Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modelling inter-contact times in social pervasive networks

Thanks to the diffusion of mobile user devices (e.g. smartphones) with rich computing and networking capabilities, we are witnessing an increasing integration between the cyber world of devices and the physical world of users. In this perspective, a possible evolution of pervasive networking (hereafter referred to as social pervasive networks, SPNs) consists in closely mapping human social structures in the network of the devices. Links between devices would correspond to social relationships between users, and communication events between devices would correspond to communications between users. It can be shown that fundamental convergence properties of SPN forwarding protocols are determined by the distributions of inter-contact times between the individual nodes (i.e. the time elapsed between two successive communication events between the nodes). Individual pairs inter-contact times are hard to completely charaterise, while the distribution of the aggregate inter-contact times is often a much more convenient figure. However, the aggregate distribution is not always representative of the individual pairs distributions. Therefore using it to characterise the properties of SPN forwarding protocols might not be correct. In this paper we provide an analytical model based on fundamental models of human social networks from the anthropology literature, which shows the exact dependence between the two in heterogeneous SPNs. Moreover, we use the model to i) study cases in which analysing the aggregate distribution is not enough, and ii) find sufficient conditions that guarantee that studying the aggregate distribution is enough to characterise the properties of SPN forwarding protocols.
Modeling seasonal variations of auroral particle precipitation in a global-scale magnetosphere-ionosphere simulation

[1] A variety of observations have shown strong seasonal variations in a vast array of magnetosphere-ionosphere parameters, including field-aligned currents, cross polar cap potential, and precipitating electron energy flux. In this paper we examine how these variations are modeled in the Lyon-Fedder-Mobarry (LFM) global-scale magnetohydrodynamic simulation of the coupled solar wind-magnetosphere-ionosphere system. In order to account for changes in the solar wind conditions caused by the seasonal variation of the Earth's dipole tilt we carefully select the solar wind parameters so that the effective driving conditions are the same across the March, June, and December intervals examined. The seasonal variation of the field-aligned current strengths is in good agreement with observations, with the sunlit hemisphere having more current than the dark hemisphere in the June and December intervals. However, in order to bring the modeled precipitating electron energy flux into better agreement with the observations we need to utilize a modified current-voltage relationship which includes a proxy for illumination effects. We provide a detailed description of the LFM's magnetosphere-ionosphere coupling interface including how illumination effects are incorporated into the model. This methodology for including these effects does not allow for determining if changes in conductance or ionospheric density are responsible for the changes. In addition to improving the agreement with observations the new version of the current-voltage relationship results in enhanced geomagnetic activity in the March interval examined and suppression of activity during the June interval.
Executing a Program on the MIT Tagged-Token Dataflow Architecture

The MIT Tagged-Token Dataflow project has a radical, but integrated approach to high-performance parallel computing. We study high-level languages that have fine-grained parallelism implicitly in their operational semantics, rather than extending conventional sequential languages. Programs are compiled to dataflow graphs which may be regarded as a parallel machine language. Dataflow graphs are executed on the MIT Tagged-Token Dataflow Architecture, which is a multiprocessor architecture. In this paper we provide an overview of this approach.
Maximal Fillings of Moon Polyominoes, Simplicial Complexes, and Schubert Polynomials

We exhibit a canonical connection between maximal $(0,1)$-fillings of a moon polyomino avoiding north-east chains of a given length and reduced pipe dreams of a certain permutation. Following this approach we show that the simplicial complex of such maximal fillings is a vertex-decomposable, and thus shellable, sphere. In particular, this implies a positivity result for Schubert polynomials. Moreover, for Ferrers shapes we construct a bijection to maximal fillings avoiding south-east chains of the same length which specializes to a bijection between $k$-triangulations of the $n$-gon and $k$-fans of Dyck paths of length $2(n-2k)$. Using this, we translate a conjectured cyclic sieving phenomenon for $k$-triangulations with rotation to the language of $k$-flagged tableaux with promotion.
Hypolipidemia: A Word of Caution

