This study analyzes the rhetorical strategies of an international public service organization. Drawing upon narrative criticism, volunteer related literatures of the Continental Societies, Inc. were studied in order to gauge their rhetorical efficacy in light of the existing literature on nonprofit organizations and volunteerism. By analyzing the organization’s literatures – their “story” – it was discovered that part of it was missing. In an attempt to fill this void, more effective materials related to volunteer recruitment and retention have been created to exemplify greater narrative fidelity, along with recommended organizational transformations that create a better fit between these “stories” and the truth of them.

Minimally invasive technique (MIS) revolutionized the field of surgery for its shorter hospitalization time, lower complication rates, and ultimately reduced morbidity and mortality. However, one of the critical challenges that prevent it from reaching the full potentials is the restricted visualization from the traditional monocular camera systems at the presence of tissue deformations. This dissertation aims to design a new approach which can provide the surgeons with real time 3D visualization of complete organ deformations during the MIS operation. This new approach even allows the surgeon to see through the wall of an organ rather than just looking at its surface. The proposed design consists of two stages. The first training stage identified the deformation subspaces from a training data set in the transformed spherical harmonic domain, such that each surface can be sparsely represented in the structured dictionary with low dimensionality. This novel idea is based on our experimental discovery that the spherical harmonic coefficients of any organ surface lie in specific low dimensional subspaces. The second reconstruction stage reconstructs the complete deformations in realtime using surface samples obtained with an optical device from a limited field of view while applying the structured dictionary. The sparse surface representation algorithm is also applied to ultrasound image enhancement and efficient surgical simulation. The former is achieved by fusing ultrasound samples 5 with optical data under proper weighting strategies. The high speed of surgical simulation is obtained by decreasing the computational cost based on the high compactness of the surface representation algorithm. In order to verify the proposed approaches, we first use the computer models to demonstrate that the proposed approach matches the accuracy of complex mathematical modeling techniques. Then ex-vivo experiments are conducted on freshly excised porcine kidneys utilizing a 3D MRI machine, a 3D optical device and an ultrasound machine to further test the feasibility under practical settings. / text

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Mitchell L. Neilsen / Now-a-days people from various backgrounds need different information on demand. People are relying on web as a source of information they need. But to get connected to internet all the time with a computer system is not possible. Android, being open source has already made its mark in the mobile application development. The highest smart phone user base and the ease of developing the applications in Android is an added advantage for the users as well as the Android developers. The vocal combo is an Android application which provides the required functionality on Android supported smart phone or a tablet. This provides the flexibility of accessing information at the users’ fingertips. This application is built using Android SDK, which makes the application easy to deploy on any Android powered device. Vocal Combo is a combination of voice based applications. It includes a Text-To-Voice convertor and Voice-To-Text convertor. This application helps the user to learn the pronunciation of various words. At the same time the user can also check his/her pronunciation skills. This application also provides the functionality of meaning check where the user can check the meaning of the words he types in or speaks out. At any point of time, the user can check the history of the words for which he has checked the meaning or pronunciation for. The application also provides the support to the user on how to use this application.

Image super-resolution technique mainly aims at restoring high-resolution image with satisfactory novel details. In recent years, leaning-based single-image super-resolution has been developed and proved to produce satisfactory results. With one or some dictionaries trained from a training set, learning-based super-resolution is able to establish a mapping relationship between low-resolution images and their corresponding high-resolution ones. Among all these algorithms, sparsity-based super-resolution has been proved with outstanding performance from extensive experiments. By utilizing compact dictionaries, this class of super-resolution algorithms can be efficient with lower computation complexity and has shown great potential for the practical applications. Our proposed model, which is known as Joint Dictionary-based Super-Resolution (JDSR) algorithm, is a new sparsity-based super-resolution approach. Based on the observation that the initial values of Non-locally Centralized Sparse Representation (NCSR) model will affect the final reconstruction, we change its initial values by using results of Zeyde's model. Besides, with the purpose of further improvement, we also add a gradient histogram preservation term in the sparse model of NCSR, and modify the reference histogram estimation by a simple edge detection based enhancement so that the estimated histogram will be closer to the ground truth. The experimental results illustrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of sharper edges, clearer textures and better novel details.

