Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SIMPLE NEAR OPTIMAL PARTITIONING APPROACH TO PERFECT TRIANGULAR ITERATION SPACE

One of the most critical issues in parallel computing is the efficient distribution of a workload and data (workload balancing) amongst networked processors in multiprocessor and multicomputer systems to achieve optimal performance. Vast large scale scientific computing, such as numerical and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) problems have the nested loops as the main parallelized code segment. The main concern in partitioning the iteration space is the trade off between load balance, data locality, and minimizing scheduling overheads. Therefore, it is important to study and implement efficient decomposition techniques, which play an important role in achieving optimal performance and efficient use of multiprocessor and multicomputer systems. In this work, we focus on static decomposition of perfect triangular iteration space to achieve load balancing across given processors in a homogenous system. This paper introduces an intuitive near-optimal partitioning approach to triangular iteration space of a loop nest along the outermost loop index. Furthermore, the obtained partitions thus consist of contiguous nonoverlapping parts which preserve data locality.
Evaluation of government income-spending hypothesis nexus in Nigeria: Application of the bound test approach

This study is a review of the relationship and dynamic interactions between government revenue and expenditure in Nigeria over the period 1981 to 2012. The analytical technique of Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bound test as was exploited. From the results, it is obvious that there is evidence of fiscal synchronization between the fiscal variables. The policy implication of the findings of this study is that government should diversify its sources of revenue. This would ensure moving away from a single product economy to a multi product economy. It is believed if this is done, returns and impact of the non oil sector on government spending and the economy in both the short and long run would be much significant. Furthermore, the government should not make spending-tax decisions in isolation of tax-spend decisions. This is because the joint determination of revenues and expenditures is appealing as long as it effectively restrains the budget deficit. This means that efforts to enrich sources of revenue should be complemented by reductions in spending by Nigeria.
Lock-free Concurrent Data Structures

© 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Concurrent data structures are the data sharing side of parallel programming. An implementation of a data structure is called lock-free, if it allows multiple processes/hreads to access the data structure concurrently and also guarantees that at least one operation among those finishes in a finite number of its own steps regardless of the state of the other operations. This chapter provides a sufficient background and intuition to help the interested reader to navigate in the complex research area of lock-free data structures. It offers the programmer familiarity to the subject that allows using truly concurrent methods. The chapter discusses the fundamental synchronization primitives on which efficient lock-free data structures rely. It discusses the problem of managing dynamically allocated memory in lock-free concurrent data structures and general concurrent environments. The idiosyncratic architectural features of graphics processors that is important to consider when designing efficient lock-free concurrent data structures for this emerging area.
Analysis of Similarity Measures between Short Text for the NTCIR-12 Short Text Conversation Task

According to rise of social networking services, short text like micro-blogs has become a valuable resource for practical applications. When using text data in applications, similarity estimation between text is an important process. Conventional methods have assumed that an input text is suﬃ-ciently long such that we can rely on statistical approaches, e.g., counting word occurrences. However, micro-blogs are much shorter; for example, tweets posted to Twitter are restricted to have only 140 character long. This is critical for the conventional methods since they suﬀer from lack of reliable statistics from the text. In this study, we compare the state-of-the-art methods for estimating text similarities to investigate their performance in handling short text, specially, under the scenario of short text conversation. We implement a conversation system us-ing a million tweets crawled from Twitter. Our system also employs supervised learning approach to decide if a tweet can be a reply to an input, which has been revealed eﬀective as a result of the NTCIR-12 Short Text Conversation Task.
Translational Research: Palatal-derived Ecto-mesenchymal Stem Cells from Human Palate: A New Hope for Alveolar Bone and Cranio-Facial Bone Reconstruction

The management of facial defects has rapidly changed in the last decade. Functional and esthetic requirements have steadily increased along with the refinements of surgery. In the case of advanced atrophy or jaw defects, extensive horizontal and vertical bone augmentation is often unavoidable to enable patients to be fitted with implants. Loss of vertical alveolar bone height is the most common cause for a non primary stability of dental implants in adults. At present, there is no ideal therapeutic approach to cure loss of vertical alveolar bone height and achieve optimal pre-implantological bone regeneration before dental implant placement. Recently, it has been found that specific populations of stem cells and/or progenitor cells could be isolated from different dental resources, namely the dental follicle, the dental pulp and the periodontal ligament. Our research group has cultured palatal-derived stem cells (paldSCs) as dentospheres and further differentiated into various cells of the neuronal and osteogenic lineage, thereby demonstrating their stem cell state. In this publication will be shown whether paldSCs could be differentiated into the osteogenic lineage and, if so, whether these cells are able to regenerate alveolar bone tissue in vivo in an athymic rat model. Furthermore, using these data we have started a proof of principle clinical- and histological controlled study using stem cell-rich palatal tissues for improving the vertical alveolar bone augmentation in critical size defects. The initial results of the study demonstrate the feasibility of using stem cell-mediated tissue engineering to treat alveolar bone defects in humans.
Semiautomatic labeling of generic objects for enlarging annotated image databases

