Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Declarative inconsistency handling in relational and semi-structured databases

In many novel database applications inconsistency becomes an important issue that cannot be addressed with simple techniques like data cleaning. For instance, data conflicts can arise during the integration of independent data sources, and the user may not have privileges to resolve the inconsistencies. The framework of consistent query answers (CQA) aims to alleviate the impact of inconsistencies on query evaluation by considering all possible (minimal) repairs of the original database. The consistent answers are the answers present in every repair. Because the repairs are not materialized, this approach does not modify the state of the database i.e., no information is physically removed from the database. In this thesis we advance the research on consistent query answers in several directions. First, we address the open question of the complexity of computing consistent query answers in the presence of universal constraints. We show that in general the problem is PP2 -complete, but we also show that for acyclic sets of full tuple-generating dependencies and denial constraints, the problem is tractable. Second, we implement a practical system Hippo for computing consistent answers to a broad class of queries w.r. t. an acyclic set of full tuple-generating dependencies and denial constraints. The efficiency of this approach, however, suffers from an excessive number of database calls. We devise several optimizations addressing this problem, which make our system capable of handling large databases. Next, we investigate extending the CQA framework with user-specified preferences on how to resolve conflicts. In the data integration scenario, for instance, the user may possess partial information on the reliability of the data sources. This kind of information can be used to further refine the quality of consistent query answers. We propose a general framework of preference-based conflict resolution, identify a set of desired properties, and investigate their computational implications. Finally, we propose adapting the framework of CQA to semi-structured databases. This direction of study is inspired by the observation that many violations of consistency are encountered in the context of XML applications. We propose the framework of valid query answers, study its computational implications, and identify tractable cases. We also present an experimental evaluation of our approach.
Band structures of laterally coupled quantum dots, accounting for electromechanical effects

In a series of recent papers we demonstrated that coupled electro-mechanical effects can lead to pronounced contributions in band structure calculations of low dimensional semiconductor nanostructures (LDSNs) such as quantum dots, wires, and even wells. Some such effects are essentially nonlinear. Both strain and piezoelectric effects have been used as tuning parameters for the optical response of LDSNs in photonics, band gap engineering and other applications. However, these effects have been largely neglected in literature while laterally coupled quantum dots (QDs) have been studied. The superposition of electron wave functions in these QDs become important in the design of optoelectronic devices as well in tayloring properties of QDs in other applications areas. At the same time, laterally grown QDs coupled with electric and mechanical fields are becoming increasingly important in many applications of LDSN-based systems, in particular where the tunneling of electron wave function through wetting layer (WL) becomes important and the distance between the dots is treated as a tuning parameter. Indeed, as electric and elastic effects are often significant in LDSNs, it is reasonable to expect that the separation between the QDs may also be used as a tuning parameter in the application of logic devices, for example, OR gates, AND gates and others. In this contribution, by using the fully coupled model of electroelasticity, we build on our previous results while analyzing the influence of these effects on optoelectronic properties of QDs. Results are reported for III-V type semiconductors with a major focus given to GaN/AlN based QD systems.
Diagnostic Performance of the GenoType MTBDRplus and MTBDRsl Assays to Identify Tuberculosis Drug Resistance in Eastern China