Hypolipidemia is a decrease in plasma lipoprotein caused by primary (genetic) or secondary (acquired) factors. It is usually asymptomatic and diagnosed incidentally on routine lipid screening. The first report of hypocholesterolemia in the medical literature was in 1911 by Chauffard and coworkers, in patients with active tuberculosis [1]. Since then (about 95 years), only few dozens of studies were published in this regard. Unlike hyperlipidemia physicians are usually unaware of hypolipidemia, its causes and consequences. As the interest in aggressive management of hyperlipidemia increases, particularly with the available, relatively strong hypolipidemic drugs and the newer and probably stronger agents, the following question should be answered; how low can we go in serum levels. For the time being, it is difficult to give a certain limit for the safest and lowest level of serum cholesterol, but knowing the complications of hypolipidemia will raise awareness. What might appear as a simple mildly reduced serum lipid can be an indication of an underlying, serious problem. A systematic search of Pubmed for all the studies in the English language as well as the abstracts of publications in other languages related to hypolipidemia was undertaken. The following words were used in the search: hypolipidemia, hypocholesterolemia, hypobetalipoproteinemia, and statins. Search results were reviewed.
2 Hidden N = 2 supersymmetry in spinless AB system

A hidden supersymmetry is revealed in the spinless Aharonov-Bohm problem. The intrinsic supersymmetric structure is shown to be intimately related with the scale symmetry. As a result, a bosonized superconformal symmetry is identified in the system. Different self-adjoint extensions of the Aharonov-Bohm problem are studied in the light of this superconformal structure and interacting anyons. Scattering problem of the original Aharonov-Bohm model is discussed in the context of the revealed supersymmetry.
Detecting Dependences and Interactions in Feature-Oriented Design

Feature-oriented software development (FOSD) aims at the construction, customization, and synthesis of large-scale software systems. We propose a novel software design paradigm, called feature-oriented design, that takes the distinguishing characteristics of FOSD into account, especially the clean and consistent mapping between features and their implementations as well as the tendency of features to interact inadvertently. We extend the lightweight modeling language Alloy with support for feature-oriented design and call the extension Feature Alloy. By means of an implementation and four case studies, we demonstrate how feature-oriented design with Feature Alloy facilitates separation of concerns, variability, and reuse of models of individual features and helps defining and detecting semantic dependences and interactions between features.
Comparative Study of Retinal Vessel Segmentation Based on Global Thresholding Techniques

Due to noise from uneven contrast and illumination during acquisition process of retinal fundus images, the use of efficient preprocessing techniques is highly desirable to produce good retinal vessel segmentation results. This paper develops and compares the performance of different vessel segmentation techniques based on global thresholding using phase congruency and contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) for the preprocessing of the retinal images. The results obtained show that the combination of preprocessing technique, global thresholding, and postprocessing techniques must be carefully chosen to achieve a good segmentation performance.
Long-term symptoms of depression and anxiety in mothers of infants with congenital heart defects.

OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between the severity of infants' congenital heart defects (CHD) and their mothers' symptoms of depression and anxiety from pregnancy to 18 months postpartum. METHODS Mothers of infants with mild, moderate, or severe CHD (n=162) and mothers (n=44,400) within the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study were assessed with an eight-item short version (SCL-8) of the Hopkins Symptom Checklist-25 at the 30th week of gestation and at 6 and 18 months postpartum. RESULTS Only the postpartum mental health trajectory of mothers of infants with severe CHD deviated from the mental health trajectory of the cohort at 6 and 18 months postpartum, showing significantly elevated levels of depression and anxiety symptoms. CONCLUSIONS The results elucidate the relationship between infants' CHD severity and maternal symptoms of depression and anxiety, possibly identifying a specifically vulnerable patient dyad in need of postoperative interventions.
Companion animals in families of children with autism spectrum disorder: Lessons learned from caregivers.