Having large databases of annotated images is important for many applications in computer vision and computer graphics. Some of the largest databases of annotated images rely on user participation (as in Flickr, LabelMe or Peekaboom). In this paper we address the problem of performing semiautomatic object labeling as a way of providing new annotated images. Some current efforts in this direction provide bounding boxes as the annotations (i.e. OPTIMOL and Seville Systems). However, in this work we present an approach that relies on a boosting process to automatically create polygonal annotations for objects similar to those entered by users in tools such as LabelMe. In particular, we train single class boosting classifiers using local image features to perform the simultaneous object detection and segmentation. We validate our approach using different object classes from the LabelMe, the TUD and the Weizmann databases. Moreover, our experiments show that we are able to correctly annotate new data returned by internet search engines.
Adipose DPP 4 and obesity : correlation with insulin resistance and depot-specific release from adipose tissue in vivo and in vitro

Objective: To study expression of the recently identified adipokine dipeptidyl peptidase 4 (DPP4) in subcutaneous (SAT) and visceral adipose tissue (VAT) of patients with different BMI and insulin sensitivity as well as to assess circulating DPP4 in relation to obesity and insulin sensitivity. Research Design and Methods: DPP4 expression was measured in SAT and VAT from 196 subjects with a wide range of BMI and insulin sensitivity. DPP4 release was measured ex vivo in paired biopsies from SAT and VAT as well as in vivo from SAT of lean and obese patients. Circulating DPP4 was measured in insulin-sensitive and insulin-resistant BMI-matched obese patients. Results: DPP4 expression positively correlated to BMI both in SAT and VAT with VAT constantly displaying higher expression compared to SAT. Ex vivo release of DPP4 from adipose tissue explants was higher from VAT as compared to SAT in lean and obese patients with obese patients displaying higher DPP4 release compared to lean controls. Net release of DPP4 from adipose tissue was also demonstrated in vivo with greater release in obese subjects compared with lean, and women compared with men. Insulin-sensitive obese patients had significantly lower circulating DPP4 as compared to obesity-matched insulin-resistant patients. Here, DPP4 positively correlated with the amount of VAT, adipocyte size and adipose tissue inflammation. Conclusions: DPP4 is a novel adipokine with higher release from VAT that is particularly pronounced in obese and insulin-resistant patients. Our data suggest that DPP4 might be a marker for visceral obesity and the metabolic syndrome.
On the Nature of the Reputational Penalty for Corporate Crime: Evidence

Recent literature on optimal sanctions for corporations has focused on coordination and refinement of criminal, civil, and market-based sanctions. This paper contributes to emerging evidence on the reputational penalties that public corporations pay for federal crimes. First, it is shown that offenses harming only private parties and not government tend to be addressed through civil or market-based and not criminal sanctions. Second, when criminal allegations do arise, they are often surrounded by reports of terminated or suspended customer relationships and of management or employee turnover. These reports are more frequent if damaged parties are customers, as in fraud, than if they are third parties, as in environmental crime, and if stock prices decline significantly at the first news of crime. All of these features are consistent with characterizations of reputational penalties found in the literature. Findings on the nonatomistic nature of damaged parties suggest directions for future research. Copyright 1999 by the University of Chicago.
Sudden death of a Siamese crocodile (Crocodylus siamensis) due to systemic aspergillosis

A 4-year-old female Siamese crocodile (Crocodylus siamensis) housed at a zoo died without any prior clinical signs. During necropsy, numerous scattered, well-demarcated, yellowish-white, firm nodules were observed throughout the liver and lungs. Microscopic examination with periodic acid-Schiff staining revealed granulomatous inflammation in the liver and lungs. Liver granulomas were characterized by the presence of a connective tissue barrier and hyphae, and the centers of the granulomas showed signs of necrosis. Lung samples showed characteristics similar to those observed in the liver samples. The fungus was identified as Aspergillus fumigatus based on its appearance on Sabouraud dextrose agar, microscopic examination with lactophenol cotton blue staining and genetic sequencing. Therefore, zoo veterinarians should pay close attention to fungal infections in captive animals.
Fiscal Treatment of Managerial Compensation - A Welfare Analysis

