pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
From a literature review to a conceptual framework for health sector websites’ assessment

Health sector institutions’ websites need to act as effective web resources of information and interactive communication mediums to address the versatile demands of their multiple stakeholders. Academic and practitioner interest in health sector website assessment has considerably risen in recent years. This can be seen by the number of papers published in journals. The purpose of this paper is twofold to further establish the field. First, it offers a literature re-view on hospitals’ websites assessment. Second, it offers a conceptual framework to address the website assessment issue in health sector. The proposed assessment framework focuses on four main criteria: content, technology, services, and participation being evaluated by the use of several indicators. Academics, hospital practitioners, public officials and users will find the review and the framework useful, as they outline major lines of research in the field and a method to assess health institution websites.This paper is a result of the project “SmartEGOV: Harnessing EGOV for Smart Governance (Foundations, methods, Tools) / NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000037”, supported by Norte Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (EFDR).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
On the use of the tree structure of depth levels for comparing 3D object views

Today the simple availability of 3D sensory data, the evolution of 3D representations, and their application to object recognition and scene analysis tasks promise to improve autonomy and flexibility of\ud
robots in several domains. However, there has been little research into what can be gained through the explicit inclusion of the structural relations between parts of objects when quantifying similarity of their shape, and hence for shape-based object category recognition. We propose a Mathematical Morphology inspired hierarchical decomposition of 3D object views into peak components at evenly spaced depth levels, casting the 3D shape similarity problem to a tree of more elementary similarity problems. The matching of these trees of peak components is here compared to matching the individual components through optimal and greedy assignment in a simple feature space, trying to find the maximum-weight-maximal-match assignments. The matching thus achieved provides a metric of total shape similarity between object views. The three matching strategies are evaluated and compared through the category recognition accuracy on objects from a public set of 3D models. It turns out that all three methods yield similar accuracy on the simple features we used, while the greedy method is fastest
Streaming Algorithm for Euler Characteristic Curves of Multidimensional
  Images

We present an efficient algorithm to compute Euler characteristic curves of
gray scale images of arbitrary dimension. In various applications the Euler
characteristic curve is used as a descriptor of an image.
  Our algorithm is the first streaming algorithm for Euler characteristic
curves. The usage of streaming removes the necessity to store the entire image
in RAM. Experiments show that our implementation handles terabyte scale images
on commodity hardware. Due to lock-free parallelism, it scales well with the
number of processor cores. Our software---CHUNKYEuler---is available as open
source on Bitbucket.
  Additionally, we put the concept of the Euler characteristic curve in the
wider context of computational topology. In particular, we explain the
connection with persistence diagrams
Detection of curved lines with B-COSFIRE filters : a case study on crack delineation

The detection of curvilinear structures is an important step for various computer vision applications, ranging from medical image analysis for segmentation of blood vessels, to remote sensing for the identification of roads and rivers, and to biometrics and robotics, among others. This is a nontrivial task especially for the detection of thin or incomplete curvilinear structures surrounded with noise. We propose a general\ud
purpose curvilinear structure detector that uses the brain-inspired\ud
trainable B-COSFIRE filters. It consists of four main steps, namely nonlinear\ud
filtering with B-COSFIRE, thinning with non-maximum suppression,\ud
hysteresis thresholding and morphological closing. We demonstrate\ud
its effectiveness on a data set of noisy images with cracked pavements,\ud
where we achieve state-of-the-art results (F-measure = 0.865). The proposed\ud
method can be employed in any computer vision methodology that\ud
requires the delineation of curvilinear and elongated structures.non peer-reviewe
Quanta of Space-Time and Axiomatization of Physics

We consider Hilbert's sixth problem on the axiomatization of physics starting
with a higher degree Heisenberg commutation relation involving the Dirac
operator and the Feynman slash of scalar fields. The two sided version of the
commutation relation in dimension 4 implies volume quantization and determines
a noncommutative space which is a tensor product of continuous and discrete
spaces. This noncommutative space predicts the full structure of a unified
model of all particle interactions based on Pati-Salam symmetries or, as a
special case, the Standard Model. We study implications of this quantization
condition on Particle Physics, General Relativity, the cosmological constant
and dark matter. We demonstrate that, with little input, noncommutative
geometry gives a compelling and attractive picture about the nature and
structure of space-time.Comment: 47 pages. Contribution to the special issue of IJGMMP celebrating the
  one century anniversary of the program announced in 1916 by Hilbert entitled
  " Foundations of Mathematics and Physics", editors, Joseph Kouneiher, John
  Stachel and Salvatore Capozzieol
Copula Eigenfaces with Attributes: Semiparametric Principal Component Analysis for a Combined Color, Shape and Attribute Model