Background: The WHO recently has recommended the GenoType MTBDRplus version 1.0 and MTBDRsl version 1.0 assays for widespread use in countries endemic with drug-resistant tuberculosis. Despite this, these assays have rarely been evaluated in China, where the burden of drug-resistant tuberculosis is among the highest globally. Methods: Mycobacterium tuberculosis clinical isolates were obtained between January 2008 and December 2008. Isolates were tested for drug resistance against rifampicin (RFP) and isoniazid (INH) using the GenoType MTBDRplus assay and drug resistance against ethambutol (EMB), ofloxacin (OFX), and kanamycin (KM) using the Genotype MTBDRsl assay. These results were compared with conventional drug-susceptibility testing (DST). Results: Readable results were obtained from 235 strains by GenoType MTBDRplus assay. Compared to DST, the sensitivity of GenoType MTBDRplus assay to detect RFP, INH, and multidrug resistance was 97.7%, 69.9%, and 69.8%, respectively, whereas the specificity for detecting RFP, INH, and multidrug resistance was 66.7%, 69.2%, and 76.8%, respectively. The sensitivity and specificity of the GenoType MTBDRsl assay were 90.9% and 95.2% for OFX, 77.8% and 99.5% for KM, 63.7% and 86.4% for EMB, respectively. Mutations in codon S531L of the rpoB gene and codon S315T1 of KatG gene were dominated in multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) strains. Conclusions: In combination with DST, application of the GenoType MTBDRplus and MTBDRsl assays may be a useful supplementary tool to allow a rapid and safe diagnosis of multidrug resistance and extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis.
Phosphoproteomic analyses reveal novel cross-modulation mechanisms between two signaling pathways in yeast

Cells respond to environmental stimuli via specialized signaling pathways. Concurrent stimuli trigger multiple pathways that integrate information, predominantly via protein phosphorylation. Budding yeast responds to NaCl and pheromone via two mitogen‐activated protein kinase cascades, the high osmolarity, and the mating pathways, respectively. To investigate signal integration between these pathways, we quantified the time‐resolved phosphorylation site dynamics after pathway co‐stimulation. Using shotgun mass spectrometry, we quantified 2,536 phosphopeptides across 36 conditions. Our data indicate that NaCl and pheromone affect phosphorylation events within both pathways, which thus affect each other at more levels than anticipated, allowing for information exchange and signal integration. We observed a pheromone‐induced down‐regulation of Hog1 phosphorylation due to Gpd1, Ste20, Ptp2, Pbs2, and Ptc1. Distinct Ste20 and Pbs2 phosphosites responded differently to the two stimuli, suggesting these proteins as key mediators of the information exchange. A set of logic models was then used to assess the role of measured phosphopeptides in the crosstalk. Our results show that the integration of the response to different stimuli requires complex interconnections between signaling pathways.
Symmetric distributed multiview video coding

Symmetric distributed source coding has made great progress in the past several years. However, few attempts have been tried to use the symmetric distributed source coding schemes in real data compression scenarios. In this paper, with the inspiration of previous symmetric distributed source coding schemes, we first put forward a novel syndrome-based symmetric distributed coding scheme which can achieve the whole Slepian-Wolf rate region. Then we propose a general architecture for symmetric distributed multiview video schemes. Our experiments show very encouraging results. In the high-rate case, our scheme can achieve great rate saving from separate H.264 coding scheme at the same video quality.
Influence of grain size on tensile properties of Al-Mg alloys

Abstract Grain size refinement is an important strengthening mechanism in Al-Mg 5000 series alloys, which have a relatively large Hall-Petch slope compared with other Al alloys. In addition, the high work hardening rate exhibited by Al-Mg alloys provides excellent formability. This paper investigates the influence of grain size on the flow stress over a range of strains, and in several different Al-Mg alloys. It is found that the Hall-Petch slope decreases after yield, indicating that the large grain size effect is primarily associated with initiating plasticity in these alloys. Beyond yield the slope decreases to a value equivalent to other, non-Mg containing alloys, and shows no clear dependence on strain. The intercept stress from the Hall-Petch plots at different strains is non-linear with ϵ 1/2 for alloys containing up to 3 wt-%Mg, which indicates that the free slip distance is strain dependent in these alloys. In an Al-5 wt-%Mg alloy the intercept stress is linear with ϵ 1/2, indicating that solute atoms are controlling the free slip distance. If Mn is added to the Al-5 wt-%Mg alloy, as it is in commercial alloys, it has little influence on the grain size dependence, but it does increase the frictional stress at the highest Mn level of 0.7 wt-%.
Coupled European and Greenland last glacial dust activity driven by North Atlantic climate