We analyze the consequences of bonus taxes, limited deductibility of bonuses from company pro ts and a corporate income tax (CIT) in a principal-agent model and explore how these tax instruments a ffect managerial incentives and how they change the design of incentive contracts used in equilibrium. Introducing bonus taxes decreases the agent's net bonus and reduces eff ort. Limited deductibility has no such e ffects. In equilibrium both instruments lead to a lower eff ort incentivized by the principal with a lower bonus when bonuses are less deductible. We find that a bonus tax can lead to an increase in bonus payments. Moreover, the model explains the welfare eff ects and distributional implications of the actions named above. Limited deductibility and bonus taxes are close substitutes and lead to a welfare loss compared to a taxation by a CIT as the CIT neither has an eff ect on incentives nor on the incentive contract. Furthermore welfare can be increased by paying a subsidy for bonus payments.
Human Neuroscience

of the habenula in error monitoring and as a critical modulatory relay between the limbic forebrain structures and the midbrain. In another study, co-activation of the habenula and midbrain was observed during negative but not positive feedback (Shepard et al., 2006). A recent study with more detailed anatomical mapping confirmed the habenula as the locus responding to negative rewards (Salas et al., 2010). However, it remains unclear whether the habenula signals to the VTA/SN in outcome monitoring, as has been demonstrated in non-human primates. The current study aimed to fill this gap of knowledge. In previous studies, we observed activation of subcortical structures including the habenula during error trials in a stop signal task (Li et al., 2008b). Here we substantiated the functional con-nectivity of the habenula and VTA/SN, using psychophysiological interaction (PPI), Granger causality analysis (GCA), and mediation analysis. PPI is a voxel-wise method widely used to examine whether correlation in activity between two brain areas is modulated by psychological contexts (Friston et al. We used PPI to establish greater connectivity between the habenula and VTA/SN during stop error (SE) as compared to stop success (SS) trials. However, PPI does not specify the direction of influence between brain regions. In contrast, GCA has been used to model directional interaction between blood oxygenation level dependent
Physiological Costs of Repetitive Courtship Displays in Cockroaches Handicap Locomotor Performance

Courtship displays are typically thought to have evolved via female choice, whereby females select mates based on the characteristics of a display that is expected to honestly reflect some aspect of the male’s quality. Honesty is typically enforced by mechanistic costs and constraints that limit the level at which a display can be performed. It is becoming increasingly apparent that these costs may be energetic costs involved in the production of dynamic, often repetitive displays. A female attending to such a display may thus be assessing the physical fitness of a male as an index of his quality. Such assessment would provide information on his current physical quality as well as his ability to carry out other demanding activities, qualities with which a choosy female should want to provision her offspring. In the current study we use courtship interactions in the Cuban burrowing cockroach, Byrsotria fumigata to directly test whether courtship is associated with a signaler’s performance capacity. Males that had produced courtship displays achieved significantly lower speeds and distances in locomotor trials than non-courting control males. We also found that females mated more readily with males that produced a more vigorous display. Thus, males of this species have developed a strategy where they produce a demanding courtship display, while females choose males based on their ability to produce this display. Courtship displays in many taxa often involve dynamic repetitive actions and as such, signals of stamina in courtship may be more widespread than previously thought.
European Governance and System Integration

The paper presents a new approach to EU governance by stressing the interdependence of governance and integration. It suggests that EU governance is not just shaped by the emerging properties of the EU polity but has a strong impact both on system formation at national and European level. It is a process of mutual structuration which is likely to affect the integration and coherence of member state systems up to a point where European ‘good governance’ may threaten the governability and democratic quality of established national systems. The paper goes on by presenting an analytical model to assess in a systematic way why and when EU governance may qualify as stumbling stones for member state coherence or stepping stones for transnational integration. A preliminary test of this analytical model comes to the conclusion that EU governance has the effect of opening a transnational polity space which, however, has so far not produced any visible dis-integrative effects at the national level. In view of the long time horizons for social change, the paper recommends thorough comparative research to take a closer look at the interdependence of EU governance and system evolution.
Client-Centred Care; balancing between perspectives of clients and nurses in home care

In the Netherlands confusion is signaled about the introduction of new care concepts like demand-oriented care. The aim of this article is to explore the phenomenon ‘interaction aimed at care tailored to the client demand’ as seen by expert clients: patients and their family caregivers. Focus interviews were held with expert patients and expert family caregivers of the ‘Dutch Council of the Chronically ill and the Disabled’. Grounded theory methodology was used to analyze the results. Recognition by the professional of client values underlying their demand (uniqueness, comprehensiveness, continuity of life, fairness and autonomy) and underlying the care-relationship (equality, partnership, and interdependence) emerged as central element within the interaction. Feelings of recognition with the client seem to reinforce autonomy, self-esteem and participation. Recognition was optimally felt in a dialogue. Four professional competencies could be identified related to recognition: attentiveness (ongoing actions to know and understand the patient); responsiveness (active, committed and responsible care guided by respect of patient identity); being a critical partner in care (giving and grounding professional opinion and discuss boundaries); being a developer of client competencies (facilitating and developing client participation within care). The findings offer possibilities to operationalize care concepts aimed at tailored care. Further research aimed at refining and testing the hypothesis developed is recommended.
Inside Volatility Arbitrage : The Secrets of Skewness

