nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
A fast and accurate motion descriptor for human action recognition applications
Venue: 2016 23rd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR)

With the availability of the recent human skeleton extraction algorithm introduced by Shotton et al.  an interest for skeleton based action recognition methods has been renewed. Despite the importance of the low latency aspect in applications, it can be noted that the majority of recent approaches has not been evaluated in terms of computational cost. In this paper, a novel fast and accurate human action descriptor named Kinematic Spline Curves (KSC) is introduced. This descriptor is built by interpolating the kinematics of joints (position, velocity and acceleration) To overcome the anthropometric and the execution rate variability, we respectively propose the use of a skeleton normalization and a temporal normalization. For this purpose, a new temporal normalization method based on the Normalized Accumulated kinetic Energy (NAE) of the human skeleton is suggested. Finally, the classification step is performed using a linear Support Vector Machine (SVM) Experimental results on challenging benchmarks show the efficiency of our approach in terms of recognition accuracy and computational latency.
Delay reduction in real time recognition of human activity for stroke rehabilitation
Venue: 2016 First International Workshop on Sensing, Processing and Learning for Intelligent Machines (SPLINE)

Assisting patients to perform activity of daily living (ADLs) is a challenging task for both human and machine. Hence, developing a computer based rehabilitation system to re train patients to carry out daily activities is an essential step towards facilitating rehabilitation of stroke patients with apraxia and action disorganization syndrome (AADS) This paper presents a real time hidden Markov model (HMM) based human activity recognizer, and proposes a technique to reduce the time delay occurred during the decoding stage. Results are reported for complete tea making trials. In this study, the input features are recorded using sensors attached to the objects involved in the tea making task, plus hand coordinate data captured using KinectTM sensor. A coaster of sensors, comprising an accelerometer and three force sensitive resistors, are packaged in a unit which can be easily attached to the base of an object. A parallel asynchronous set of detectors, each responsible for the detection of one sub goal in the tea making task, are used to address challenges arising from overlaps between human actions. The proposed activity recognition system with the modified HMM topology provides a practical solution to the action recognition problem and reduces the time delay by 64% with no loss in accuracy.
A multiple case study of self perceived affective experiences and self reported foreign language performances from a dynamic systems theory perspective

This study aims to explore the non linear interactions between the self perceived affective experiences of a group of learners and their self evaluated performances in a foreign language (FL) classroom through the lens of Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) a theory which developed from advances in the understanding of complex and nonlinear systems in physics and mathematics. The present study bridges several disciplines, namely, mathematics, physics, psychology, applied linguistics and education, in order to avoid over simplifying the phenomenon by focusing on fragments of reality. This study endeavours to transcend the boundaries between the above disciplines.  DST concepts from mathematics and physics were initially translated into tangible FL terms acceptable to social science researchers. In addition, in order to engage with the learners, a phenomenographic approach was adopted as a qualitative method to explore the dynamism of the learners' affective experiences and their reflections on their experiences from a second order perspective. 12 second year Chinese students of English from a Foreign Language University in China participated in this six month longitudinal study. Diary, Qualitative Survey, Semi structured Interview and Class Observation were utilised for data collection. Thematic Analysis (TA) was employed to describe the phenomena at a collective level. Finally, a three layer model, the Dynamic Model of Foreign Language Development was proposed to draw a conclusion from this study, aiming to present a novel way of understanding the distinctive features of the learners' constant self evaluations and their perceptions in the different contexts across time. In summary, at a collective level, the relevant attractor states from the second layer, which were determined by three main forces, namely, cognition, emotion and motivation from the first layer, contribute to making up the relevant learning experiences in the third layer. This study has contributed to the under studied area of emotions and performance in FL learning. Several research and pedagogical implications have been identified. The results of this study contribute to a possible way to figure out terminological issues in an interdisciplinary study. The findings suggest that DST could allow a researcher to situate emotions and performances in one iterative system. DST might provide a possible logical solution to such a causality dilemma.
Investigating Students' Test Anxiety and Attitude toward Foreign Language Learning in Secondary School in Ilam.