Significance Atmospheric dust is a major component of climate change. However, the relationship between glacial continental dust activity and abrupt centennial–millennial-scale climate changes of the North Atlantic is poorly known. Recent advances in high-precision radiocarbon dating of small gastropods in continental loess deposits provide an opportunity to gain unprecedented insights into dust variations and its major drivers at centennial–millennial scales from a near-source dust archive. Here, we show that Late Quaternary North Atlantic temperature and dustiness in Greenland and Europe were largely synchronous and suggest that this coupling was driven via precipitation changes and large-scale atmospheric circulation. Centennial-scale mineral dust peaks in last glacial Greenland ice cores match the timing of lowest Greenland temperatures, yet little is known of equivalent changes in dust-emitting regions, limiting our understanding of dust−climate interaction. Here, we present the most detailed and precise age model for European loess dust deposits to date, based on 125 accelerator mass spectrometry 14C ages from Dunaszekcső, Hungary. The record shows that variations in glacial dust deposition variability on centennial–millennial timescales in east central Europe and Greenland were synchronous within uncertainty. We suggest that precipitation and atmospheric circulation changes were likely the major influences on European glacial dust activity and propose that European dust emissions were modulated by dominant phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation, which had a major influence on vegetation and local climate of European dust source regions.
Quasi-static crack propagation

When cracks of any size spread in brittle materials and when large cracks spread in large structures of ductile materials, irreversible deformation is confined to a small volume of material contiguous with the crack surfaces. A general theory of quasi-static crack propagation under such conditions is formulated. The stability of crack propagation is subject to chosen constraints, and general stability criteria under monotonically increasing load and displacement are presented. Experiments in which cracks are spread quasi-statically are described, and by recording both load and corresponding displacement of load, the local specific work of crack spreading, or fracture toughness (R) may be deduced without calculation of the elastic stress distribution or even measuring the shape of the test piece. By causing the crack to spread at a range of speeds, variation of R with speed of crack front may be found. When R is independent of scale, it is shown that the stress intensity to propagate geometrically similar cracks in geometrically similar structures varies inversely as the square root of the size. A principle controlling the path of a quasi-static crack is proposed and some experimental confirmation is offered. An interpretation of crack spreading under cyclic loading is given.
Harmony Search Algorithm for Word Sense Disambiguation

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is the task of determining which sense of an ambiguous word (word with multiple meanings) is chosen in a particular use of that word, by considering its context. A sentence is considered ambiguous if it contains ambiguous word(s). Practically, any sentence that has been classified as ambiguous usually has multiple interpretations, but just one of them presents the correct interpretation. We propose an unsupervised method that exploits knowledge based approaches for word sense disambiguation using Harmony Search Algorithm (HSA) based on a Stanford dependencies generator (HSDG). The role of the dependency generator is to parse sentences to obtain their dependency relations. Whereas, the goal of using the HSA is to maximize the overall semantic similarity of the set of parsed words. HSA invokes a combination of semantic similarity and relatedness measurements, i.e., Jiang and Conrath (jcn) and an adapted Lesk algorithm, to perform the HSA fitness function. Our proposed method was experimented on benchmark datasets, which yielded results comparable to the state-of-the-art WSD methods. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the dependency generator, we perform the same methodology without the parser, but with a window of words. The empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to produce effective solutions for most instances of the datasets used.
Analyzing the Adoption and Cascading Process of OSN-Based Gifting Applications