Principal component analysis is a ubiquitous method in parametric appearance modeling for describing dependency and variance in datasets. The method requires the observed data to be Gaussian-distributed. We show that this requirement is not fulfilled in the context of analysis and synthesis of facial appearance. The model mismatch leads to unnatural artifacts which are severe to human perception. As a remedy, we use a semiparametric Gaussian copula model, where dependency and variance are modeled separately. This model enables us to use arbitrary Gaussian and non-Gaussian marginal distributions. Moreover, facial color, shape and continuous or categorical attributes can be analyzed in an unified way. Accounting for the joint dependency between all modalities leads to a more specific face model. In practice, the proposed model can enhance performance of principal component analysis in existing pipelines: The steps for analysis and synthesis can be implemented as convenient pre- and post-processing steps
Culture at the Country Level

Contains fulltext :
                  177082_a.pdf (author's version ) (Open Access)This chapter introduces and critically discusses the idea of measuring the culture of countries and cross-national differences therein. We start by elaborating the theoretical foundations for studying culture at the country level. We highlight the use of countries or nations as a unit of analysis and pay special attention to the way in which a group-level construct such as culture has implications at lower levels of analysis, affecting the values and beliefs of individuals. After briefly tracing the history of national culture studies, we then offer a short description of the current leading frameworks of national culture such as those by Hofstede, GLOBE, Inglehart, and Schwartz. Throughout the chapter, the emphasis is on debates concerning extant frameworks conceptualizing and quantifying cultural differences between countries in different dimensions, which feeds into open questions concerning culture at the country level. We end with some concluding remarks
Automated Cryptographic Analysis of the Pedersen Commitment Scheme

Aiming for strong security assurance, recently there has been an increasing
interest in formal verification of cryptographic constructions. This paper
presents a mechanised formal verification of the popular Pedersen commitment
protocol, proving its security properties of correctness, perfect hiding, and
computational binding. To formally verify the protocol, we extended the theory
of EasyCrypt, a framework which allows for reasoning in the computational
model, to support the discrete logarithm and an abstraction of commitment
protocols. Commitments are building blocks of many cryptographic constructions,
for example, verifiable secret sharing, zero-knowledge proofs, and e-voting.
Our work paves the way for the verification of those more complex
constructions.Comment: 12 pages, conference MMM-ACNS 201
Quick Response Code Secure: a cryptographically secure anti-phishing tool for QR code attacks.

The two-dimensional quick response (QR) codes can be misleading due to the difficulty in differentiating a genuine QR code from a malicious one. Since, the vulnerability is practically part of their design, scanning a malicious QR code can direct the user to cloned malicious sites resulting in revealing sensitive information. In order, to evaluate the vulnerabilities and propose subsequent countermeasures, we demonstrate this type of attack through a simulated experiment, where a malicious QR code directs a user to a phishing site. For our experiment, we cloned Google's web page providing access to their email service (Gmail). Since, the URL is masqueraded into the QR code the unsuspecting user who opens the URL is directed to the malicious site. Our results proved that hackers could easily leverage QR codes into phishing attack vectors targeted at smartphone users, even bypassing web browsers safe browsing feature. In addition, the second part of our paper presents adequate countermeasures and introduces QRCS (Quick Response Code Secure). QRCS is a universal efficient and effective solution focusing exclusively on the authenticity of the originator and consequently, the integrity of QR code by using digital signatures
Establishment of collaborative networks – a model-driven engineering approach based on thermodynamics

The setup of an efficient collaborative situation between organizations can be considered according to four main complementary dimensions: the context (geographical, social, economical environment), the partners (the actors, their capabilities, their resources and their relationships), the objectives (the collaborative goals of the network, the risks to be avoided, etc.) and finally the behaviour (the collaborative processes to be implemented by the partners to achieve the objectives considering the context). Some research works try to infer the behaviour based on the three other issues assumed to be known, by using different approaches such as model-driven engineering (MDE), optimization, heuristics, planning, etc. MDE helps studying the opportunity of inferring the objectives part from the context and partners dimensions in order to feed the behaviour issue. We use a non-equilibrium thermodynamics analogy where partners and context attributes and methods are mapped to thermodynamic state variables of an organisation seen as an open system in the frame of dissipative structure thermodynamics. We apply it specifically to enterprises and discuss briefly the analogy of behaviour as an irreversible trajectory aiming to maintain the enterprise activity aliv
Two Hidden Layers are Usually Better than One

This study investigates whether feedforward neural networks with two hidden layers generalise better than those with one. In contrast to the existing literature, a method is proposed which allows these networks to be compared empirically on a hidden-node-by-hidden-node basis. This is applied to ten public domain function approximation datasets. Networks with two hidden layers were found to be better generalisers in nine of the ten cases, although the actual degree of improvement is case dependent. The proposed method can be used to rapidly determine whether it is worth considering two hidden layers for a given problem
Recommender systems meeting security: from product recommendation to cyber-attack prediction

