Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Analytical Formula of Population Gradient for two-layered ReLU network and its Applications in Convergence and Critical Point Analysis

In this paper, we explore theoretical properties of training a two-layered ReLU network $g(\mathbf{x}; \mathbf{w}) = \sum_{j=1}^K \sigma(\mathbf{w}_j^T\mathbf{x})$ with centered $d$-dimensional spherical Gaussian input $\mathbf{x}$ ($\sigma$=ReLU). We train our network with gradient descent on $\mathbf{w}$ to mimic the output of a teacher network with the same architecture and fixed parameters $\mathbf{w}^*$. We show that its population gradient has an analytical formula, leading to interesting theoretical analysis of critical points and convergence behaviors. First, we prove that critical points outside the hyperplane spanned by the teacher parameters ("out-of-plane") are not isolated and form manifolds, and characterize in-plane critical-point-free regions for two ReLU case. On the other hand, convergence to $\mathbf{w}^*$ for one ReLU node is guaranteed with at least $(1-\epsilon)/2$ probability, if weights are initialized randomly with standard deviation upper-bounded by $O(\epsilon/\sqrt{d})$, consistent with empirical practice. For network with many ReLU nodes, we prove that an infinitesimal perturbation of weight initialization results in convergence towards $\mathbf{w}^*$ (or its permutation), a phenomenon known as spontaneous symmetric-breaking (SSB) in physics. We assume no independence of ReLU activations. Simulation verifies our findings.
Understanding Tolerance of Ambiguity of EFL Learners in Reading Classes at Tertiary Level

This study aimed to explore tolerance of ambiguity (AT) of a group of tertiary level Turkish EFL learners at a state university in Turkey. To do this, 188 preparation year students were administered a Second Language Tolerance of Ambiguity Scale with some demographic questions. Statistical analysis indicated students on average have lower tolerance for ambiguity in the process of learning, with female students reporting less tolerance than male students. Students" AT, their self-perceived success, and strategy training they received correlated significantly. Suggestions for further research and classroom practice are offered in the light of the findings and current literature.
The Efficacy of Mood State Profiling with Elite Performers: A Review and Synthesis

Research into the relationship between mood profiles and athletic performance has produced equivocal results. It appears that athletic populations tend to show more positive mood profiles than the general population, but that mood profiles are ineffective in differentiating between athletes of varying achievement levels. POMS appears to have greater discriminatory power among homogeneous ability groups in terms of differentiating between successful and unsuccessful performances. In this paper, a number of conditions that increase the predictive capability of preperformance mood profiling are proposed. In addition, measurement issues, factors influencing crosssectional and intraindividual comparisons, and proposed uses of mood profiling among elite performers are discussed. It is concluded that further research is required to fully understand how intraindividual mood fluctuations influence athletic performance, and to understand the impact of preperformance and intraperformance mood trends upon performance.
Acute kidney injury in the intensive care unit: An update and primer for the intensivist

Objective:Acute kidney injury is common in critically ill patients and is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Patients across the spectrum of critical illness have acute kidney injury. This requires clinicians from across disciplines to be familiar with recent advances in definitions, diagnosis, prevention, and management of acute kidney injury in the intensive care unit. The purpose of this concise review, therefore, is to address, for the non-nephrologist, clinically relevant topical questions regarding acute kidney injury in the intensive care unit. Data Sources:The authors (nephrologists and intensivists) performed a directed review of PubMed to evaluate topics including the definition, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of acute kidney injury in the intensive care unit. The goal of this review is to address topics important to the practicing intensivist. Data Synthesis and Findings:Whenever available, preferential consideration was given to randomized controlled trials. In the absence of randomized trials, observational and retrospective studies and consensus opinions were included. Conclusions:Acute kidney injury in the intensive care unit is a clinically relevant problem requiring awareness and expertise among physicians from a wide variety of fields. Although many questions remain controversial and without definitive answers, a periodic update of this rapidly evolving field provides a framework for understanding and managing acute kidney injury in the intensive care unit.
Dependence Guided Symbolic Execution

Symbolic execution is a powerful technique for systematically exploring the paths of a program and generating the corresponding test inputs. However, its practical usage is often limited by the <italic>path explosion</italic> problem, that is, the number of explored paths usually grows exponentially with the increase of program size. In this paper, we argue that for the purpose of fault detection it is not necessary to systematically explore the paths, and propose a new symbolic execution approach to mitigate the path explosion problem by predicting and eliminating the redundant paths based on symbolic value. Our approach can achieve the equivalent fault detection capability as traditional symbolic execution without exhaustive path exploration. In addition, we develop a practical implementation called Dependence Guided Symbolic Execution (DGSE) to soundly approximate our approach. Through exploiting program dependence, DGSE can predict and eliminate the redundant paths at a reasonable computational cost. Our empirical study shows that the redundant paths are abundant and widespread in a program. Compared with traditional symbolic execution, DGSE only explores 6.96 to 96.57 percent of the paths and achieves a speedup of 1.02<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times$</tex-math><alternatives><inline-graphic xlink:href="liu-ieq1-2584063.gif"/> </alternatives></inline-formula> to 49.56<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="liu-ieq2-2584063.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>. We have released our tool and the benchmarks used to evaluate DGSE<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^\ast$</tex-math><alternatives> <inline-graphic xlink:href="liu-ieq3-2584063.gif"/></alternatives></inline-formula>.
Wrinkled fibrations on near-symplectic manifolds