ABSTRACT Companion animals (i.e., pets) have been increasingly recognized for the roles they play in families, including those with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This cross-sectional study explored the unique functions of companion animals within families with a child with ASD. Phenomenology was used to analyze the responses of participants (N = 338) who responded to a survey offered through the Interactive Autism Network. The study initially focused on dogs; however, the analysis was forced to expand to other species due to the data provided by participants. Seven major themes emerged: bonding and benefits, learning opportunities, barriers, grief, fit (match of family characteristics with those of the companion animal), safety, and alternative animals. Successful fit between companion animals and families was often described as necessary for beneficial functions. Barriers included necessary cost and time, as well as required supervision of interactions to enhance safety of the children and animals.
DETECTION OF HIGH-ENERGY GAMMA-RAY EMISSION DURING THE X-RAY FLARING ACTIVITY IN GRB 100728A

We present the simultaneous Swift and Fermi observations of the bright GRB 100728A and its afterglow. The early X-ray emission is dominated by a vigorous flaring activity continuing until 1 ks after the burst. In the same time interval, high-energy emission is significantly detected by the Fermi/Large Area Telescope. Marginal evidence of GeV emission is observed up to later times. We discuss the broadband properties of this burst within both the internal and external shock scenarios, with a particular emphasis on the relation between X-ray flares, the GeV emission, and a continued long-duration central engine activity as their power source.
Effects of Different Tidal Volume Ventilation on Paraquat-Induced Acute Lung Injury in Piglets

Background The aim of this study was to explore the effects of different tidal volume (VT) ventilation on paraquat-induced acute lung injury or acute respiratory distress syndrome (ALI/ARDS) in piglets. Material/Methods We developed ALI/ARDS models in piglets by intraperitoneal injection of paraquat (PQ). The piglets were randomly divided into three groups: small VT group (VT=6 ml/kg, n=6), middle VT group (VT=10 ml/kg, n=6), and large VT group (VT=15 ml/kg, n=6), with the positive end-expiratory pressure (PEEP) set as 10 cmH2O. The hemodynamics were monitored by pulse-indicated continuous cardiac output (PiCCO) and the airway pressure changes and blood gas analysis indexes were recorded at different time points. The pathological changes were observed by lung puncture. Results The piglets showed ALI/ARDS in 4.5±0.8 hours after PQ intraperitoneal injection. PH, PaO2 and oxygenation indexes in the three groups all decreased after modeling success compared with baseline, and PaCO2 increased significantly. PH in the small VT group decreased most obviously after ventilation for 6 hours. PaO2 and oxygenation indexes in the small VT group showed the most obvious increase after ventilation for 2 hours and were much higher than the other two groups after ventilation for 6 hours. PaCO2 increased gradually after mechanical ventilation and the small VT group showed most obvious increase. The ELWI increased obviously after ventilation for 2 hours and then the small VT group clearly decreased. PIP and plateau pressure (Pplat) in the small VT group decreased gradually and in the middle and large VT group they increased after ventilation. The lung histopathology showed that the large VT group had the most severe damage and the small VT group had only minimal damage. Conclusions Small tidal volume ventilation combined with PEEP could alleviate the acute lung injury induced by paraquat and improve oxygenation.
Nonnegative matrix factorization for unsupervised audiovisual document structuring

This paper introduces a new paradigm for unsupervised audiovisual document structuring. In this paradigm, a novel Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) algorithm is applied on histograms of counts (relating to a bag of features representation of the content) to jointly discover latent structuring patterns and their activations in time. Our NMF variant employs the Kullback-Leibler divergence as a cost function and imposes a temporal smoothness constraint to the activations. It is solved for using a majorization-minimization technique. The approach proposed is meant to be generic and is particularly well suited to applications where the structuring patterns may overlap in time. As such, it is evaluated on a person-oriented video structuring task, using a challenging database of political debate videos. Our results outperform reference results obtained by a method using Hidden Markov Models. Further, we show the potential that our general approach has for audio speaker diarization.
Memristive phase switching in two-dimensional 1T-TaS2 crystals