To achieve growth in the user base of online social networks--(OSN) based applications, word-of-mouth diffusion mechanisms, such as user-to-user invitations, are widely used. This article characterizes the adoption and cascading process of OSN-based applications that grow via user invitations. We analyze a detailed large-scale dataset of a popular Facebook gifting application, iHeart, that contains more than 2 billion entries of user activities generated by 190 million users during a span of 64 weeks. We investigate (1) how users invite their friends to an OSN-based application, (2) how application adoption of an individual user can be predicted, (3) what factors drive the cascading process of application adoptions, and (4) what are the good predictors of the ultimate cascade sizes. We find that sending or receiving a large number of invitations does not necessarily help to recruit new users to iHeart. We also find that the average success ratio of inviters is the most important feature in predicting an adoption of an individual user, which indicates that the effectiveness of inviters has strong predictive power with respect to application adoption. Based on the lessons learned from our analyses, we build and evaluate learning-based models to predict whether a user will adopt iHeart. Our proposed model that utilizes additional activity information of individual users from other similar types of gifting applications can achieve high precision (83%) in predicting adoptions in the target application (i.e., iHeart). We next identify a set of distinctive features that are good predictors of the growth of the application adoptions in terms of final population size. We finally propose a prediction model to infer whether a cascade of application adoption will continue to grow in the future based on observing the initial adoption process. Results show that our proposed model can achieve high precision (over 80%) in predicting large cascades of application adoptions. We believe our work can give an important implication in resource allocation of OSN-based product stakeholders, for example, via targeted marketing.
Rate maximization in multi-antenna broadcast channels with linear preprocessing

The sum rate capacity of the multi-antenna broadcast channel has recently been computed. However, the search for efficient practical schemes that achieve it is still ongoing. In this paper, we focus on schemes with linear preprocessing of the transmitted data. We propose two criteria for precoding matrix design, one maximizing the sum rate and the other maximizing the minimum rate among all users. The latter problem is shown to be quasiconvex and is solved exactly via the bisection method. In addition to precoding, we employ a signal scaling scheme that minimizes average bit-error-rate (BER). The signal scaling scheme is posed as a convex optimization problem, and thus can be solved exactly via efficient interior-point methods. In terms of achievable sum rate, the proposed technique significantly outperforms traditional channel inversion methods, while having comparable (in fact, often superior) BER performance.
Olfactory Evoked Responses and Identification Tests in Neurological Disease

ABSTRACT: To assess the value of smell testing we used olfactory evoked potentials (OEP) and an identification test in multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, motor neuron disease and Alzheimer's disease. Methods: The OEP to H2S (20 ppm) was obtained using an olfactometer designed to stimulate olfactory nerve endings only. Odor recognition was assessed by the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test (UPSIT). In all instances the disease was 'definite' based on standard diagnostic criteria. Controls were derived from 156 healthy people. Results: 1) Multiple Sclerosis: 11/72 patients (15%) were abnormal on UPSIT. For OEP there was significant increase of latency and decrease in amplitude in 6/26 patients (23%). 2) Parkinson's Disease: 126/155 (81%) patients had an abnormal UPSIT score. 12/37 (32%) had prolonged latency with normal amplitude measurement on OEP, but 27 had absent or unclear readings. 4/10 with normal UPSIT displayed abnormality on OEP. 3) Motor Neuron Disease: 9/58 (16%) were abnormal on UPSIT. There was significant delay in 1/10 (10%) patients on OEP. 4) Alzheimer's Disease: UPSIT scores were abnormal in all 8 patients examined. OEP was normal in 4 of these who could be tested. Conclusion: Smell dysfunction was found in all 4 conditions but most severely in Parkinson's Disease (over 80%). The UPSIT in general showed abnormality more frequently than OEP. The olfactory defect probably involves peripheral structures in all diseases tested except Alzheimer's. A patient with normal olfaction is unlikely to have idiopathic Parkinson's disease.
Italy , 5-6 September 2013 , ISBN : 978-1-922069-29-0 1 Differentiation Strategies , Transaction Costs and Capabilities as Determinants of Vertical Integration

This study evaluates the importance of a product differentiation strategy as a determinant of vertical integration in the firm. The proposed model also controls for known determinants of integration such as transaction costs and firm-level capabilities. By identifying transaction-, firmand strategy-level determinants, we derive testable predictions about the choice of vertical integration. To test these predictions we analyze the case of the Rioja wine industry with a representative sample of 187 firms. In general, empirical evidence indicates that firms vertically integrate to mitigate opportunism, to deal with unforeseen contingencies, to internally exploit their capabilities and to improve their success in vertically differentiating their products.
Alcoholism susceptibility loci: confirmation studies in a replicate sample and further mapping.