Motivated by the programmes initiated by Taubes and Perutz, we study the geometry of near-symplectic 4-manifolds, i.e., manifolds equipped with a closed 2-form which is symplectic outside a union of embedded 1-dimensional submanifolds, and broken Lefschetz fibrations on them. We present a set of four moves which allow us to pass from any given fibration to any other broken fibration which is deformation equivalent to it. Moreover, we study the change of the near-symplectic geometry under each of these moves. The arguments rely on the introduction of a more general class of maps, which we call wrinkled fibrations and which allow us to rely on classical singularity theory.Finally, we illustrate these constructions by showing how one can merge components of the zero-set of the near-symplectic form. We also disprove a conjecture of Gay and Kirby by showing that any achiral broken Lefschetz fibration can be turned into a broken Lefschetz fibration by applying a sequence of our moves.
Testing the predictions of the feature-assembly hypothesis: evidence from the L2 acquisition of Spanish aspect morphology

According to the Feature-Assembly Hypothesis (FAH) (Lardiere 2005, 2009, Choi and Lardiere 2006a) convergence in second language acquisition is determined by whether L2 speakers can effectively reassemble existing features into new (L2) configurations. We discuss the validity of this prediction for the L2 acquisition of Spanish imperfect, an area of attested difficulty, which requires native speakers of English to remap semantic concepts regarding the temporal status of events onto new morphological configurations. Data from 60 L1 English learners of Spanish and 15 native speakers who completed a context/sentence matching task show that only the meaning associated with Spanish imperfect which requires a new semantics-morphology mapping is problematic. We argue that a hypothesis, such as the FAH, which takes into account the conditions which determine the expression of aspect-related features, can adequately provide a fine-grained account of L2 variation in this grammatical domain
Towards Vision-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Motion Control

This paper introduces a machine learning based system for controlling a robotic manipulator with visual perception only. The capability to autonomously learn robot controllers solely from raw-pixel images and without any prior knowledge of configuration is shown for the first time. We build upon the success of recent deep reinforcement learning and develop a system for learning target reaching with a three-joint robot manipulator using external visual observation. A Deep Q Network (DQN) was demonstrated to perform target reaching after training in simulation. Transferring the network to real hardware and real observation in a naive approach failed, but experiments show that the network works when replacing camera images with synthetic images.
Connection Admission Control for RED-VBR , a Renegotiation-Based

In 16], we proposed a new service called REnegotiated Deterministic Variable Bit Rate Service (RED-VBR). RED-VBR attempts to strike an eecient balance among tradeoos in quality of service, achievable network utilization, and method of dealing with overload situations. The approach is based on deterministic guarantees with client controlled renegotiation of traac and QOS parameters and graceful adaptation during overload periods. In this paper, we introduce a new connection admission control algorithm for RED-VBR which bounds the renegotiation failure probability. We evaluate the scheme using two traces of MPEG-compressed video and show that, even with simple renegotiation polices and relatively low renegotiation frequencies, high network utilization in the range of 50% to 80% can be achieved. For traac that is bursty over long intervals, this represents a 100% to 150% improvement in network utilization compared to deterministic service. Compared to a statistical service, our approach allows more graceful and client-controlled QOS degradation during overload period.
SPQR : Formalized Design Pattern Detection and Software Architecture Analysis

We present formal analysis methods and results from SPQR, the System for Pattern Query and Recognition, a toolkit that detects instances of known design patterns directly from object-oriented source code in an automated and flexible manner. Based on previous work in rhocalculus (extended Abadi/Cardelli sigma-calculus) and Pattern/Object Markup Language (POML), the SPQR toolset is easily retargetable to any OO language, though our current results are for C++ programs. In this paper we present an overview of the current SPQR implementation, as well as both positive and negative results from running this tool on production C++ code. We also discuss how the basic formalisms can be applied to other software analyses such as refactoring support and architectural evaluation and comparisons.
Layout Level Timing Optimization by Leveraging Active Area Dependent Mobility of Strained-Silicon Devices