This study tried to examine the level of anxiety of Iranian high school students in English language exams and their attitudes towards English language learning. Further, relationship between these two variables and the differences between test anxiety and attitude in different genders and majors of study were addressed. Westside Test Anxiety Scale and Language Learning Attitudes Questionnaire were used as research instruments to collect the data. The instruments were translated into Persian and their reliability and validity were confirmed. They were, then, administered to 400 male and female high school students. The findings showed that 60% of students had an above average level of test anxiety. However, no significant difference in test anxiety was found between male and female participants. Nonetheless, the level of Incapacity was higher among females but the level of Worry was not significantly different. Significant differences in anxiety level were found between students of Mathematics vs. Humanity; Science vs. General, and Humanity vs. General, yet no difference was found between students of different majors regarding attitude. However, female participants tended to have more optimistic attitudes toward English language learning. In spite of the fact that meaningful differences were found between gender vs. Risk taking and Ambiguity, no meaningful relationships were found between gender and Self image, Inhibition and Ego Permeability. In general, there was a meaningful, nonetheless weak, relationship between test anxiety and attitude, and between test anxiety and age.
Diversity and Distribution of Heavy Metal Resistant Bacteria in Polluted Sediments of the Araca Bay, Sao Sebastiao (SP) and the Relationship Between Heavy Metals and Organic Matter Concentrations
Venue: Microbial Ecology

Heavy metals influence the population size, diversity, and metabolic activity of bacteria. In turn, bacteria can develop heavy metal resistance mechanisms, and this can be used in bioremediation of contaminated areas. The purpose of the present study was to understand how heavy metals concentration influence on diversity and distribution of heavy metal resistant bacteria in Araca Bay, Sao Sebastiao, on the Sao Paulo coast of Brazil. The hypothesis is that activities that contribute for heavy metal disposal and the increase of metals concentrations in environment can influence in density, diversity, and distribution of heavy metal resistant bacteria. Only 12 of the isolated bacteria were sensitive to all of the metals tested. We observed that the highest percentage of resistant strains were in areas closest to the Sao Sebastiao channel, where port activity occurs and have bigger heavy metals concentrations. Bacterial isolated were most resistant to Cr, followed by Zn, Cd, and Cu. Few strains resisted to Cd levels greater than 200 mg L 1. In respect to Cr, 36 of the strains were able to grow in the presence of as much as 3200 mg L 1. Few strains were able to grow at concentrations of Zn and Cu as high as 1600 mg L 1, and none grew at the highest concentration of 3200 mg L 1. Bacillus sp. was most frequently isolated and may be the dominant genus in heavy metal polluted areas. Staphylococcus sp. Planococcus maritimus, and Vibrio aginolyticus were also isolated, suggesting their potential in bioremediation of contaminated sites.
A novel HLA B*40 allele, B*40:01:40, identified in a Chinese individual
Venue: International journal of immunogenetics

A new allele, officially named B*40:01:40, was detected in a Chinese individual by sequence based typing (SBT) The new allele differs from B*40:01:01 by a single nucleotide exchange at position 99 in codon 9, which results in synonymous substitution and seems not to compromise the HLA complex and T cell receptor interaction.
Sentence Clustering: A Comparative study

Clustering is one of the important steps in most of the text mining/information retrieval task like text summarization, domain identification etc. We are working on automatic abstractive text summarization where we require finding out tightly coupled sentences that could be merged and compressed to generate compact abstract summary. For our pipeline we require a clustering technique that does not take no. of clusters to be formed in advance as input.Therefore, we studied two important clustering techniques density based DBSCAN and graph based Markov Clustering Algorithm (MCL) in association with some sentence level relationships. Both the clustering techniques do not require no. of clusters to be formed in advance which is needed to generate summary of a text document without any intervention.Evaluation of sentence clustering is done using purity metric. Purity of both the sentence clustering technique is compared with baseline K means clustering technique.MCL with some sentence level features performs better than others and fits into our pipeline.
Query Biased Multi document Abstractive Summarization via Submodular Maximization Using Event Guidance
Venue: WAIM

This paper proposes an abstractive multi document summarization method. Given a document set, the system first generates sentence clusters through an event clustering algorithm using distributed representation. Each cluster is regarded as a subtopic of this set. Then we use a novel multi sentence compression method to generate K shortest paths for each cluster. Finally, some preferable paths are selected from these candidates to construct the final summary based on several customized submodular functions, which are designed to measure the summary quality from different perspectives. Experimental results on DUC 2005 and DUC 2007 datasets demonstrate that our method achieves better performance compared with the state of the art systems.
The Tobit Kalman Filter: An Estimator for Censored Measurements
Venue: IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology

Tobit model censored data arise in multiple engineering applications through saturating sensors, limit of detection effects, and image frame effects. In this brief, we introduce a novel formulation of the Kalman filter for Tobit Type 1 censored measurements. Our proposed formulation, called the Tobit Kalman filter, is identical to the standard Kalman filter in the no censoring case. At or near the censored region, the Tobit Kalman filter utilizes a local approximation of the probability of censoring in order to provide a fully recursive estimate of the state and state error covariance. The additional computational burden of the method compared with the standard Kalman filter is limited to the calculation of m normal probability density functions and m normal cumulative density functions per update, where m is the number of measurements.
Impact of Religiosity on Buying Behavior of Financial Products: A Literature Review