Les données génomiques issues d'expériences de puces à ADN ou de séquençage ont deux caractéristiques principales: leur grande dimension (le nombre de marqueurs dépassant de plusieurs ordres de grandeurs le nombre d'observations), et leur forte structuration (notamment via les dépendances entre marqueurs). La prise en compte de cette structuration est un enjeu clé pour le développement de méthodes performantes en grande dimension.Cette thèse est axée sur les données présentant une forte structure le long du génome. C'est le cas des données de nombres de copies d'ADN, mais aussi des données de génotypes. La thèse couvre à la fois le développement de méthodes statistiques, l'implémentation logicielle, et l'application des méthodes développées à des jeux de données réelles. Nous avons, en particulier, étudié des méthodes de segmentation, et de dictionary learning. Toutes les implémentations logiciel de ces méthodes sont librement disponibles sous forme de packages R. / Genomic data from DNA microarray or sequencing technologies have two major characteristics: their high dimension (number of markers larger than the number of observations), and their strong structuration (dependence between markers). Taking into account this structuration, it is a challenging issue for the development of efficient methods.This work is focused on the data with a strong spatial structuration, namely DNA copy number data in tumor samples. We developed statistical models, software implementations and we applied these developments to real data. We explored in particular segmentation models and dictionary learning methods. All the software Implementations of these methods are freely available as R packages.

Conducting and disseminating humanities research is fast becoming a highly technological endeavor. The variety of multimedia options for presenting information changes the questions we ask and the answers we find as well as the problems we encounter and the solutions we devise. The following essays provide an account of creating a digital edition of John Cleland's The Dictionary of Love using XML. The project utilizes traditional literary research methods while working toward an untraditional digital final product, a characteristic that highlights the feedback loop between form and function. Thus, the purpose of this project is twofold: to provide students and scholars information and analysis on The Dictionary of Love and, in the process, to examine and discuss the challenges, drawbacks and benefits of producing the content as a web-compatible resource. / Master of Arts

The sparse coding is approximation/representation of signals with the minimum number of coefficients using an overcomplete set of elementary functions. This kind of approximations/ representations has found numerous applications in source separation, denoising, coding and compressed sensing. The adaptation of the sparse approximation framework to the coding problem of signals is investigated in this thesis. Open problems are the selection of appropriate models and their orders, coefficient quantization and sparse approximation method. Some of these questions are addressed in this thesis and novel methods developed. Because almost all recent communication and storage systems are digital, an easy method to compute quantized sparse approximations is introduced in the first part. The model selection problem is investigated next. The linear model can be adapted to better fit a given signal class. It can also be designed based on some a priori information about the model. Two novel dictionary selection methods are separately presented in the second part of the thesis. The proposed model adaption algorithm, called Dictionary Learning with the Majorization Method (DLMM), is much more general than current methods. This generality allowes it to be used with different constraints on the model. Particularly, two important cases have been considered in this thesis for the first time, Parsimonious Dictionary Learning (PDL) and Compressible Dictionary Learning (CDL). When the generative model order is not given, PDL not only adapts the dictionary to the given class of signals, but also reduces the model order redundancies. When a fast dictionary is needed, the CDL framework helps us to find a dictionary which is adapted to the given signal class without increasing the computation cost so much. Sometimes a priori information about the linear generative model is given in format of a parametric function. Parametric Dictionary Design (PDD) generates a suitable dictionary for sparse coding using the parametric function. Basically PDD finds a parametric dictionary with a minimal dictionary coherence, which has been shown to be suitable for sparse approximation and exact sparse recovery. Theoretical analyzes are accompanied by experiments to validate the analyzes. This research was primarily used for audio applications, as audio can be shown to have sparse structures. Therefore, most of the experiments are done using audio signals.

Title: Creating a Bilingual Dictionary using Wikipedia Author: Angelina Ivanova Department/Institute: Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (32-ÚFAL) Supervisor of the master thesis: RNDr. Daniel Zeman Ph.D. Abstract: Machine-readable dictionaries play important role in the research area of com- putational linguistics. They gained popularity in such fields as machine translation and cross-language information extraction. In this thesis we investigate the quality and content of bilingual English-Russian dictionaries generated from Wikipedia link structure. Wiki-dictionaries differ dramatically from the traditional dictionaries: the re- call of the basic terminology on Mueller's dictionary was 7.42%. Machine translation experiments with Wiki-dictionary incorporated into the training set resulted in the rather small, but statistically significant drop of the the quality of the translation compared to the experiment without Wiki-dictionary. We supposed that the main reason was domain difference between the dictio- nary and the corpus and got some evidence that on the test set collected from Wikipedia articles the model with incorporated dictionary performed better. In this work we show how big the difference between the dictionaries de- veloped from the Wikipedia link structure and the traditional...