Advanced MOSFETs such as strained silicon (SS) devices have emerged as critical enablers to keep Moore's law on track for sub-100 nm technologies. Use of strained silicon devices provides performance improvement equivalent to use of next generation devices, without actually requiring scaling. Traditionally, the research in the field of SS has been focussed on device modeling and process characterization. Recently, the dependence of mobility of a SS MOSFET device on its poly-to-poly distance has been reported. In this work, we propose a new methodology to exploit this dependence to achieve cycle time reduction of a design at the layout level. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research work to tackle timing closure by layout modifications using active area dependent mobility of SS devices. Our methodology shows consistent improvement for benchmark designs mapped onto various 90 nm commercial standard cell libraries. This work enables reduction of cycle time by as much as 6.31% (and on an average 5.25%) very late in the design closure cycle without requiring any optimization iterations.
China ’ s Development Model : An Alternative Strategy for Technological Catch-Up Working paper

The context in which Chinese firms and, as a nation, China is attempting to catch-up is fundamentally different that that facing earlier latercomers such as Japan and Korea. This paper contrasts these contexts and describes an alternative model of catch-up that can be discerned through an examination of the industries in which Chinese firms are competing successfully. The basic elements of their two-stage catch-up strategy is that they first take advantage of the modularization of manufacturing in an industry, source technology externally, and are intensely market-oriented in their product innovation; only later do they pursue internal capabilities in technological development to generate process and product innovations.
Plane waves with weak singularities

We study a class of time dependent solutions of the vacuum Einstein equations which are plane waves with weak null singularities. This singularity is weak in the sense that though the tidal forces diverge at the singularity, the rate of divergence is such that the distortion suffered by a freely falling observer remains finite. Among such weak singular plane waves there is a sub-class which do not exhibit large back reaction in the presence of test scalar probes. String propagation in these backgrounds is smooth and there is a natural way to continue the metric beyond the singularity. This continued metric admits string propagation without the string becoming infinitely excited. We construct a one parameter family of smooth metrics which are at a finite distance in the space of metrics from the extended metric and a well defined operator in the string sigma model which resolves the singularity.
Developing a reflective practice model for engineering leadership

Abstract This paper advances discourse pertaining to the development of a reflective practice model in engineering leadership. It is based on reflective experiences over a four-year period that were developed as part of a Doctoral in Business Administration module. It is contextualised within an engineering consultancy and the narrative is described from an Engineering Leadership perspective; the narrative is also woven with theory and there is the inclusion of a DBA Practitioner lens on the findings. The paper identifies the model developed for reflective practice and presents evidence of personal learning and thinking styles as its outcome. The paper concludes that reflective practice is a personal journey of learning and that model development is a choice of what suits the individual.
Clinical Interventions in Aging Dovepress Fatigue as a Long-term Risk Factor for Limitations in Instrumental Activities of Daily Living And/or Mobility Performance in Older Adults after 10 Years

hereby accept the Terms. Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from Dove Medical Press Limited, provided the work is properly attributed. For permission for commercial use of this work, please see paragraphs 4.2 and 5 of our Terms Objectives: Decline in the performance of instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) and mobility may be preceded by symptoms the patient experiences, such as fatigue. The aim of this study is to investigate whether self-reported non-task-specific fatigue is a long-term risk factor for IADL-limitations and/or mobility performance in older adults after 10 years. Methods: A prospective study from two previously conducted cross-sectional studies with 10-year follow-up was conducted among 285 males and 249 females aged 40–79 years at baseline. Fatigue was measured by asking " Did you feel tired within the past 4 weeks? " (males) and " Do you feel tired? " (females). Self-reported IADLs were assessed at baseline and follow-up. Mobility was assessed by the 6-minute walk test. Gender-specific associations between fatigue and IADL-limitations and mobility were estimated by multivariable logistic and linear regression models. Results: A total of 18.6% of males and 28.1% of females were fatigued. After adjustment, the odds ratio for fatigued versus non-fatigued males affected by IADL-limitations was 3.3 (P=0.023). In females, the association was weaker and not statistically significant, with odds ratio being 1.7 (P=0.154). Fatigued males walked 39.1 m shorter distance than those non-fatigued (P=0.048). For fatigued females, the distance was 17.5 m shorter compared to those non-fatigued (P=0.479). Conclusion: Our data suggest that self-reported fatigue may be a long-term risk factor for IADL-limitations and mobility performance in middle-aged and elderly males but possibly not in females.
Cysteine-Mediated Gene Expression and Characterization of the CmbR Regulon in Streptococcus pneumoniae

