Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Global Outsourcing on IT Providers

This article examines the impact of Global IT Outsourcing on Information Technology (IT) firms from the off-shore sourcing perspective. IT Providers are defined in this article as companies that produce IT as opposed to companies that consume IT. To assess the impact of outsourcing on such companies, this article presents an Enterprise Architecture (EA) view of IT and uses it as the framework to determine the impact of outsourcing. The three dimensions of Enterprise Architecture include people, process and product and/or services. The article argues that if the sourcing decisions are based purely on short term goals such as cost, then the long term viability of the IT firm may be compromised. Lack of an IT development model and lack of IT metrics makes it difficult for IT Providers to truly plan and manage the off-shore resources. This article suggests that shorter development cycles, requirements volatility, and the need for constant developer-user interaction makes off-shore outsourcing more difficult. To address these challenges, organizations should develop metrics and governance practices based on experience. This article also proposes that the type of product or service is critical in addressing the decision to outsource. The higher the intellectual (or proprietary) content, the higher is the risk when outsourcing. This article presents two simple frameworks, one for assessing the benefits and risk of outsourcing for IT infrastructure services and the other for IT applications. IT Providers are advised to pay particular attention to the life cycle model of off-shoring where early gains give way to a learning and adjustment phase. If the IT firm successfully develops a rich experience base and adjusts the off-shore model, then sustained benefits can be realized.
Thermal-aware task allocation and scheduling for embedded systems

Temperature affects not only the reliability but also the performance, power, and cost of the embedded system. This paper proposes a thermal-aware task allocation and scheduling algorithm for embedded systems. The algorithm is used as a subroutine for hardware/software co-synthesis to reduce the peak temperature and achieve a thermally even distribution while meeting real time constraints. The paper investigates both power-aware and thermal-aware approaches to task allocation and scheduling. The experimental results show that the thermal-aware approach outperforms the power-aware schemes in terms of maximal and average temperature reductions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first task allocation and scheduling algorithm that takes temperature into consideration.
A fast algorithm for finding dominators in a flowgraph

A fast algorithm for finding dominators in a flowgraph is presented. The algorithm uses depth-first search and an efficient method of computing functions defined on paths in trees. A simple implementation of the algorithm runs in <italic>O</italic>(<italic>m</italic> log <italic>n</italic>) time, where <italic>m</italic> is the number of edges and <italic>n</italic> is the number of vertices in the problem graph. A more sophisticated implementation runs in <italic>O</italic>(<italic>m</italic>α(<italic>m</italic>, <italic>n</italic>)) time, where α(<italic>m</italic>, <italic>n</italic>) is a functional inverse of Ackermann's function. Both versions of the algorithm were implemented in Algol W, a Stanford University version of Algol, and tested on an IBM 370/168. The programs were compared with an implementation by Purdom and Moore of a straightforward <italic>O</italic>(<italic>mn</italic>)-time algorithm, and with a bit vector algorithm described by Aho and Ullman. The fast algorithm beat the straightforward algorithm and the bit vector algorithm on all but the smallest graphs tested.
Capillary recruitment in response to tissue hypoxia and its dependence on red blood cell deformability.

The effect of reduced red blood cell (RBC) deformability on microvessel recruitment attendant to a reduction in tissue[Formula: see text] was studied in rat cremaster muscle using indicator-dilution techniques. Transit times (TT) of fluorescently labeled RBCs (TTRBC) and plasma (TTPl) between functionally paired arterioles and venules were obtained from their dispersion throughout the microvascular network. Changes in[Formula: see text] were effected by superfusing the tissue with Ringer solution deoxygenated to different levels. Arteriolar blood flow (Q˙) was measured with the two-slit technique, and the vascular volume (V) occupied by RBCs and plasma was computed from the product of Q˙ × TT during bolus infusions of rat and less deformable human RBCs to obtain VRBC and fluorescently labeled albumin to obtain VPl. Measurements of TTRBC and TTPl permitted computation of an average flow-weighted tissue (microvascular) hematocrit (HM) relative to systemic values (HS). During infusions of autologous rat RBCs, Q˙ and total V increased threefold in response to hypoxia, whereas normalized RBC TT (TTRBC/TTPl) and normalized tissue hematocrit (HM/HS) did not show a significant trend, indicating an increase in the number of pathways through which the RBCs can traverse the network because of spatial recruitment of capillaries. In contrast, during infusions of human RBCs, TTRBC/TTPland HM/HSdecreased significantly in response to hypoxia. AlthoughQ˙ exhibited an increase similar to that during rat RBC infusions, VRBC exhibited a smaller increase compared with VPl, suggesting that reduced RBC deformability leads to a redistribution of RBCs through larger-diameter pathways within the network and exclusion of these RBCs from pathways normally recruited during hypoxia. Hence, reduced RBC deformability may adversely affect capillary recruitment and physiological mechanisms that ensure adequate delivery of oxygen to tissue.
Quantitative stereological analysis of confocal laser scanning microscopic images of cells