Electrical switching to multiple novel metastable states in a correlated two-dimensional crystal. Scaling down materials to an atomic-layer level produces rich physical and chemical properties as exemplified in various two-dimensional (2D) crystals including graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides, and black phosphorus. This is caused by the dramatic modification of electronic band structures. In such reduced dimensions, the electron correlation effects are also expected to be significantly changed from bulk systems. However, there are few attempts to realize novel phenomena in correlated 2D crystals. We report memristive phase switching in nano-thick crystals of 1T-type tantalum disulfide (1T-TaS2), a first-order phase transition system. The ordering kinetics of the phase transition were found to become extremely slow as the thickness is reduced, resulting in an emergence of metastable states. Furthermore, we realized unprecedented memristive switching to multistep nonvolatile states by applying an in-plane electric field. The reduction of thickness is essential to achieve such nonvolatile electrical switching behavior. The thinning-induced slow kinetics possibly make the various metastable states robust and consequently realize the nonvolatile memory operation. The present result indicates that a 2D crystal with correlated electrons is a novel nano-system to explore and functionalize multiple metastable states that are inaccessible in its bulk form.
Home-Based and Facility-Based Directly Observed Therapy of Tuberculosis Treatment under Programmatic Conditions in Urban Tanzania

Introduction Decentralization of Directly Observed Treatment (DOT) for tuberculosis (TB) to the community (home-based DOT) has improved the coverage of TB treatment and reduced the burden to the health care facilities (facility-based DOT). We aimed to compare TB treatment outcomes in home-based and facility-based DOT under programmatic conditions in an urban setting with a high TB burden. Methodology A retrospective analysis of a cohort of adult TB patients (≥15 years) routinely notified between 2010 and 2013 in two representative TB sub-districts in the Temeke district, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. We assessed differences in treatment outcomes by calculating Risk Ratios (RRs). We used logistic regression to assess the association between DOT and treatment outcomes. Results Data of 4,835 adult TB patients were analyzed, with a median age of 35 years, 2,943 (60.9%) were men and TB/HIV co-infection prevalence of 39.9%. A total of 3,593 (74.3%) patients were treated under home-based DOT. Patients on home-based DOT were more likely to die compared to patients on facility-based DOT (RR 2.04, 95% Confidence Interval [95% CI]: 1.52–2.73), and more likely to complete TB treatment (RR 1.14, 95% CI: 1.06–1.23), but less likely to have a successful treatment outcome (RR 0.94, 95% CI: 0.92–0.97). Home-based DOT was preferred by women (adjusted Odds Ratio [aOR] 1.55, 95% CI: 1.34–1.80, p<0.001), older people (aOR 1.01 for each year increase, 95% CI: 1.00–1.02, p = 0.001) and patients with extra-pulmonary TB (aOR 1.45, 95% CI: 1.16–1.81, p = 0.001), but less frequently by patients on a retreatment regimen (aOR 0.12, 95% CI: 0.08–0.19, p<0.001). Conclusions/significance TB patients under home-based DOT had more frequently risk factors of death such as older age, HIV infection and sputum smear-negative TB, and had higher mortality compared to patients under facility-based DOT. Further operational research is needed to monitor the implementation of DOT under programmatic conditions.
The Performance of State-Owned Enterprises and Newly Privatized Firms: Does Privatization Really Matter?