In this study, we investigated the transcriptomic response of Streptococcus pneumoniae D39 to cysteine. Transcriptome comparison of the D39 wild-type grown at a restricted concentration of cysteine (0.03 mM) to one grown at a high concentration of cysteine (50 mM) in chemically-defined medium (CDM) revealed elevated expression of various genes/operons, i.e., spd-0150, metQ, spd-0431, metEF, gshT, spd-0618, fhs, tcyB, metB-csd, metA, spd-1898, yvdE, and cysK, likely to be involved in the transport and utilization of cysteine and/or methionine. Microarray-based data were further confirmed by quantitative RT-PCR. Promoter lacZ-fusion studies and quantitative RT-PCR data showed that the transcriptional regulator CmbR acts as a transcriptional repressor of spd-0150, metEF, gshT, spd-0618, tcyB, metA, and yvdE, putatively involved in cysteine uptake and utilization. The operator site of CmbR in the promoter regions of CmbR-regulated genes is predicted and confirmed by mutating or deleting CmbR operator sites from the promoter regions of these genes.
Differential Expression of SPARC in Intestinal-type Gastric Cancer Correlates with Tumor Progression and Nodal Spread.

AIMS Nodal spread is the single most important prognostic factor of survival in gastric cancer patients. In this study, genes that were upregulated in the lymph node metastases of gastric cancer were identified and may serve as putative novel therapeutic target. METHODS Complementary DNA (cDNA) microarray analysis and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction of primary gastric carcinomas and matched lymph node metastasis were carried out. Immunohistochemistry with anti-SPARC antibodies was performed on large tissue sections of 40 cases with primary gastric carcinoma (20 diffuse, 20 intestinal) and the corresponding lymph node metastases, as well as on tissue microarrays of 152 gastric cancer cases. RESULTS A cDNA microarray identified SPARC as being upregulated in primary gastric carcinoma tissue and the corresponding lymph node metastasis compared with the nonneoplastic mucosa. SPARC was expressed in fibroblasts and, occasionally, in tumor cells. However, the level of immunoreactivity was particularly strong in stromal cells surrounding the tumor. The level of expression of SPARC, determined by immunohistochemistry, correlated in intestinal-type gastric cancer with the local tumor growth, nodal spread, and tumor stage according to the International Union Against Cancer. CONCLUSIONS Our study provides transcriptional and translational evidence for the differential expression of SPARC in gastric cancer tissue. On the basis of our observations and those made by others, we hypothesize that SPARC is a promising novel target for the treatment of gastric cancer.
The SkyLoc Floor Localization System

When a mobile user dials 911, a key to arriving to the emergency scene promptly is knowing the location of the mobile user. This paper presents SkyLoc, a GSM fingerprinting-based localization system that runs on a mobile phone and identifies the current floor of a user in tall multi-floor buildings. Knowing the floor in a tall building significantly reduces the area that emergency service personnel have to canvas to locate the individuals in need. We evaluated our system in three multi-floor buildings located in Washington DC, Seattle and Toronto. Our system identifies the floor correctly in up to 73% of the cases and is within 2 floors in 97% of the cases. The system is robust as it works for different network operators, when the training and testing sets were collected with different hardware and up to one month apart. In addition, we show that feature selection techniques that select a subset of highly relevant radio sources for fingerprint matching nearly double the localization accuracy of our system
Detection of epithelial tumour RNA in the plasma of colon cancer patients is associated with advanced stages and circulating tumour cells

Background: Although circulating tumour DNA has been detected in patients with different types of cancer, little is known of free RNA in cancer patients. Aims: We investigated the presence of RNA from epithelial tumours in plasma from patients with colorectal carcinomas, and its correlation with tumour characteristics and circulating tumour cells. Methods: β-actin mRNA was analysed to assess the viability of plasma RNA in samples from 53 patients with colonic cancer and 25 controls. Subsequently, nested primers were used to detect the presence of cytokeratin 19 (CK19) and carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) RNA in the same samples. Nine clinicopathological parameters were studied to correlate the molecular and clinical parameters. Additionally, we investigated for micrometastases in blood in 18 of these patients and in 10 of the controls samples. Results: All samples had detectable quantities of β-actin RNA. In the controls, one case (4%) was positive for CEA and five (20%) for CK19 RNA; of the 53 patients, 17 cases (32%) were positive for CEA and 39 (73.6%) for CK19 RNA. This was statistically significant (p=0.000001). Advanced stages (p=0.03) and soluble CEA status (p=0.03) were associated with the presence of CEA, CK19, or both RNAs in plasma. Lymph node metastases (p=0.06) and vascular invasion (p=0.07) were almost significant. On the basis of these results, we examined the possible presence of micrometastases in blood in several of these patients. The presence of plasma tumour RNA was found to be associated with circulating tumour cells in blood (p=0.04). Conclusions: Epithelial tumour RNA is detectable in plasma from colon cancer patients. This molecular event is associated with advanced stages and circulating tumour cells. Our results could offer new approaches in the diagnosis and monitoring of colon cancer.