Introducing new product to the market is the only way to create sustainable competitive advantage. However, the success of any product/service in market is ultimately depended on consumer acceptance. Innovativeness is one of the individual characteristics that might influence the acceptance of novel product/services. Innovativeness itself also from other side might be affected by several factors such individual's religion affiliation and the level of commitment to his/her religion. This research study tested literature review of whether religiosity has significant influence on Muslim consumers' buying attitude and purchase intention of Financial Products.
Halal Cosmetics Adoption Among Young Muslim Consumers in Malaysia: Religiosity Concern

The global increase in Muslim populations and purchasing power has created a new demand for halal cosmetic product development.While the introduction of new product may facilitate companies in gaining competitive advantage, the failure rates of product innovation is also high. Owing to such interests, this paper aims to determine factors that motivate young adult Muslim consumers in the emerging market to adopt halal cosmetics. This study expands prior research by integrating Diffusion of Innovation theory and religiosity dimension to explain the antecedents of halal cosmetics adoption among young Muslim consumers. Data were collected from 238 young Muslim consumers using questionnaires distributed at a number of supermarkets in Kuala Lumpur. The conceptual model and hypotheses developed were tested using partial leased square.Our results demonstrate that perceived product characteristics, social influence and consumer innovativeness influence young Muslim consumers to adopt halal cosmetics products. This study also report religiosity as moderator between these three predictors and halal cosmetic adoption.
Sensory evaluation based fuzzy AHP approach for material selection in customized garment design and development process

Material selection is the most difficult section in the customized garment product design and development process. This study aims to create a hierarchical framework for material selection. The analytic hierarchy process and fuzzy sets theories have been applied to mindshare the diverse requirements from the customer and inherent interaction/interdependencies among these requirements. Sensory evaluation ensures a quick and effective selection without complex laboratory test such as KES and FAST, using the professional knowledge of the designers. A real empirical application for the physically disabled people is carried out to demonstrate the proposed method. Both the theoretical and practical background of this paper have indicated the fuzzy analytical network process can capture expert's knowledge existing in the form of incomplete, ambiguous and vague information for the mutual influence on attribute and criteria of the material selection.
Thermophoresis and Brownian motion effects on MHD bioconvection of nanofluid with nonlinear thermal radiation and quartic chemical reaction past an upper horizontal surface of a paraboloid of revolution

In this paper, the combined effects of buoyancy force, Brownian motion, thermophoresis and quartic autocatalytic kind of chemical reaction on bioconvection of nanofluid containing gyrotactic microorganism over an upper horizontal surface of a paraboloid of revolution are analyzed. The case of unequal diffusion coefficients of reactant A (bulk fluid) and reactant B (catalyst at the surface) in the presence of nonlinear thermal radiation is presented. The fluid under consideration contains random movement of microscopic nanoparticles (i.e. Brownian motion) Moreover, it is assumed that the thermo physical of the nanofluid does not vary with volume fraction. The governing nonlinear partial differential equations are obtained and transformed into a system of coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations using similarity transformations and then tackled numerically using the Runge Kutta fourth order method with shooting technique. Good agreement is obtained between the solutions of RK4SM and MATLAB bvp5c for a limiting case. The influence of pertinent parameters are illustrated graphically and discussed. The presence of Brownian motion and thermophoresis decreases and increases concentration of reactant B (heterogeneous) respectively. Brownian motion boosts concentration of bulk fluid while thermophoresis reduces it.
Liouville Brownian motion

We construct a stochastic process, called the Liouville Brownian motion which we conjecture to be the scaling limit of random walks on large planar maps which are embedded in the euclidean plane or in the sphere in a conformal manner. Our construction works for all universality classes of planar maps satisfying \gamma \gamma_c=2$ In particular, this includes the interesting case of \gamma=\sqrt{8/3} which corresponds to the conjectured scaling limit of large uniform planar $p$ angulations (with fixed $p\geq 3$ We start by constructing our process from some fixed point $x\in \R^2$ (or $x\in \S^2$ This amounts to changing the speed of a standard two dimensional brownian motion $B_t$ depending on the local behaviour of the Liouville measure $M_\gamma(dz) e^\gamma X} dz$ (where $X$ is a Gaussien Free Field, say on \S^2$ A significant part of the paper focuses on extending this construction simultaneously to all points $x\in \R^2$ or \S^2$ in such a way that one obtains a semi group $P_\t$ (the Liouville semi group) We prove that the associated Markov process is a Feller diffusion for all \gamma<\gamma_c=2$ and that for \gamma<\sqrt{2} the Liouville measure $M_\gamma$ is invariant under $P_\t$ (which in some sense shows that it is the right quantum gravity diffusion to consider) This Liouville Brownian motion enables us to give sense to part of the celebrated Feynman path integrals which are at the root of Liouville quantum gravity, the Liouville Brownian ones. Finally we believe that this work sheds some new light on the difficult problem of constructing a quantum metric out of the exponential of a Gaussian Free Field (see conjecture \ref{c.metric}
The Future of Using Earth Abundant Elements in Counter Electrodes for Dye Sensitized Solar Cells.
Venue: Advanced materials

