Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Intent Understanding Using an Activation Spreading Architecture

In this paper, we propose a new approach for recognizing intentions of humans by observing their activities with a color plus depth (RGB-D) camera. Activities and goals are modeled as a distributed network of inter-connected nodes in an Activation Spreading Network (ASN). Inspired by a formalism in hierarchical task networks, the structure of the network captures the hierarchical relationship between high-level goals and low-level activities that realize these goals. Our approach can detect intentions before they are realized and it can work in real-time. We also extend the formalism of ASNs to incorporate contextual information into intent recognition. We further augment the ASN formalism with special nodes and synaptic connections to model ordering constraints between actions, in order to represent and handle partial-order plans in our ASN. A fully functioning system is developed for experimental evaluation. We implemented a robotic system that uses our intent recognition to naturally interact with the user. Our ASN based intent recognizer is tested against three different scenarios involving everyday activities performed by a subject, and our results show that the proposed approach is able to detect low-level activities and recognize high-level intentions effectively in real-time. Further analysis shows that contextual and partial-order ASNs are able to discriminate between otherwise ambiguous goals.
A criterion for filtering code clone related bugs

Software reviews are time-consuming task especially for large software systems. To reduce the efforts required, Li et al. developed CP-Miner, a code clone detection tool that detects identifier naming inconsistencies between code clones as bug candidates. However, reviewers using CP-Miner still have to assess many inconsistencies, since the tool also reports many false-positive candidates. To reduce the false-positive candidates, we propose a criterion for filtering the candidates. In our experiments, filtering with the proposed criterion removed 30% of the false-positive candidates and no true-positive candidates. This result shows that the proposed criterion helps the review task by effectively reducing the number of bug candidates.
An Effective Architecture and Algorithm for Detecting Worms with Various Scan

Since the days of the Morris worm, the spread of malicious code has been the most imminent menace to the Internet. Worms use various scanning methods to spread rapidly. Worms that select scan destinations carefully can cause more damage than worms employing random scan. This paper analyzes various scan techniques. We then propose a generic worm detection architecture that monitors malicious activities. We propose and evaluate an algorithm to detect the spread of worms using real time traces and simulations. We find that our solution can detect worm activities when only 4% of the vulnerable machines are infected. Our results bring insight on the future battle against worm attacks.
Clocking design automation in Intel's Core i7 and future designs

In the competitive CPU market, emphasis is placed on automations that promotes innovation and supports design of multiple CPU configuration which meets schedule and timely turnaround to market. Design automation is essential in the design of different areas of CPU including the global clock distributions. This paper talks about design automation tools developed to handle the design of the global clock distributions for various Intel microprocessors.
A Static Neural Network for Input-Output Mapping of Power Electronic Circuits

This paper investigates the effectiveness of a static neural network for input-output mapping of power electronic circuits. The neural network is a multilayer perceptron (MLP) that is trained to form a mapping between the inputs and outputs of a power electronic circuit. The circuit consists of a full bridge diode rectifier, together with the source inductance and the output filter. Dynamic models have been used for the rectifier diodes. The ultimate objective of the designed neural network is to provide an indication when the performance properties of one or more components in the rectifier circuit have changed. Simulation results are provided that indicate the neural network is capable of mapping the inputs and outputs of the circuit and detect operating conditions that are different from the original condition.
Methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

In the Caribbean, the typical Staphylococcus aureus (S aureus) is penicillin resistant, but susceptible to beta-lactamase stable penicillins to which methicillin belongs, first and second generation cephalosporins and beta-lactam/beta-lactam inhibitor combinations such as amoxicillin/clavulanate and piperacillin/tazobactam. Susceptibility to erythromycin, clindamycin, tetracycline and co-trimoxazole is usual. In contrast, methicillin-resistant S aureus (MRSA) are resistant to all beta-lactams. This is due to the production of a chromosomally mediated new penicillin binding protein, PBP 2a so that the target of drug action does not bind these drugs. Furthermore, MRSA tend to be resistant to alternative nonbeta-lactam agents. Susceptibility to ciprofloxacin and vancomycin are almost always found, although resistance to ciprofloxacin may arise during treatment. Methicillin-resistant S aureus first emerged in the late 1970s in Europe and North America, but are now encountered worldwide. It has been confined mostly to hospitalized patients, where the MRSA may be endemic or epidemic. Control of the organism has proven to be problematic, involving identification of colonization (and infection), sourceisolation and elimination of carriage with neomycin-chlorhexidine or mupirocin intranasally accompanied by chlorhexidine or triclosan showering. In teaching hospitals, in particular, MRSA isolates may outnumber methicillin susceptible isolates of S aureus (MSSA). The Netherlands, where a “search and destroy” policy is active, is the only European country without a problem of hospital-acquired MRSA. More recently, MRSA have emerged as causes of hospital-care associated infections, where the patient comes from the community or a nursing home with MRSA colonization that persisted since a prior period of hospitalization. In some cases, the nursing home becomes the focus of endemic MRSA. In this issue, Karabay et al (1) discuss increased awareness of proper hand hygiene in the control of MSSA and MRSA in two Turkish nursing homes. Currently, there is considerable concern about the recent emergence of MRSA infection in the community, without heathcare associated exposure. Northern United States of America and Canada have noted this unwelcome development (Professor P Levett, Saskatchewan Health, personal communication). In this issue, a case report describes community acquired MRSA in a child from Anguilla (2), suggesting that the Caribbean needs to be aware of MRSA infection without any history of healthcare contact.
A social network integrated game experiment to relate tapping to speed perception and explore rhythm reproduction

