It is hypothesized that interplay of earthquake, soil, foundation and structure (SFS) dynamic characteristic, and their interaction in time domain, control the behavior of SFS system during earthquakes. Moreover, (passive and active) control of spatial and temporal location of seismic energy dissipation (preferably in soil) can improve safety and economy of SFS systems. Such energy dissipation ...

It is a fact that the notion of education has been changing over the last years, mainly owing to the Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). In this globalized world, we are swamped by information, and the key issue is to surf it and choose the appropriate bit. This wealth of information and the need of being constantly updating knowledge in order to carry out our work in the way we ...

Large numbers of people all over the world read and contribute to various review sites. Many contributors are understandably concerned about privacy in general and, specifically, about linkability of their reviews (and accounts) across multiple review sites. In this paper, we study linkability of community-based reviewing and try to answer the question: to what extent are ”anonymous” reviews li...

Although the importance of advocacy activities by civil society organizations (CSOs) in policy and decision-making procedures has been greatly emphasized in the literature of political science and social policy, we have relatively little understanding of the relevance and impact of the leading actors who structure the diverse networks and discourses through social media; further recognition is ...

This paper describes how the phase, obtained by Gabor filtering an image, can be used to aggregate related Gabor elements (simple features identified by peaks in the Gabor magnitude). This phase-based feature grouping simplifies the perennial problem of target/background segmentation because we need to only determine if the aggregate feature is target or background, rather than determine the st...

In this paper we present a technique for shape similarity estimation and apply it to content-based indexing and retrieval over large image databases. This technique is based on wavelet decomposition and uses polygonal approximation. It uses simple features (aspect ratio, angles, distances from the centroid, distance ratios and relative positions) extracted at high curvature points. The experime...

Online discussion forums are a valuable means for users to resolve specific information needs, both interactively for the participants and statically for users who search/browse over historical thread data. However, the complex structure of forum threads can make it difficult for users to extract relevant information. Automatically identifying whether the problem in a thread has been solved or ...

Superconductor–ferromagnet–superconductor (SFS) Josephson junctions are known to exhibit a transition between π and 0 states. In this letter, we find the π–0 phase diagram of an SFS junction depending on the transparency of an intermediate insulating layer (I). We show that, in general, the Josephson critical current is nonzero at the π–0 transition temperature. Contributions to the current fro...

In this paper we introduce a number of new features for quality estimation in machine translation that were developed for the WMT 2012 quality estimation shared task. We find that very simple features such as indicators of certain characters are able to outperform complex features that aim to model the connection between two languages.