BACKGROUND There is substantial evidence for a significant genetic component to the risk for alcoholism. A previous study reported linkage to chromosomes 1, 2, and 7 in a large data set that consisted of 105 families, each with at least three alcoholic members. METHODS Additional genotyping in the 105 families has been completed in the chromosomal regions identified in the initial analyses, and a replication sample of 157 alcoholic families ascertained under identical criteria has been genotyped. Two hierarchical definitions of alcoholism were employed in the linkage analyses: (1) Individuals who met both Feighner and DSM-III-R criteria for alcohol dependence represented a broad definition of disease; and (2) individuals who met ICD-10 criteria for alcoholism were considered affected under a more severe definition of disease. RESULTS Genetic analyses of affected sibling pairs supported linkage to chromosome 1 (LOD = 1.6) in the replication data set as well as in a combined analysis of the two samples (LOD = 2.6). Evidence of linkage to chromosome 7 increased in the combined data (LOD = 2.9). The LOD score on chromosome 2 in the initial data set increased after genotyping of additional markers; however, combined analyses of the two data sets resulted in overall lower LOD scores (LOD = 1.8) on chromosome 2. A new finding of linkage to chromosome 3 was identified in the replication data set (LOD = 3.4). CONCLUSIONS Analyses of a second large sample of alcoholic families provided further evidence of genetic susceptibility loci on chromosomes 1 and 7. Genetic analyses also have identified susceptibility loci on chromosomes 2 and 3 that may act only in one of the two data sets.
Double-blind, randomized comparison of memantine and escitalopram for the treatment of major depressive disorder comorbid with alcohol dependence.

OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to evaluate possible new treatments for major depressive disorder in patients with comorbid alcohol dependence in a municipal alcohol treatment unit. The efficacy of memantine, a noncompetitive glutamate N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)-receptor blocker used for the treatment of moderate to severe Alzheimer's disease, was compared with that of escitalopram, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor antidepressant. METHOD Eighty alcohol-dependent outpatients with major depressive disorder (DSM-IV criteria) seeking treatment from municipal alcohol treatment clinics in Helsinki, Finland, were randomly assigned 1:1 to receive memantine 20 mg/day or escitalopram 20 mg/day. During the study period, patients continued their routine treatment at the clinics. Abstinence was not required. Concomitant interventions or imposed treatment goals were not offered by the study physician. The patients returned to the treatment clinics at weeks 1, 2, 4, 12, and 26 for data collection and for medication checking and dispensing. Outcome measures were the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS) and Beck Depression Inventory-II for depression, Hamilton Rating Scale for Anxiety (HAM-A) and Beck Anxiety Inventory for anxiety, Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease test battery for cognitive functions, and Social and Occupational Functioning Assessment Scale for social and occupational functions and quality-of-life measures. Twenty-nine patients in each group completed the study. All primary and secondary outcome statistical analyses were performed by an independent source for intent-to-treat populations, which included all patients randomly assigned to treatment. The study was conducted from December 2004 to May 2006. RESULTS Both treatments significantly reduced the baseline level of depression and anxiety according to MADRS and HAM-A, which were the primary measures (p < .0001). There was no significant difference between the memantine and escitalopram groups. Assessed cognitive functioning scores were primarily within the normative range and were unchanged in both groups. Quality-of-life outcomes equally improved in both treatment groups. CONCLUSIONS These data provide new evidence for the safety and potential efficacy of memantine and escitalopram for major depressive disorder in patients with comorbid alcohol dependence. CLINICAL TRIALS REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT00368862.