During recent years, games with a purpose (GWAPs) have become increasingly popular for studying human behaviour [1–4]. However, no standardised method for web-based game experiments has been proposed so far. We present here our approach comprising an extended version of the CaSimIR social game framework [5] for data collection, mini-games for tempo and rhythm tapping, and an initial analysis of the data collected so far. The game presented here is part of the Spot The Odd Song Out game, which is freely available for use on Facebook and on the Web 1 . We present the GWAP method in some detail and a preliminary analysis of data collected. We relate the tapping data to perceptual ratings obtained in previous work. The results suggest that the tapped tempo data collected in a GWAP can be used to predict perceived speed. I toned down the above statement as I understand from the results section that our data are not as good as When averagingthe rhythmic performances of a group of 10 players in the second experiment, the tapping frequency shows a pattern that corresponds to the time signature of the music played. Our experience shows that more effort in design and during runtime is required than in a traditional experiment. Our experiment is still running and available on line.
Describing discourse semantics

Descriptions. In recent years, both formal and computational linguistics have been exploiting descriptions of structures where previously the structures themselves were used. The practice started with (Marcus et al., 1983), who demonstrated the value of (syntactic) tree descriptions for near-deterministic incremental parsing. Vijay-Shankar (Vijay-Shankar and Joshi, 1988; Vijay-Shankar, 1992) used descriptions to maintain the monotonicity of syntactic derivations in the framework of Feature-Based Tree Adjoining Grammar. In semantics, both (Muskens, 1997) and (Egg et al., 1997) have shown the value of descriptions as an underspecified representation of scope ambiguities. The current paper further extends the use of descriptions, from individual sentences to discourse, showing their benefit for incremental, near-deterministic discourse processing. In particular, we show that using descriptions to describe the semantic representation of discourse permits: (1) a monotone treatment of local ambiguity; (2) a deterministic treatment of global ambiguity; and (3) a distinction to be made between “simple” local ambiguity and “garden-path” local ambiguity.
Functional Analysis of the Carbohydrate-Binding Domains of Erwinia chrysanthemi Cel5 (Endoglucanase Z) and an Escherichia coli Putative Chitinase

ABSTRACT The Cel5 cellulase (formerly known as endoglucanase Z) fromErwinia chrysanthemi is a multidomain enzyme consisting of a catalytic domain, a linker region, and a cellulose binding domain (CBD). A three-dimensional structure of the CBDCel5 has previously been obtained by nuclear magnetic resonance. In order to define the role of individual residues in cellulose binding, site-directed mutagenesis was performed. The role of three aromatic residues (Trp18, Trp43, and Tyr44) in cellulose binding was demonstrated. The exposed potential hydrogen bond donors, residues Gln22 and Glu27, appeared not to play a role in cellulose binding, whereas residue Asp17 was found to be important for the stability of Cel5. A deletion mutant lacking the residues Asp17 to Pro23 bound only weakly to cellulose. The sequence of CBDCel5 exhibits homology to a series of five repeating domains of a putative large protein, referred to as Yheb, from Escherichia coli. One of the repeating domains (Yheb1), consisting of 67 amino acids, was cloned from the E. coli chromosome and purified by metal chelating chromatography. While CBDCel5 bound to both cellulose and chitin, Yheb1 bound well to chitin, but only very poorly to cellulose. The Yheb protein contains a region that exhibits sequence homology with the catalytic domain of a chitinase, which is consistent with the hypothesis that the Yheb protein is a chitinase.
Improving GPU performance via large warps and two-level warp scheduling