Modern information society depends on reliable functionality of information systems infrastructure, while at the same time the number of cyber-attacks has been increasing over the years and damages have been caused. Furthermore, graphs can be used to show paths than can be exploited by attackers to intrude into systems and gain unauthorized access through vulnerability exploitation. This paper presents a method that builds attack graphs using data supplied from the maritime supply chain infrastructure. The method delivers all possible paths that can be exploited to gain access. Then, a recommendation system is utilized to make predictions about future attack steps within the network. We show that recommender systems can be used in cyber defense by predicting attacks. The goal of this paper is to identify attack paths and show how a recommendation method can be used to classify future cyber-attacks. The proposed method has been experimentally evaluated and it is shown that it is both practical and effective
Continuous Test-Driven Development: A Preliminary Empirical Evaluation using Agile Experimentation in Industrial Settings

Abstract Test-Driven Development (TDD) is an agile software development\ud
and design practice popularized by the eXtreme Programming methodology.\ud
Continuous Test-Driven Development (CTDD), proposed by the authors, is\ud
the recent enhancement of the TDD practice and combines TDD with the\ud
continuous testing (CT) practice that recommends background testing. Thus\ud
CTDD eliminates the need to manually execute the tests by a developer. This\ud
paper uses CTDD research to test out the idea of Agile Experimentation. It is\ud
a re�ned approach performing disciplined scienti�c research in an industrial\ud
setting. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the new CTDD practice vs.\ud
the well-established TDD practice via a Single Case empirical study involving\ud
a professional developer in a real, industrial software development project\ud
employing Microsoft .NET.We found that there was a slight ( 4 minutes) drop\ud
in the mean red-to-green time (i.e., time from the moment when any of the\ud
tests fails or the project does not build to the time when the project compiles\ud
and all the tests are passing), while the size of the CTDD vs. TDD e�ect was\ud
non-zero but small (
Improved Hybrid Navigation for Space Transportation

This paper presents a tightly coupled hybrid navigation system for space transportation applications. The tightly integrated set-up, selected for its robustness and design flexibility, is here updated with GPS Pseudoranges and Time-Differenced GPS Carrier Phases (TDCP) to promote fast-dynamics estimation. The receiver clock errors affecting both GNSS observables are analysed and modelled. Tropospheric delay-rate is found to cause major disturbance to the TDCP during atmospheric ascent. A robust correction scheme for this effect is devised. Performance is evaluated using real GPS measurements
Analysis of optimization strategies for solving space manoeuvre vehicle trajectory optimization problem

In this paper, two types of optimization strategies are applied to solve the Space Manoeuvre Vehicle (SMV) trajectory optimization problem. The SMV dynamic model is constructed and discretized applying direct multiple shooting method. To solve the resulting Nonlinear Programming (NLP) problem, gradient-based and derivative free optimization techniques are used to calculate the optimal time history with respect to the states and controls. Simulation results indicate that the proposed strategies are effective and can provide feasible solutions for solving the constrained SMV trajectory design problem
Immersion and Invariance Adaptive Backstepping Spacecraft Attitude Control with Modified Rodrigues Parameters

An adaptive Backstepping attitude control law based on Immersion and Invariance (I&I) is developed for the TU Delft FAST-D micro-satellite. Tackling both system uncertainties and disturbances, a general additively disturbed rotational dynamics model is considered. In the I&I framework the parameters to be estimated are typically constant. Here, however, a family of I&I-Backstepping controllers is shown to be input-to-state stable for a class of strict-feedback systems with time-varying uncertainties. This novel result allows the design of an I&I attitude controller for the spacecraft model considered. The developed control law shows superior performance with respect to Standard (non-adaptive) and Tuning Functions adaptive Backstepping controllers under nominal and heavily perturbed conditions
Ergodic Markov processes and Poisson equations (lecture notes)

These are lecture notes on the subject defined in the title. As such, they do
not pretend to be really new, probably except for the only section about
Poisson equations with potentials. Yet, the hope of the author is that they may
serve as a bridge to the important area of Poisson equations "in the whole
space" and with a parameter, the latter theme not being presented here. Why
this area is so important was explained in many papers and books (see the
references [12, 34, 35]): it provides one of the main tools in diffusion
approximation in the area stochastic averaging. Hence, the aim of these
lectures is to prepare the reader to "real" Poisson equations -- i.e., for
differential operators instead of difference operators -- and, indeed, to
diffusion approximation. Among other presented topics we mention coupling
method.Comment: 49 pages, 49 references in the 3rd versio
Regression-based variance reduction approach for strong approximation
  schemes