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:22:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2004-05-20Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:48:36Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 duran_ms_me_sjrp_prot.pdf: 620903 bytes, checksum: 693ba01a05848c9dd2baaae12aa97988 (MD5) / Da segunda metade do século XX até os dias atuais podemos observar uma crescente preocupação dos projetos lexicográficos em atender às necessidades dos aprendizes e, em especial, dos aprendizes de línguas estrangeiras. Diversas pesquisas têm gerado um arcabouço de conhecimentos e constituindo a chamada Metalexicografia Pedagógica. Nesse contexto, surgiram várias inovações, dentre as quais o dicionário semibilíngüe. Esse tipo de dicionário tem sido discutido internacionalmente, mas ainda não existe um consenso quanto à sua inserção na classificação tipológica geral. O presente trabalho, além de trazer uma seleção de recentes contribuições que associam o dicionário ao ensino de línguas estrangeiras, tem por principal objetivo apresentar uma proposta de inserção do dicionário semibilíngüe na tipologia de dicionários. Para isso, parte da verificação de três hipóteses: 1) trata-se de um novo tipo de dicionário, alternativo ao bilíngüe e ao monolíngüe; 2) trata-se de um sucedâneo do dicionário bilíngüe; 3) trata-se de um subtipo do dicionário bilíngüe. Percorrendo o caminho dos principais pesquisadores na área da Metalexicografia Pedagógica e analisando contrastivamente os dicionários bilíngüe e semibilíngüe, são reunidos subsídios que levam à conclusão de que o semibilíngüe é um subtipo do dicionário bilíngüe. O trabalho propõe, também, uma nova denominação para o dicionário semibilíngüe - dicionário bilíngüe pedagógico -, mostrando por que a atual terminologia não é a mais adequada. / From the second half of last century, there is an increasing effort in lexicographic projects to satisfy learners needs, notably foreign languages learners. In this context, several researches embody a new field of investigation that may be called Pedagogical Metalexicography. Among the pedagogical lexicographic innovations, the very first bilingual one seems to be the semi-bilingual dictionary. As the typological classification of this kind of dictionary is still under discussion, this work presents a proposal for it. Three hypothesis are verified: 1) semi-bilingual is a new type of dictionary, alternative to the bilingual and monolingual ones; 2) it is a substitute for the bilingual dictionary; 3) it is a subtype of bilingual dictionary. Following the path of the more representative researchers in Pedagogical Metalexicography, and contrasting bilingual dictionary with the semi-bilingual one, this work concludes that semi-bilingual is a subtype of the bilingual dictionary. Finally, it is also proposed and justified a new denomination for semi-bilingual dictionary - pedagogical bilingual dictionary.

The effective size of an L2 cache can be increased by using a dictionary-based compression scheme. Naive application of this idea performs poorly since the data values in a cache greatly vary in their “compressibility.” The novelty of this paper is a scheme that dynamically partitions the cache into sections of different compressibilities. While compression is often researched in the context of a large stream, in this work it is applied repeatedly on smaller cache-line sized blocks so as to preserve the random access requirement of a cache. When a cache-line is brought into the L2 cache or the cache-line is to be modified, the line is compressed using a dynamic, LZW dictionary. Depending on the compression, it is placed into the relevant partition. The partitioning is dynamic in that the ratio of space allocated to compressed and uncompressed varies depending on the actual performance, Certain SPEC-2000 benchmarks using a compressed L2 cache show an 80reduction in L2 miss-rate when compared to using an uncompressed L2 cache of the same area, taking into account all area overhead associated with the compression circuitry. For other SPEC-2000 benchmarks, the compressed cache performs as well as a traditional cache that is 4.3 times as large as the compressed cache in terms of hit rate, The adaptivity ensures that, in terms of miss rates, the compressed cache never performs worse than a traditional cache. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)