Due to their massive computational power, graphics processing units (GPUs) have become a popular platform for executing general purpose parallel applications. GPU programming models allow the programmer to create thousands of threads, each executing the same computing kernel. GPUs exploit this parallelism in two ways. First, threads are grouped into fixed-size SIMD batches known as warps, and second, many such warps are concurrently executed on a single GPU core. Despite these techniques, the computational resources on GPU cores are still underutilized, resulting in performance far short of what could be delivered. Two reasons for this are conditional branch instructions and stalls due to long latency operations. To improve GPU performance, computational resources must be more effectively utilized. To accomplish this, we propose two independent ideas: the large warp microarchitecture and two-level warp scheduling. We show that when combined, our mechanisms improve performance by 19.1% over traditional GPU cores for a wide variety of general purpose parallel applications that heretofore have not been able to fully exploit the available resources of the GPU chip.
Neural Monkey: An Open-source Tool for Sequence Learning

Abstract In this paper, we announce the development of Neural Monkey – an open-source neural machine translation (NMT) and general sequence-to-sequence learning system built over the TensorFlow machine learning library. The system provides a high-level API tailored for fast prototyping of complex architectures with multiple sequence encoders and decoders. Models’ overall architecture is specified in easy-to-read configuration files. The long-term goal of the Neural Monkey project is to create and maintain a growing collection of implementations of recently proposed components or methods, and therefore it is designed to be easily extensible. Trained models can be deployed either for batch data processing or as a web service. In the presented paper, we describe the design of the system and introduce the reader to running experiments using Neural Monkey.
On Finding a Minimum Weight Cycle Basis with Cycles of Bounded Length

Consider a connected undirected graph G = (V, E) without loops and multiple edges. Let n = |V | and m = |E| be respectively the number of vertices and edges. A generalized cycle is a subset of edges C ⊆ E such that every vertex of V is incident to an even number of edges in C. All the cycles of G form a vector space, the so-called cycle space. Given an undirected graph G with a nonnegative weight we assigned to each edge e ∈ E, the Minimum Cycle Basis problem consists in finding a cycle basis C of minimum total weight w(C) = ∑ C∈C w(C), where the weight of a cycle is defined as w(C) = ∑ e∈C we. This problem has been extensively studied, both from the algorithmic and the structural point of views. See the most recent works [1,2], the survey [9] and the references therein.
Genetic Fuzzy Systems: Status, Critical Considerations and Future Directions

Fuzzy Systems have shown their utility for solving a wide range of problems in different application domains. The use of Genetic Algorithms for designing Fuzzy Systems allows us to introduce the learning and adaptation capabilities. This topic has attracted considerable attention in the Computation Intelligence community. This short paper briefly reviews the classical models and the most recent trends for Genetic Fuzzy Systems. We pay special attention to a short discussion on some critical considerations of recent developments and to the suggestion of potential research future directions.
Using new remote sensing satellites for assessing water quality in a reservoir

ABSTRACT Water quality monitoring could benefit from information derived from the newest generation of medium-resolution Earth observation satellites. The main objective of our study was to assess the suitability of both Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2A satellites for estimating and mapping of Secchi disk transparency (SDT), a common measurement of water clarity, in Cassaffousth Reservoir (Córdoba, Argentina). Ground observations and a dataset of four Landsat 8 and four Sentinel-2A images were used to create and validate models to estimate SDT in the reservoir. The selected algorithms were used to obtain graphic representations of water clarity. Slight differences were found between Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 estimations. Thus, we demonstrated the suitability of both satellites for estimating and mapping water quality. This study highlights the importance of free and readily available satellite datasets in monitoring water quality, especially in countries where conventional monitoring programmes are either lacking or unsatisfactory.
Old Lineages in a New Ecosystem: Diversification of Arcellinid Amoebae (Amoebozoa) and Peatland Mosses

Arcellinid testate amoebae (Amoebozoa) form a group of free-living microbial eukaryotes with one of the oldest fossil records known, yet several aspects of their evolutionary history remain poorly understood. Arcellinids occur in a range of terrestrial, freshwater and even brackish habitats; however, many arcellinid morphospecies such as Hyalosphenia papilio are particularly abundant in Sphagnum-dominated peatlands, a relatively new ecosystem that appeared during the diversification of Sphagnum species in the Miocene (5–20 Myr ago). Here, we reconstruct divergence times in arcellinid testate amoebae after selecting several fossils for clock calibrations and then infer whether or not arcellinids followed a pattern of diversification that parallels the pattern described for Sphagnum. We found that the diversification of core arcellinids occurred during the Phanerozoic, which is congruent with most arcellinid fossils but not with the oldest known amoebozoan fossil (i.e. at ca. 662 or ca. 750 Myr). Overall, Sphagnum and the Hyalospheniidae exhibit different patterns of diversification. However, an extensive molecular phylogenetic analysis of distinct clades within H. papilio species complex demonstrated a correlation between the recent diversification of H. papilio, the recent diversification of Sphagnum mosses, and the establishment of peatlands.
Repair Optimal Erasure Codes Through Hadamard Designs

In distributed storage systems that employ erasure coding, the issue of minimizing the total communication required to exactly rebuild a storage node after a failure arises. This repair bandwidth depends on the structure of the storage code and the repair strategies used to restore the lost data. Designing high-rate maximum-distance separable (MDS) codes that achieve the optimum repair communication has been a well-known open problem. Our work resolves, in part, this open problem. In this study, we use Hadamard matrices to construct the first explicit two-parity MDS storage code with optimal repair properties for all single node failures, including the parities. Our construction relies on a novel method of achieving perfect interference alignment over finite fields with a finite number of symbol extensions. We generalize this construction to design $m$-parity MDS codes that achieve the optimum repair communication for single systematic node failures.
A Structured View of Dialogue Context as a Basis for Addressing the Interactive Re-Use of Educational Dialogues

Vicarious learning from others’ dialogues Learning by observing spontaneous conversations between other learners is an educational task which has been proved to be effective (Cox et al. 1998). A challenging goal is to accomplish such a task through a tutoring system and to show how it can be usefully supported by formal accounts of educational dialogue. In particular, there is a need for characterising the indeterminacy of the problem and addressing the question of the nature of context in such applications. This paper presents a representation of context which inte~ates pre-existing methods and models. The perspective taken is motivated by empirical data. It is aimed at identifying informational needs of overhearers and at determining design principles which can drive the implementation of hypermedia educational environments.
Effect of savings-led economic empowerment on HIV preventive practices among orphaned adolescents in rural Uganda: results from the Suubi-Maka randomized experiment

ABSTRACT Improving economic resources of impoverished youth may alter intentions to engage in sexual risk behaviors by motivating positive future planning to avoid HIV risk and by altering economic contexts contributing to HIV risk. Yet, few studies have examined the effect of economic-strengthening on economic and sexual behaviors of orphaned youth, despite high poverty and high HIV infection in this population. Hierarchal longitudinal regressions were used to examine the effect of a savings-led economic empowerment intervention, the Suubi-Maka Project, on changes in orphaned adolescents’ cash savings and attitudes toward savings and HIV-preventive practices over time. We randomized 346 Ugandan adolescents, aged 10–17 years, to either the control group receiving usual orphan care plus mentoring (n = 167) or the intervention group receiving usual orphan care plus mentoring, financial education, and matched savings accounts (n = 179). Assessments were conducted at baseline, 12, and 24 months. Results indicated that intervention adolescents significantly increased their cash savings over time (b = $US12.32, ±1.12, p < .001) compared to adolescents in the control group. At 24 months post-baseline, 92% of intervention adolescents had accumulated savings compared to 43% in the control group (p < .001). The largest changes in savings goals were the proportion of intervention adolescents valuing saving for money to buy a home (ΔT1−T0 = +14.9, p < .001), pursue vocational training (ΔT1−T0 = +8.8, p < .01), and start a business (T1−T0 = +6.7, p < .01). Intervention adolescents also had a significant relative increase over time in HIV-preventive attitudinal scores (b = +0.19, ±0.09, p < .05), most commonly toward perceived risk of HIV (95.8%, n = 159), sexual abstinence or postponement (91.6%, n = 152), and consistent condom use (93.4%, n = 144). In addition, intervention adolescents had 2.017 significantly greater odds of a maximum HIV-prevention score (OR = 2.017, 95%CI: 1.43–2.84). To minimize HIV risk throughout the adolescent and young adult periods, long-term strategies are needed to integrate youth economic development, including savings and income generation, with age-appropriate combination prevention interventions.
Potential contaminant runoff from Californias dairy concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs): A geospatial analysis

Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) contain large quantities of dairy cows and therefore have the potential to contribute significant amounts of harmful waste products to the environment. Although previous studies have used geospatial tools to assess potential contaminant runoff, the results from these studies are dependent on the unique geographical characteristics of specific regions. This study incorporated geographical characteristics unique to California to: 1) characterize the distribution of dairy CAFOs in California; and 2) determine and compare the potential for dairy CAFOs in high vs. low runoff potential regions in subject counties to contaminate surface water. The CAFOs were grouped by their location in either high or low runoff potential regions characterized by Curve Number (CN) grids. The potential for the CAFOs in either group to contaminate surface water was determined by calculating the proportion of CAFOs with runoff that intersected with surface water. Among the CAFOs in high runoff potential regions, 180 out of 193 facilities had the potential to contaminate surface water. This proportion was found to be significantly different from the proportion of CAFOs in low runoff potential regions (p=0.023), indicating validity of the CN grids used to approximate runoff potential. Key words: Concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO), dairy, water pollution, geographic information system (GIS), curve number (CN) grids