In this paper we present a novel approach towards variance reduction for
discretised diffusion processes. The proposed approach involves specially
constructed control variates and allows for a significant reduction in the
variance for the terminal functionals. In this way the complexity order of the
standard Monte Carlo algorithm ($\varepsilon^{-3}$) can be reduced down to
$\varepsilon^{-2}\sqrt{\left|\log(\varepsilon)\right|}$ in case of the Euler
scheme with $\varepsilon$ being the precision to be achieved. These theoretical
results are illustrated by several numerical examples.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1510.0314
Improving incremental recommenders with online bagging

Online recommender systems often deal with continuous, potentially fast and
unbounded flows of data. Ensemble methods for recommender systems have been
used in the past in batch algorithms, however they have never been studied with
incremental algorithms that learn from data streams. We evaluate online bagging
with an incremental matrix factorization algorithm for top-N recommendation
with positive-only -- binary -- ratings. Our results show that online bagging
is able to improve accuracy up to 35% over the baseline, with small
computational overhead.Comment: Submitted to EPIA 201
A SOA web-based group decision support system considering affective aspects

The topic of Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) has been studied
over the last decades. Supporting decision-makers that participate in group
decision-making processes is a complex task, especially when decision-makers
have no opportunity to gather at the same place and at the same time. In this
work, we propose a Web based Group Decision Support System (WebGDSS)
which intends to support decision-makers anywhere, anytime and through almost
any kind of devices. Our system was developed under a SOA architecture and we
used a multi criteria algorithm that features decision-makers’ cognitive aspects,
as well as a component of generation of intelligent reports to feedback the results
of decision-making processes to the decision-makers.This work was supported by GECAD - Research Group on
Intelligent Engineering and Computing for Advanced Innovation and Development
and by National Funds through the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a
Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) with the João
Carneiro Ph.D. Grant with the Reference SFRH/BD/89697/2012.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Selected Topics in Cosmic Ray Physics

The search for the origin of cosmic rays is as active as ever, mainly driven
by new insights provided by recent pieces of observation. Much effort is being
channelled in putting the so called supernova paradigm for the origin of
galactic cosmic rays on firmer grounds, while at the highest energies we are
trying to understand the observed cosmic ray spectra and mass composition and
relating them to potential sources of extragalactic cosmic rays. Interestingly,
a topic that has acquired a dignity of its own is the investigation of the
transition region between the galactic and extragalactic components, once
associated with the ankle and now increasingly thought to be taking place at
somewhat lower energies. Here we summarize recent developments in the
observation and understanding of galactic and extragalactic cosmic rays and we
discuss the implications of such findings for the modelling of the transition
between the two.Comment: Solicited review paper to be published in the volume 'Multiple
  Messengers and Challenges in Astroparticle Physics', GSSI-Springer book
  series, Springe
Decision Support System for Urbanization of the Northern Part of the
  Volga-Akhtuba Floodplain (Russia) on the Basis of Interdisciplinary Computer
  Modeling

There is a computer decision support system (CDSS) for urbanization of the
northern part of the Volga-Akhtuba floodplain. This system includes subsystems
of cognitive and game-theoretic analysis, geoinformation and hydrodynamic
simulations. The paper presents the cognitive graph, two-level and three-level
models of hierarchical games for the cases of uncontrolled and controlled
development of the problem situation. We described the quantitative analysis of
the effects of different strategies for the spatial distribution of the
urbanized territories. For this reason we conducted the territory zoning
according to the level of negative consequences of urbanization for various
agents. In addition, we found an analytical solution for games with the linear
dependence of the average flooded area on the urbanized area. We numerically
computed a game equilibrium for dependences derived from the imitational
geoinformation and hydrodynamic modeling of flooding. As the result, we showed
that the transition to the three-level management system and the implementation
of an optimal urbanization strategy minimize its negative consequences.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures; Conference: Creativity in Intelligent
  Technologies and Data Science. CIT&DS 201
A Functional Safety OpenMP∗ for Critical Real-Time Embedded Systems

OpenMP* has recently gained attention in the embedded domain by virtue of the augmentations implemented in the last specification. Yet, the language has a minimal impact in the embedded real-time domain mostly due to the lack of reliability and resiliency mechanisms. As a result, functional safety properties cannot be guaranteed. This paper analyses in detail the latest specification to determine whether and how the compliant OpenMP implementations can guarantee functional safety. Given the conclusions drawn from the analysis, the paper describes a set of modifications to the specification, and a set of requirements for compiler and runtime systems to qualify for safety critical environments. Through the proposed solution, OpenMP can be used in critical real-time embedded systems without compromising functional safety.This work was funded by the EU project P-SOCRATES (FP7-ICT-2013- 10)\ud
and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under contract TIN2015-\ud
65316-P.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft