Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Co-branding hotel owners and operators to increase willingness to pay

ABSTRACT Although hotel brands are well established in the industry, customers have not been educated about the different kinds of properties, nor has hotel structure been utilised as a functional marketing tool. Drawing on previous studies, the purpose of this study is to evaluate consumer branding preferences and willingness to pay because of co-branding and informed ownership, operational, or franchise branding. This two-part study looks at consumer awareness and consumer preferences in the first part through semi-structured interviews, and in the second part, an experimental survey. Results reveal that most travellers do not understand the difference between a corporate-owned and -managed hotel and a franchised hotel. Co-branding efforts for management and ownership companies were not significant in both value perceptions and willingness to pay. However, co-branding efforts by ownership companies with parent companies increased their guests’ willingness to pay.
Distinct states of nucleolar stress induced by anticancer drugs

Ribosome biogenesis is a vital and energy-consuming cellular function occurring primarily in the nucleolus. Cancer cells have an especially high demand for ribosomes to sustain continuous proliferation. This study evaluated the impact of existing anticancer drugs on the nucleolus by screening a library of anticancer compounds for drugs that induce nucleolar stress. For a readout, a novel parameter termed “nucleolar normality score” was developed that measures the ratio of the fibrillar center and granular component proteins in the nucleolus and nucleoplasm. Multiple classes of drugs were found to induce nucleolar stress, including DNA intercalators, inhibitors of mTOR/PI3K, heat shock proteins, proteasome, and cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs). Each class of drugs induced morphologically and molecularly distinct states of nucleolar stress accompanied by changes in nucleolar biophysical properties. In-depth characterization focused on the nucleolar stress induced by inhibition of transcriptional CDKs, particularly CDK9, the main CDK that regulates RNA Pol II. Multiple CDK substrates were identified in the nucleolus, including RNA Pol I – recruiting protein Treacle, which was phosphorylated by CDK9 in vitro. These results revealed a concerted regulation of RNA Pol I and Pol II by transcriptional CDKs. Our findings exposed many classes of chemotherapy compounds that are capable of inducing nucleolar stress, and we recommend considering this in anticancer drug development. Types of nucleolar stresses identified in this study (1) DNA intercalators and RNA Pol inhibitors induced canonical nucleolar stress manifested by partial dispersion of granular component (GC) and segregation of rDNA and fibrillar center (FC) components UBF, Treacle, and POLR1A within nucleolar stress caps. (2) Inhibition of mTOR and PI3K growth pathways induced a metabolic suppression of function accompanied by the decrease in nucleolar normality score, size, and rRNA production, without dramatic re-organization of nucleolar anatomy. (3) Inhibitors targeting HSP90 and proteasome induced proteotoxicity, resulting in the disruption of protein homeostasis and the accumulation of misfolded and/or undegraded proteins. These effects were accompanied by a decrease in nucleolar normality score, rRNA output, and in some cases formation of protein aggregates (aggresomes) inside the nucleolus. (4) Inhibition of transcriptional CDK activity led to the disruption of interactions between rDNA, RNA Pol I, and GC proteins. This resulted in almost complete nucleolar dissolution, leaving behind an extended bare rDNA scaffold with only a few associated FC proteins remaining. UBF and PolI-recruiting protein Treacle remained associated with the rDNA, while POLR1A and GC dispersed in the nucleoplasm. rRNA production ceased and the nucleolar normality score was greatly reduced.
Nod1-dependent NF-kB activation initiates hematopoietic stem cell specification in response to small Rho GTPases

The possibility of specifying functional hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) from human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) would overcome current limitations related to HSPC transplantation. However, generating hPSC-derived HSPCs has been elusive, necessitating a better understanding of the native developmental mechanisms that trigger HSPC specification. Here, we revealed in vivo an intrinsic inflammatory mechanism triggered by Nod1 that drives early hemogenic endothelium (HE) patterning to specify HSPCs. Our genetic and chemical experiments showed that HSPCs failed to specify in the absence of Nod1 and its downstream kinase Ripk2. Rescue experiments demonstrated that Nod1 and Ripk2 acted through NF-kB, and that small Rho GTPases are at the apex of this mechanism. Manipulation of NOD1 in a human system of hPSCs differentiation towards the definitive hematopoietic lineage indicated functional conservation. This work establishes the RAC1-NOD1-RIPK2-NFkB axis as the earliest inflammatory inductor that intrinsically primes the HE for proper HSPC specification. Manipulation of this pathway could help derive a competent HE amenable to specify functional patient specific HSPCs for the treatment of blood disorders. Highlights Nod1 specifies HSPCs in vivo through the early induction of hemogenic endothelium. Nod1-Ripk2 controls HSPC specification by activating the inflammatory master TF NF-kB. Nod1 links small Rho GTPases with pro-inflammatory signaling during the genesis of HSPCs. The function of NOD1 is conserved in the development of definitive human HSPCs.
Phase-space Analysis in the Group and Cluster Environment: Time Since Infall and Tidal Mass Loss

Using the latest cosmological hydrodynamic N-body simulations of groups and clusters, we study how location in phase-space coordinates at z = 0 can provide information on environmental effects acting in clusters. We confirm the results of previous authors showing that galaxies tend to follow a typical path in phase-space as they settle into the cluster potential. As such, different regions of phase-space can be associated with different times since first infalling into the cluster. However, in addition, we see a clear trend between total mass loss due to cluster tides and time since infall. Thus, we find location in phase-space provides information on both infall time and tidal mass loss. We find the predictive power of phase-space diagrams remains even when projected quantities are used (i.e., line of sight velocities, and projected distances from the cluster). We provide figures that can be directly compared with observed samples of cluster galaxies and we also provide the data used to make them as supplementary data to encourage the use of phase-space diagrams as a tool to understand cluster environmental effects. We find that our results depend very weakly on galaxy mass or host mass, so the predictions in our phase-space diagrams can be applied to groups or clusters alike, or to galaxy populations from dwarfs up to giants.
Describing bond-breaking processes by reactive potentials: Importance of an environment-dependent interaction range

First nearest-neighbor models are routinely used for atomistic modeling of covalent materials. Neighbors are usually determined by looking for atoms within a fixed interaction range. While these models provide a faithful description of material properties near equilibrium, the limited interaction range introduces problems in heterogeneous environments and when bond-breaking processes are of concern. We demonstrate in this Rapid Communication that the reliability of reactive bond-order potentials is substantially improved by using an environment-dependent first nearest-neighbor definition.
Transferring transactional business processes to FaaS

Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is a modern cloud service model that has gained significant attention from the research and industry communities in recent years for its many benefits such as dynamic scaling, cost efficiency, faster programming, flexibility to microservices and containers technology. However, the building and deployment of serverless applications come with many challenges that need to be tackled, like workflow design complexity and migration of other applications. When transactions between different parties are involved, the workflow becomes knotty and the communication between participants and all properties of transactions have to be properly resolved. Transactions have widely been discussed in Business processes, so same practices might be adopted by serverless workflows. In this work we provide guidelines and mapping mechanisms for transforming transactional Business Process Modeling Notation 2.0 (BPMN2) applications to a serverless platform. We shed light on the current inability of function orchestrators to express workflow definitions, and deal with various architectural dilemmas that stem from the dissimilar nature of stateful BPMN vs. stateless serverless applications. We overcome the unbalanced capabilities between well-established BPMN notations and function orchestration definitions and illustrate how to exploit and combine cloud native services that comes with FaaS to create serverless applications.
A plug-in memory network for trip purpose classification

Trip purpose plays a critical role in reflecting human mobility behavior. However, it is relatively difficult to determine. With the rapid growth of urban mobility and big mobile data, utilizing these data for trip purpose classification has been a long-term objective to enhance travel demand and behavior models used in urban planning. Although studies on this topic have been extensively conducted, most past research preferred relying on traveler attributes or long-term travel histories to achieve accurate results. These data could be privacy sensitive and often do not satisfy real-world scenarios. This study addresses the problem of classifying trip purpose by only space activity information to avoid privacy conflict. 1) External memories are collected from factorized components based on the non-negative Tucker decomposition scheme. 2) These memories are extended by the cross-attention mechanism to achieve feature augmentation. 3) Subsequently, a novel concept called "latent mode alignment" is proposed. By leveraging the linear characteristics of external memories, geographic contextual latent modes are represented and matched with travel activities; this procedure is called "alignment. " 4) The gate mechanism controls the eventual outputs for update. The proposed plug-in memory network (PMN), combined with baseline models, effectively outperforms the original settings. Moreover, combination models are validated with strong tolerance through missing data tests, which are common and problematic in real-world scenarios. The proposed PMN is a plug-and-play design that is easy to combine with newly developed classification models, and other memory collection methods can be expected.
Observability of target tracking with range-only measurements

A necessary and sufficient condition for local system observability, a prerequisite to target motion analysis, is presented in this technical communication for two-dimensional manoeuvring target tracking with range-only measurements from a single observer. The approach taken in this paper utilizes the Fisher information matrix developed from the analytical treatment of system dynamics and noisy measurement equations established in a modified polar coordinate system. The analytical results of this paper are demonstrated by a series of simulation studies for applications on naval surface vehicle engagements.
Diffuse and Smooth: Beyond Truncated Receptive Field for Scalable and Adaptive Graph Representation Learning

As the scope of receptive field and the depth of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are two completely orthogonal aspects for graph learning, existing GNNs often have shallow layers with truncated-receptive field and far from achieving satisfactory performance. In this article, we follow the idea of decoupling graph convolution into propagation and transformation processes, which generates representations over a sequence of increasingly larger neighborhoods. Though this manner can enlarge the receptive field, it has two critical problems unsolved: how to find the suitable receptive field to avoid under-smoothing or over-smoothing? and how to balance different diffusion operators for better capturing the local and global dependencies? We tackle these challenges and propose a Scalable, Adaptive Graph Convolutional Networks (SAGCN) with Transformer architecture. Concretely, we propose a novel non-heuristic metric method that quickly finds the suitable number of diffusing iterations and produces smoothed local embeddings that enable the truncated receptive field to become scalable and independent of prior experience. Furthermore, we devise smooth2seq and diffusion-based position schemes introduced into Transformer architecture for better capturing local and global information among embeddings. Experimental results show that SAGCN enjoys high accuracy, scalability and efficiency on various open benchmarks and is competitive with other state-of-the-art competitors.
CoMiner: nationwide behavior-driven unsupervised spatial coordinate mining from uncertain delivery events

Geocoding, associating textual addresses with corresponding GPS coordinates, is vital for many location-based services (e.g., logistics, ridesharing, and social networks). One of the most common Geocoding solutions is using commercial map services (e.g., Google Maps) by uploading textual addresses to obtain corresponding coordinates. However, this is typically not practical for some location-based service providers due to real-world challenges like commercial competition and high costs (recurring fees). In this paper, we design a new cost-effective Geocoding framework to automatically infer the geographic coordinates from textual addresses for service providers. To achieve this, we take the E-Commerce logistics service as a concrete scenario and design CoMiner, an unsupervised coordinate inference framework based on textual address data, delivery event data, and courier trajectory data. There are three main components in CoMiner. (1) A POI-level clustering model by modeling customers' shopping patterns at different spatial granularities; (2) A Delivery Mobility Graph (DMG) by modeling couriers' delivery events and geographic coordinates; (3) A behavior-driven address ranking model by mining couriers' uncertain reporting behaviors to further infer coordinates on DMG. We extensively verify the performance of CoMiner with a three-phase evaluation from data-driven experiments to real-world deployment. (i) We conduct extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets where CoMiner achieves an average accuracy of 95.1%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 20.3%. (ii) We deploy CoMiner in JD Logistics, inferring coordinates for over 30 million addresses with an average accuracy of 93.3%. (iii) We utilize CoMiner for two Geocoding-based applications, i.e., parcel re-routing optimization and abnormal delivery event detection.
Influence of the Knowledge of Procurement Personnel on Implementation of Green Public Procurement: (Case Study: Banten, East Java, and Central Java Provinces)

Traditionally, public procurement practices emphasize value for money, which is carried out through competitive tenders to ensure that government agencies receive the cheapest offers of goods/services. But it should not only consider economic factors; the public procurement in Indonesia is also expected not to damage the environment. However, the weak capability and knowledge of personnel causes the implementation of green procurement in government institutions has not shown significant progress. The purpose of this study is to find out what factors will be able to increase the performance of green procurement in government institutions. This study uses data from questionnaires distributed to 43 respondents from Banten, East Java, and Central Java Provinces and tests using multiple linear regression methods and Moderated Regression Analysis (MRA). Data processing shows that the awareness of procurement personnel regarding the implementation of green public procurement, training and individual awareness has a significant effect to the performance of green public procurement. In addition, training and the joining in procurement association strengthen the relationship between awareness of procurement personnel regarding to the implementation of green procurement toward performance of green public procurement. This is importance to develop personnel knowledge through training and joining procurement associations. In this way, personnel awareness regarding implementation of green procurement is able to further improve green public procurement performance.
Striving in Banking Industry in Indonesia Through Technology Information Investment Effectiveness

Digitalization in the banking industry has rapidly sped up, especially during this pandemic era. Customers’ needs and expectations push banking companies to invest in technology even more, forcing banks to select and implement the technology prudently and effectively. This study aims to analyze the effect of information technology investment effectiveness in the banking industry in Indonesia. The data in this study was obtained from 33 banks listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX), from 2015-2020. Data analyzed using Eviews 9. The results of this research show that there is a relationship between information technology investment on bank performance that is measured by two parameters, the first one is a financial performance using return on asset (ROA) and the second one is bank efficiency using cost efficiency (CEFF). The effectiveness of information technology investment in this study was measured by Total Investment Per Employee (TIPE), Employee Expense per total Asset (EEAR), the total number of Automatic Teller Machine (ATM), and Investment Computer Software (ICS). The results are, for TIPE and total of ATM have a positive and significant relationship on bank performance whereas the EEAR and ICS have a negative and significant relationship to bank performance. This study provides implications and unique insights about the role of management in managing the information technology investment effectiveness for bank performance.
A wide-baseline multiview system for indoor scene capture

We present a complete multiview acquisition system, a camera array allowing depth reconstruction based on disparity. We built a new wide-baseline camera grid supported by an interactive camera controller purposely built for indoor large scene capture. It is composed of 16 cameras aligned as a 4 × 4 grid, synchronized, and characterized. The design of the camera system manages storage and real-time capture viewing. We also propose a DNN-based approach to estimate the floating-point disparity values, which is adapted to wide-baseline configurations while providing high precision, even for sharp and concave objects. The ultimate result is a dense 3D point cloud which offers versatile possibilities of viewing.
Effect of dietary supplementation of organic chromium on feed intake, growth performance and economics in commercial broiler chickens

The present study was carried out to evaluate the effect of supplementation of organic chromium (CrPro) in the diet of broiler chickens. A total of two hundred, day old broiler chicks of Cobb-400 strain were divided into four treatment groups with 5 replicates of 10 chicks in each and were assigned to four iso-nutritive diets, viz., T 1 : Control (Feed without CrPro supplementation), T 2 : CrPro supplementation in feed @ 400 µg/kg, T 3 : CrPro supplementation in feed @ 800 µg/kg and T 4 : CrPro supplementation in feed @ 1200 µg/kg. The feeding experiment was carried out for 42 days and feed intake, weight gain, feed conversion ratio and economics of feeding were assessed. Supplementation of CrPro at different levels did not have any significant effect on total feed intake and final body weights of CrPro supplemented groups as compared to the control. The total body weight gain (g/bird) in T 4 group was significantly ( P <0.05) higher than the control group (T 1 ). Feed conversion ratio of birds in T 2, T 3 and T 4 groups found numerically improved as compared to the control group (T 1 ). When profit over control in terms of rupees per bird was calculated, it were found to be 5.20, 4.14 and 2.65 more profit in T 4 , T 3 and T 2, respectively. It is concluded that supplementation of organic chromium improves the performance of broilers when added at the rate of 1200 µg/kg broilers’ ration.
The motion of an internal solitary wave of depression over a fixed bottom boundary in a shallow, two-layer fluid

The motion of a large-amplitude internal solitary wave of depression over a fixed bottom boundary in a shallow, two-layer fluid is investigated experimentally. Measurements of the velocity fields close to the bottom boundary are presented to illustrate the generation of an unsteady boundary jet along the bed. The formation of the jet, the structural characteristics of which show striking similarities with those predicted by recent numerical model studies by Diamessis and Redekopp [J. Phys. Oceanogr. (in press)], is attributed to boundary layer separation in the adverse pressure gradient region of the wave-induced flow.
Stability of Degenerate Diffusions with State-Dependent Switching

This paper deals with the ergodic properties of hybrid systems modelled by diffusion processes with state-dependent switching. We investigate the sufficient conditions expressed in terms of the parameters of the underlying process which would ensure the existence of a unique invariant probability and stability in distribution of the flow. It turns out that the conditions would depend on certain averaging mechanisms over the states of the discrete component of the hybrid system.