With limited global resources for many of the elements that are found in some of the most common renewable energy technologies, there is a growing need to use "Earth abundant" elements as a long term solution to growing energy demands. The dye sensitized solar cell has the potential to produce low cost renewable energy, with inexpensive production and most components using Earth abundant elements. However, the most commonly used material for the cell counter electrode (CE) is platinum, an extremely expensive and rare element. A selection of the materials investigated as alternative CEs are discussed, including metal sulfides, oxides, carbides, and nitrides and carbon based materials such as carbon nanotubes, graphene, and conductive polymers. As well as having the potential for lower cost, these materials can also produce more efficient devices due to their high surface area and catalytic activity. Therefore, once issues such as stability have been studied in more detail and scale up of production methods are considered, there is a very promising future for the replacement of Pt in DSSCs with lower cost, Earth abundant alternatives.
MIX and match: mobile T6SS MIX effectors enhance bacterial fitness
Venue: Mobile genetic elements

Protein secretion systems that mediate interbacterial competition secret a wide repertoire of antibacterial toxins. A major player in these competitions is the newly discovered bacterial type VI secretion system (T6SS) We recently found that a subset of polymorphic MIX effectors, which are a widespread class of effectors secreted by T6SSs, are horizontally shared between marine bacteria and are used to diversify their T6SS effector repertoires, thus enhancing their environmental fitness. In this commentary, I expand on the ideas that were introduced in the previous report, and further speculate on the possible mobility of other MIX effectors. In addition, I discuss the possible role of horizontal gene transfer in the dissemination of MIX effectors through bacterial genomes, as well as its possible role in diversifying the T6SS effector repertoire.
Beer and the boro A perfect match!

Although football clubs (FCs) as firms are relatively unsustainable from a purely financial perspective, the club brands appear highly sustainable in comparison with many other industries (Kuper and Szymanski, 2012) While the ownership and the companies running the clubs may change, the club brands themselves appear to be more stable than in other industries where firms and brands go out of business, relocate or diversify to a far greater extent (e.g. Hannah, 1997) This may be because they are less vulnerable to competition FCs have historically been geographic, and while their catchment area may shrink during less successful periods, it will not disappear entirely. Furthermore, rival foreign clubs do not enter and supply soccer at lower prices (although foreign investors may bid to take over the ownership) and although English clubs as a whole could fall behind foreign competitors and lose their best players, foreign clubs have their own problems of finance and management (Kuper and Szymanski, 2012) Put succinctly, society can keep unprofitable clubs going cheaply: bank managers and tax collectors have historically appeared reluctant to close century old clubs and so society swallowed the losses. Perhaps clubs were and still are too small to fail. At the same time, the brand loyalty of supporters means that no matter how lousy the product, a hard core of customers will continue to purchase: "Soccer is more than just a business. No one has their ashes scattered down the aisle at Tesco" (Taylor, 1998, cited by Kuper and Szymanski, 2012, p.82)
Smart metering in smart grid framework: A review
Venue: 2016 Fourth International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Grid Computing (PDGC)

Here we present different ways in which smart grid can overcome different problems in conventional electricity grid. It is also explained that how smart grid can overhaul the Home Energy Management System (HEMS) Additionally, status of smart grid in India and abroad is given. As a result, it is concluded that smart grid development will allow consumers to use energy effectively and thus help in securing energy needs of India and the world. It will be an important component of Smart City mission of Indian Government as well.
Battery energy storage system: The key of future smart grid
Venue: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communication Workshops (PerCom Workshops)

One of the foundations of the Smart Grid is the real time information and data exchange between all of its components, facilitated by the extended application of smart metering and information technologies. Advanced control functions integrated with the complicated and slow dynamic electricity grid, will necessitate the use of an electricity buffer in order to maintain balance and stability at all times. Owing to their relatively low footprint and flexible geographical placement, Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) will play the key role of providing the electricity buffer of the future smart grid. The challenge of BESS and their different technologies will be discussed in various scenarios of grid related functionalities and roles. The development of BESS in Australia will be reviewed, identifying market potential and opportunities.