 3 bends) VAs. High-resolution magnetic resonance imaging was used to evaluate BA plaques. Logistic regression models examined the relationship between the geometry type and BA plaque prevalence.Results After adjusting for sex, age, body mass index ≥ 28, hypertension, and diabetes mellitus, the Walking, Lambda, and No Confluence geometries were associated with the presence of BA plaque. Patients with multi-bending VAs in both the Walking (71.43%, P = 0.003) and Lambda group (40.43%, P = 0.018) had more plaques compared to patients with oligo-bending VAs in these groups. In the Lambda group, the diameter difference between the VAs was larger in patients with BA plaques than that in patients without BA plaques (1.4 mm vs. 0.9 mm, P < 0.001). Conclusions The Walking, Lambda, and No Confluence geometry, ≥ 3 bends in the VAs, and a large diameter difference between the VAs were associated with the presence of BA plaque.
Streaming Bayesian Inference for Crowdsourced Classification

A key challenge in crowdsourcing is inferring the ground truth from noisy and unreliable data. To do so, existing approaches rely on collecting redundant information from the crowd, and aggregating it with some probabilistic method. However, oftentimes such methods are computationally inefficient, are restricted to some specific settings, or lack theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we revisit the problem of binary classification from crowdsourced data. Specifically we propose Streaming Bayesian Inference for Crowdsourcing (SBIC), a new algorithm that does not suffer from any of these limitations. First, SBIC has low complexity and can be used in a real-time online setting. Second, SBIC has the same accuracy as the best state-of-the-art algorithms in all settings. Third, SBIC has provable asymptotic guarantees both in the online and offline settings.
ac-driven annular Josephson junctions: The missing Shapiro steps

Examination of an annular system of underdamped Josephson junctions in the presence of external radiation showed that the ability of the system to lock with some external radiation was determined not only by the number but also by the type of rotating excitations (fluxons or antifluxons). Shapiro steps can be observed in the current-voltage characteristics only in the system with trapped fluxons or in the system with fluxon-antifluxon pairs. If the trapped fluxons circulate simultaneously with fluxon-antifluxon pairs, there are no Shapiro steps regardless of the amplitude or frequency of the applied external radiation.
Spatial Light Modulator Technology: Materials, Devices and Applications

Nematic liquid crystals physical properties of smectic liquid crystals and novel electro-optic effects nonlinear optical properties of organic structures - fundamentals and applications photorefractive materials multiple quantum well spatial light modulators FLC spatial light modulators the magneto-optic spatial light modulator (MOSLM) charge-transfer-plate membrane-mirror light modulators acousto-optic Bragg cell devices smart pixels - technology and applications to parallel computing SLMs in optical computing display applications of SLMs SLMs for optical switching real-time holoography, innovative adaptive optics and compensated optical processors using spatial light modulators.
Real-Time Ultra-Low Power ECG Anomaly Detection Using an Event-Driven Neuromorphic Processor

Accurate detection of pathological conditions in human subjects can be achieved through off-line analysis of recorded biological signals such as electrocardiograms (ECGs). However, human diagnosis is time-consuming and expensive, as it requires the time of medical professionals. This is especially inefficient when indicative patterns in the biological signals are infrequent. Moreover, patients with suspected pathologies are often monitored for extended periods, requiring the storage and examination of large amounts of non-pathological data, and entailing a difficult visual search task for diagnosing professionals. In this work we propose a compact and sub-mW low power neural processing system that can be used to perform on-line and real-time preliminary diagnosis of pathological conditions, to raise warnings for the existence of possible pathological conditions, or to trigger an off-line data recording system for further analysis by a medical professional. We apply the system to real-time classification of ECG data for distinguishing between healthy heartbeats and pathological rhythms. Multi-channel analog ECG traces are encoded as asynchronous streams of binary events and processed using a spiking recurrent neural network operated in a reservoir computing paradigm. An event-driven neuron output layer is then trained to recognize one of several pathologies. Finally, the filtered activity of this output layer is used to generate a binary trigger signal indicating the presence or absence of a pathological pattern. We validate the approach proposed using a Dynamic Neuromorphic Asynchronous Processor (DYNAP) chip, implemented using a standard 180 nm CMOS VLSI process, and present experimental results measured from the chip.