Illustrations. Acknowledgments. Introduction. Summary. Contributions and Further Research. Data and Programs. Chapter 1: The Volatility Problem. Introduction. The Stock Market. The Stock Price Process. Historic Volatility. The Derivatives Market. The Black-Scholes Approach. The Cox-Ross-Rubinstein Approach. Jump Diffusion and Level-Dependent Volatility. Jump Diffusion. Level-Dependent Volatility. Local Volatility. The Dupire Approach. The Derman-Kani Approach. Stability Issues. Calibration Frequency. Stochastic Volatility. Stochastic Volatility Processes. GARCH and Diffusion Limits. The Pricing PDE Under Stochastic Volatility. The Market Price of Volatility Risk. The Two-Factor PDE. The Generalized Fourier Transform. The Transform Technique. Special Cases. The Mixing Solution. The Romano-Touzi Approach. A One-Factor Monte Carlo Technique. The Long-Term Asymptotic Case. The Deterministic Case. The Stochastic Case. A Series Expansion on Volatility-of-Volatility. Pure-Jump Models. Variance Gamma. Variance Gamma with Stochastic Arrival. Variance Gamma with Gamma Arrival Rate. Chapter 2: The Inference Problem. Introduction. Using Option Prices. Direction Set (Powell) Method. Numeric Tests. The Distribution of the Errors. Using Stock Prices. The Likelihood Function. Filtering. The Simple and Extended Kalman Filters. The Unscented Kalman Filter. Kushner's Nonlinear Filter. Parameter Learning. Parameter Estimation via MLE. Diagnostics. Particle Filtering. Comparing Heston with Other Models. The Performance of the Inference Tools. The Bayesian Approach. Using the Characteristic Function. Introducing Jumps. Pure Jump Models. Recapitulation. Model Identification. Convergence Issues and Solutions. Chapter 3: The Consistency Problem. Introduction. The Consistency Test. The Setting. The Cross-Sectional Results. Robustness Issues for the Cross-Sectional Method. Time-Series Results. Financial Interpretation. The Peso Theory. Background. Numeric Results. Trading Strategies. Skewness Trades. Kurtosis Trades. Directional Risks. An Exact Replication. The Mirror Trades. An Example of the Skewness Trade. Multiple Trades. High Volatility-of-Volatility and High Correlation. Non-Gaussian Case. VGSA. AWord of Caution. Foreign Exchange, Fixed Income, and Other Markets. Foreign Exchange. Fixed Income. References. Index.
A Conceptual Framework for Web Opinion Mining

Knowing what the customer thinks of a particular product/service helps top management to introduce improvements in processes and products, thus gaining competitive advantages. Nowadays, customers freely express their opinions through blog, wiki, forum, social network and other web 2.0 tools. These opinions can be processed by Text Mining techniques in order to derive strategic knowledge. In particular, in this work, we present an approach for polarizing opinions, that is to decide whether the expressed opinion is positive or negative. This approach is based on sentiment analysis techniques.
Fully Automatic Analysis of Engagement and Its Relationship to Personality in Human-Robot Interactions

Engagement is crucial to designing intelligent systems that can adapt to the characteristics of their users. This paper focuses on the automatic analysis and classification of engagement based on humans’ and robot’s personality profiles in a triadic human–human–robot interaction setting. More explicitly, we present a study that involves two participants interacting with a humanoid robot, and investigate how participants’ personalities can be used together with the robot’s personality to predict the engagement state of each participant. The fully automatic system is first trained to predict the Big Five personality traits of each participant by extracting individual and interpersonal features from their nonverbal behavioural cues. Second, the output of the personality prediction system is used as an input to the engagement classification system. Third, we focus on the concept of “group engagement”, which we define as the collective engagement of the participants with the robot, and analyze the impact of similar and dissimilar personalities on the engagement classification. Our experimental results show that: 1) using the automatically predicted personality labels for engagement classification yields an F-measure on par with using the manually annotated personality labels, demonstrating the effectiveness of the automatic personality prediction module proposed; 2) using the individual and interpersonal features without utilizing personality information is not sufficient for engagement classification, instead incorporating the participants and robots personalities with individual/interpersonal features increases engagement classification performance; and 3) the best classification performance is achieved when the participants and the robot are extroverted, while the worst results are obtained when all are introverted.
Exact number of limit cycles for a family of rigid systems

For a given family of planar differential equations it is a very difficult problem to determine an upper bound for the number of its limit cycles. Even when this upper bound is one it is not always an easy problem to distinguish between the case of zero and one limit cycle. This note mainly deals with this second problem for a family of systems with a homogeneous nonlinear part. While the condition that allows us to separate the existence and the nonexistence of limit cycles can be described, it is very intricate.