While it is well documented that privatization leads to an improvement in the performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) following divestiture, it is argued that many of these studies do not consider the performance of control firms of similar pre-privatization situations, i.e. the performance of SOEs. By matching sample firms (privatized) to control firms (SOEs), we find that privatized firms do not exhibit significant improvement in their performance changes compared with SOEs, which might put into question the benefits of privatization in Egypt. However, the caveat here is that the findings of no significant differences between privatized firms and SOEs might be attributed to one or more of the following reasons: the SOEs specific characteristics, the power of the non-parametric test and/or the small sample size, and changes in the economic system in Egypt and/or the restructuring process of the SOEs. Nevertheless, with all due respect to the findings from the statistical tests, the interpretation of the evidence of this study could mean that privatization improved the performance of privatized firms, which is in turn could have had important spillover effects on SOEs. Indeed, a study over a longer period is needed before these results could be considered conclusive. Keyword: SOEs, Privatization, Middle East, and Egypt
Beyond Hovering: A Conceptual Argument for an Inclusive Model of Family Engagement in Higher Education

Abstract:Persistently negative stereotypes of college students' parents are biased toward parents from privileged backgrounds and reflect privileged practices that operate from a color-blind and class-blind ideology. This scholarly paper argues for a conceptual shift from parent involvement to family engagement, establishes the need for a more inclusive lens to engage diverse families, and situates the family as a larger collective. We propose a "Model of Parent and Family Characteristics, Engagement, & Support" that contains a more inclusive understanding of the pre-college and college contributions that students' families offer and the broader community and institutional contexts in which they are situated.
Modeling, Enacting, and Integrating Custom Crowdsourcing Processes

Crowdsourcing (CS) is the outsourcing of a unit of work to a crowd of people via an open call for contributions. Thanks to the availability of online CS platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk or CrowdFlower, the practice has experienced a tremendous growth over the past few years and demonstrated its viability in a variety of fields, such as data collection and analysis or human computation. Yet it is also increasingly struggling with the inherent limitations of these platforms: each platform has its own logic of how to crowdsource work (e.g., marketplace or contest), there is only very little support for structured work (work that requires the coordination of multiple tasks), and it is hard to integrate crowdsourced tasks into state-of-the-art business process management (BPM) or information systems. We attack these three shortcomings by (1) developing a flexible CS platform (we call it Crowd Computer, or CC) that allows one to program custom CS logics for individual and structured tasks, (2) devising a BPMN--based modeling language that allows one to program CC intuitively, (3) equipping the language with a dedicated visual editor, and (4) implementing CC on top of standard BPM technology that can easily be integrated into existing software and processes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach with a case study on the crowd-based mining of mashup model patterns.
Abstract art and cortical motor activation: an EEG study

The role of the motor system in the perception of visual art remains to be better understood. Earlier studies on the visual perception of abstract art (from Gestalt theory, as in Arnheim, 1954 and 1988, to balance preference studies as in Locher and Stappers, 2002, and more recent work by Locher et al., 2007; Redies, 2007, and Taylor et al., 2011), neglected the question, while the field of neuroesthetics (Ramachandran and Hirstein, 1999; Zeki, 1999) mostly concentrated on figurative works. Much recent work has demonstrated the multimodality of vision, encompassing the activation of motor, somatosensory, and viscero-motor brain regions. The present study investigated whether the observation of high-resolution digitized static images of abstract paintings by Lucio Fontana is associated with specific cortical motor activation in the beholder's brain. Mu rhythm suppression was evoked by the observation of original art works but not by control stimuli (as in the case of graphically modified versions of these works). Most interestingly, previous visual exposure to the stimuli did not affect the mu rhythm suppression induced by their observation. The present results clearly show the involvement of the cortical motor system in the viewing of static abstract art works.
SEMA: An Approach Based on Internal Measurement to Evaluate Energy Efficiency of Android Applications

This work proposes an approach for energy consumption estimation of Android applications based on internal measurement. The proposed approach uses samples of voltage and current extracted from the battery of the Android device driver itself. This approach is able to measure the energy consumption of an Android application, or parts of its code. Experiments demonstrate the proposal and compare its results to those obtained by an external measurement approach and a model based approach. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve consistent results compared to other approaches and presents advantages as low granularity, easy-to-use and low overhead.