Stereology is an interdisciplinary method of mathematics and morphology, and is unbiased, quick, accurate, noninvasive, and has high reproducibility. It is widely used in radiation imaging and cell biology. In this paper, the confocal laser scanning microscopic images (CLSMI) of tumor cells of MCF-7 and B16/ GPR4 were quantitatively analyzed using stereological point counting method. 22 images of MCF-7 and 16 images of B16/GPR4 were used in the study. The number of slices used to space the cell was determined by keeping the coefficient of error (CE) equal or less than 5%. The cell was sliced by randomly picking up the starting point and the stereology grids were placed in the 2D images of the cell layers. The circumference, areas and volumes of the cells and nuclei were measured. The average volume of nuclei (Vn), volume density of nuclei (Vvn), surface area density of nuclei (Svn), ratio of surface area and volume of nuclei (Rsvn), and ratio of nuclei and plasma (Rnp) were calculated. The maximum and minimum, and median diameters of the cells were calculated from the binarized image of the cells. The results were very close to the results obtained using the image processing software of Leica and reconstructed 3D images of the CLSMI. It was shown that the stereological method is a quick and easy-to-use tool for quantitative analysis of cell images.
Proactive maintenance tools for transaction oriented wide area networks

The motivation of the work presented in this paper comes from a real network management center in charge of supervising a very large hybrid telecommunications/data transaction-oriented network. We present a set of tools that we have developed and implemented in the AT&T Transaction Access Services (TAS) network, in order to automate and facilitate the process of diagnosing network faults and identifying the potentially affected elements, resources and customers. Specifically in this paper we describe the development implementation and use of the following systems: (a) the TAS Information and Tracking System (TIMATS) that provides a common framework for the storage and retrieval of provisioning, capacity management and maintenance data; (b) the Transactions Event Viewer (TEVIEW) system that generates, filters, and presents diagnostic events that indicate system occurrences or conditions that may cause a degradation of the service; and (c) the Transaction Instantaneous Anomaly Notification (TRISTAN) system which implements an adaptive network anomaly detection software that detects network and service anomalies of TAS as dynamically defined violations of the base-lined performance characteristics and profiles.
Physiologically-Mediated Self/Non-Self Root Discrimination in Trifolium repens has Mixed Effects on Plant Performance

Recent studies suggest that plant roots can avoid competition with other roots of the same plant, but the mechanism behind this behavior is yet largely unclear and their effects on plant performance hardly studied. We grew combinations of two ramets of Trifolium repens in a single pot that were either intact, disconnected for a shorter or longer time, or that belonged to different genotypes. Interconnected ramets developed lower root length and mass than any other combination of ramets, supporting the notion that self/non-self discrimination in T. repens was based entirely on physiological coordination between different roots that develop on the same plant, rather than biochemical allorecognition. These responses were consistent among eight field-collected genotypes, suggesting that self/non-self discrimination is a common feature in wild populations of white clover. There were no significant treatment x genotype interactions suggesting that genetic variation for self/non-self discrimination may be limited. Self-interactions resulted in lower to similar shoot biomass and number of ramets, but higher flowering probabilities, compared to non-self interactions. Thus, our results demonstrated that the performance consequences of self/non-self discrimination may be more complicated than previously thought.
Cost-Optimal Outsourcing of Applications into the Clouds

Commercial services for provisioning software components and virtual infrastructure in the cloud are emerging. For customers, this creates a multitude of possibilities for outsourcing part of the IT-stack to third parties in order to run their applications. These possibilities are associated with different running costs, so cloud customers have to determine the optimal solution. In this paper, we present and experimentally evaluate an algorithm that solves the corresponding optimization problem. We assume that applications are described as templates, fixing the deployment structure and constraining the properties of the used soft- and hardware components. Different parts of the application may be outsourced to different providers and several levels of outsourcing can be considered. However, dependencies between different parts of the application have to be respected. Our algorithm decomposes the application graph in a first step-in order to discover all suitable cloud provisioning services from a registry. It determines the optimal solution by representing the problem as constraint optimization problem that can be solved by an existing solver implementation.
Groundwater Storage in High Alpine Catchments and Its Contribution to Streamflow

There is limited knowledge about groundwater storage in alpine catchments, although it might strongly influence how these catchments react to earlier snowmelt due to climate change. The objective of the study was to develop and test a method to quantify seasonal groundwater storage in alpine catchments and evaluate how groundwater storage is related to hydrogeological properties. As representative water table observations are challenging to acquire in such environments, we used a water balance approach targeting the main snowmelt period when most groundwater recharge is expected to occur. Based on a detailed quantification of the snow water equivalent at the onset of snowmelt combined with discharge measurements, it is possible to quantify groundwater storage with a low uncertainty even if other terms of the water balance are less well constrained. The application of the method to an 11‐km2 research catchment revealed a large seasonal increase of groundwater storage by 300 mm or 45% of the premelt snow water equivalent. An independent quantification of groundwater storage depletion during the 7‐month‐long recession period provided a similar value of 330 mm, demonstrating that the stored groundwater is available to sustain streamflow. At the end of the recession, catchment outflow still amounted to 0.9 mm/day with a composite bedrock aquifer providing a disproportionally high share as demonstrated by hydrochemical data. The study demonstrates that high alpine aquifers can seasonally redistribute water and stabilize catchment outflow in an otherwise very dynamic environment and thus might strongly influence the response of such catchments to climate change.
Nonparametric Return Distribution Approximation for Reinforcement Learning

Standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to optimize decision-making rules in terms of the expected return. However, especially for risk-management purposes, other criteria such as the expected shortfall are sometimes preferred. Here, we describe a method of approximating the distribution of returns, which allows us to derive various kinds of information about the returns. We first show that the Bellman equation, which is a recursive formula for the expected return, can be extended to the cumulative return distribution. Then we derive a nonparametric return distribution estimator with particle smoothing based on this extended Bellman equation. A key aspect of the proposed algorithm is to represent the recursion relation in the extended Bellman equation by a simple replacement procedure of particles associated with a state by using those of the successor state. We show that our algorithm leads to a risk-sensitive RL paradigm. The usefulness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through numerical experiments.
SCORES: A scalable and parametric streams-based communication architecture for modular reconfigurable systems

Parallel architectures have become an increasingly popular method in which to achieve high performance with low power consumption. In order to leverage these benefits, applications are decomposed into multiple computational modules (tasks) that collectively operate and communicate in parallel. In this paper, we present a scalable and highly parametric streams-based communication architecture for inter-module communication for FPGA-based systems - SCORES. This communication architecture improves on previous methods by providing increased application specialization and heterogeneous module clock frequencies, as well as providing a means for low latency communication and data throughput guarantees.
Accurate Relay Selection for Improved Multipath Throughput in Internet Overlays

Distributed applications deployed over the Internet, such as in grids, clouds, or P2P networks, crucially depend on the speed of their Internet connections. A common solution is to exploit underlying network parallelism via multipath routing within an application-level overlay network. Accurately selecting appropriate relay hosts within an overlay, however, remains a challenging problem, frequently addressed by simple heuristics. We propose a modeling-based approach to solving the relay selection problem for multipath overlay routing. Our system enables formula-based, dynamic, flexible and overlay-specific model building and prediction of end-to-end metrics such as TCP throughput on multiple paths based on any number of underlying predictor metrics. For evaluation, we use Planetlab and, as prediction data, we leverage 9 months worth of available bandwidth traces collected from the S3 project, in addition to our own measurements. Comparing with existing heuristic methods, we show that relay selection using our modeling-based approach enables consistent performance gains across the Internet.
Towards an Analysis of Opinions in News Editorials: How positive was the year? (project abstract)

Editorials represent opinion articles written by the publisher, editors or columnists of newspapers. From this perspective, editorials are ideal sources for outlining views on events and analyzing how they are perceived, e.g. whether they are positive or negative or the kind of feelings or analysis they involve (uncertainty, worries, etc.). The proposed work aims at identifying the linguistic criteria and at creating a model for the aforementioned purpose, which makes use of an adequate set of semantic tags that we have defined to annotate texts from which a detailed analysis can be carried out.
Ultrasonic Tomography Technique for Evaluation Concrete Pavements Core-free Ultrasonic Technique for Evaluation Concrete Pavements

Ultrasonic tomography is an emerging technology that shows promise for quality assurance/quality control (QA/QC) during construction, or for making rehabilitation decisions in concrete pavements. However, the benefits of this emerging technology have not yet been fully captured for widespread use in highway infrastructure management. Verification of a state-of-the-art ultrasonic tomography device (MIRA) is presented through multiple field trials involving typical pavement constructability and rehabilitation issues. Field trials indicate that, while the device is a useful portable pavement diagnostic alternative capable of consistent thickness measurement, reinforcement location, and distress evaluation, significant efforts and user expertise are required for measurement and data interpretation of large scale application. Thus, software was developed for a more productive, objective signal interpretation method with automated analysis of reinforcement location in continuously reinforced concrete pavement. This type of automation for multiple applications shows promise for the use of ultrasonic tomography to improve large scale pavement QA/QC and rehabilitation projects in the future. Nevertheless, the research in the paper shows ultrasonic tomography to be an accurate, reliable, and convenient alternative or supplement to traditional techniques that can be utilized for a wide variety of small scale pavement diagnostics applications.
Analysis of Computer Security Incident Data Using Time Series Models

Organizations face increasing challenges in addressing and preventing computer and network security incidents. There are financial consequences from security incidents. These include lost time and resources used during recovery, possible theft of personal and/or proprietary information, and reputational damage that may negatively impact stock prices or reduce consumer confidence in a company. Being able to understand and predict trends in computer and network security incidents can aid an organization with resource allocation for prevention of such incidents, as well as evaluation of mitigation strategies. We look at using time series models with a large set of security incident data. We examine appropriateness of the data for modeling and consider needed transformations. Parameter search and model selection criteria are discussed. Then, forecasts from time series models are compared to forecasts from Non-Homogeneous Poisson Process (NHPP) software reliability growth (SRG) models.
Use of response functions in selecting lodgepole pine populations for future climates

Although growth response functions have previously been developed for lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Dougl. ex Loud.) populations in British Columbia, new analyses were conducted: (1) to demonstrate the merit of a new local climate model in genecological analysis; (2) to highlight new methods for deriving response functions; and (3) to evaluate the impacts of management options for existing geographically defined seed planning units (SPUs) for reforestation. Results of this study suggest that new methods for anchoring population response functions, and a multivariate approach for incorporating climate variables into a single model, considerably improve the reliability of these functions. These functions identified a small number of populations in central areas of the species distribution with greater growth potential over a wide range of mean annual temperature (MAT). Average productivity of lodgepole pine is predicted to increase (up to 7%) if moderate warming ( 2 1C MAT) occurs in the next few decades as predicted, although productivity would substantially decline in some SPUs in southern BC. Severe global warming (43 1C MAT) would result in either a drastic decline in productivity or local populations being extirpated in southern SPUs. New deployment strategies using the best seed sources for future reforestation may not only be able to mitigate the negative impact of global warming, but may even be able to increase productivity in some areas.
Blood Loss in Major Spine Surgery: Are There Effective Measures to Decrease Massive Hemorrhage in Major Spine Fusion Surgery?

Study Design. Systematic review. Objective. To determine the definition and incidence of significant hemorrhage in adult spine fusion surgery, and to assess whether measures to decrease hemorrhage are effective. Summary of Background Data. Significant hemorrhage and associated comorbidities in spine fusion surgery have not yet been clearly identified. Several preoperative and intraoperative techniques are currently available to reduce blood loss and transfusion requirements such as cell saver (CS), recombinant factor VIIa, and perioperative antifibrinolytic agents, such as aprotinin, tranexamic acid, and &egr;-aminocaproic acid. Their effectiveness and safety in spine surgery is uncertain. Methods. A systematic review of the English-language literature was undertaken for articles published between January 1990 and April 2009. Electronic databases and reference lists of key articles were searched to identify published studies examining blood loss in major spine surgery. Two independent reviewers assessed the quality of the literature using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation criteria. Disagreements were resolved by consensus. Results. A total of 90 articles were initially screened, and 17 ultimately met the predetermined inclusion criteria. No studies were found that attempted to define significant hemorrhage in adult spine surgery. We found that there is a high level of evidence that antifibrinolytic agents reduce blood loss and the need of transfusion in adult spine surgery; however, the safety profile of these agents is unclear. There is very low evidence to support the use of CS, recombinant factor VIIa, activated growth factor platelet gel, or normovolemic hemodilution as a method to prevent massive hemorrhage in spine fusion surgery. Conclusion. There is no consensus definition of significant hemorrhage in adult spine fusion surgery. However, definition in the anesthesiology literature of massive blood loss is somewhat arbitrary but is commonly accepted to entail loss of 1 volume of the patient's total blood (60 mL/kg in adults) in <24 hours. On the basis of the current literature, there is little support for routine use of CS during elective spinal surgery. Concerns related to the use of aprotinin were such that our panel of experts unanimously recommended against its use in spine surgery on the basis of the reports of increased complications. With respect to the antifibrinolytics of the lysine analog class (tranexamic acid and aminocaproic acid), on the basis of the available efficacy and safety data, we recommend that they be considered as possible agents to help reduce major hemorrhage in adult spine surgery.