Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using communicative acts in high-level specifications of user interfaces for their automated synthesis

User interfaces are very important for the success of many computer-based applications these days. However, their development takes time, requires experts for user-interface design as well as experienced programmers and is very expensive. This problem becomes even more severe through the ubiquitous use of a variety of devices such as PCs, mobile phones, PDAs etc., since each of these devices has its own specifics that require a special user interface.Therefore, we developed a tool-supported approach to automatically synthesize multi-device user interfaces from high-level specifications in the form of models. In contrast to previous approaches focusing on abstracting the user interface per se, we make use of communicative acts derived from speech act theory for the specification of desired user intentions in interactions. In this way, we approach a solution to the given problem, since user interfaces can be efficiently provided without experience in implementing them.
Magic is relevant

We define the magic-sets transformation for traditional relational systems (with duplicates, aggregation and grouping), as well as for relational systems extended with recursion. We compare the magic-sets rewriting to traditional optimization techniques for nonrecursive queries, and use performance experiments to argue that the magic-sets transformation is often a better optimization technique.
Molecular physiology of P2X receptors.

P2X receptors are membrane ion channels that open in response to the binding of extracellular ATP. Seven genes in vertebrates encode P2X receptor subunits, which are 40-50% identical in amino acid sequence. Each subunit has two transmembrane domains, separated by an extracellular domain (approximately 280 amino acids). Channels form as multimers of several subunits. Homomeric P2X1, P2X2, P2X3, P2X4, P2X5, and P2X7 channels and heteromeric P2X2/3 and P2X1/5 channels have been most fully characterized following heterologous expression. Some agonists (e.g., alphabeta-methylene ATP) and antagonists [e.g., 2',3'-O-(2,4,6-trinitrophenyl)-ATP] are strongly selective for receptors containing P2X1 and P2X3 subunits. All P2X receptors are permeable to small monovalent cations; some have significant calcium or anion permeability. In many cells, activation of homomeric P2X7 receptors induces a permeability increase to larger organic cations including some fluorescent dyes and also signals to the cytoskeleton; these changes probably involve additional interacting proteins. P2X receptors are abundantly distributed, and functional responses are seen in neurons, glia, epithelia, endothelia, bone, muscle, and hemopoietic tissues. The molecular composition of native receptors is becoming understood, and some cells express more than one type of P2X receptor. On smooth muscles, P2X receptors respond to ATP released from sympathetic motor nerves (e.g., in ejaculation). On sensory nerves, they are involved in the initiation of afferent signals in several viscera (e.g., bladder, intestine) and play a key role in sensing tissue-damaging and inflammatory stimuli. Paracrine roles for ATP signaling through P2X receptors are likely in neurohypophysis, ducted glands, airway epithelia, kidney, bone, and hemopoietic tissues. In the last case, P2X7 receptor activation stimulates cytokine release by engaging intracellular signaling pathways.
Genetic diversity and phylogenetic relationships in five Porphyra species revealed by rapd analysis

Summary The genus Porphyra comprises red algae known as laver. They are distributed throughout Asia and used as food in Korea and other countries. Five species of Porphyra (P. tenera, P. yezoensis, P. seriata, P. suborbiculata and P. dentata) are regarded as ecologically and economically important in Korea. We used random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) to investigate their genetic diversity and phylogenetic relationships. The analysis of ten primers revealed 97 loci, of which 70 were polymorphic (72.2%). P. seriata had the highest genetic diversity (0.147), and P. dentata, the lowest one (0.059). An indirect estimate of the number of migrants per generation (Nm = 0.212) indicated that gene flow was very low among the populations studied. The classification of Porphyra species based on the DNA markers does not fully coincide with the classification based on morphology.
Outage performance of two users cooperative network coding

Cooperative communications has emerged as an efficient realization of multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) systems. To reap the benefits of cooperative communications we follow the block-Markov code book structure. Recently a low cost and efficient operational implementation of block-Markov coding, using network coding, has been proposed. In this paper, we derive the closed form expression for outage probability of that network coded cooperative communications scheme. We take information theoretic approach to define the outage probability. For comparison purpose, we also discuss the outage results of Space-Time (ST) coded cooperation, and the cooperation based on repetition. With numerical results, we show that the network coded cooperation, based on block-Markov code book structure, performs better than ST and repetition based cooperation, in terms of coding gain, while offering the same diversity gain as the other two.
Anchor Models for Emotion Recognition from Speech

In this paper, we study the effectiveness of anchor models applied to the multiclass problem of emotion recognition from speech. In the anchor models system, an emotion class is characterized by its measure of similarity relative to other emotion classes. Generative models such as Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs) are often used as front-end systems to generate feature vectors used to train complex back-end systems such as support vector machines (SVMs) or a multilayer perceptron (MLP) to improve the classification performance. We show that in the context of highly unbalanced data classes, these back-end systems can improve the performance achieved by GMMs provided that an appropriate sampling or importance weighting technique is applied. Furthermore, we show that anchor models based on the euclidean or cosine distances present a better alternative to enhance performances because none of these techniques are needed to overcome the problem of skewed data. The experiments conducted on FAU AIBO Emotion Corpus, a database of spontaneous children's speech, show that anchor models improve significantly the performance of GMMs by 6.2 percent relative. We also show that the introduction of within-class covariance normalization (WCCN) improves the performance of the anchor models for both distances, but to a higher extent for euclidean distance for which the results become competitive with cosine distance.
Biological cell injection visual and haptic interface

This paper presents a new three-dimensional (3-D) biomicromanipulation system for biological objects such as embryos, cells or oocytes. As the cell is very small, kept in liquid and observed through a microscope, 2-D visual feedback makes accurate manipulation in the 3-D world difficult. To improve the manipulation work, we proposed an intelligent human–machine interface. The 3-D visual information is provided to the operator through a 3-D reconstruction method using vision-based tracking deformations of the cell embryo. In order to perform stable microinjection tasks, the operator needs force feedback and haptic assistance during penetration of the cell envelop — the chorion. Thus, realistic haptic rendering techniques have been implemented to validate stable insertion of a micropipette in a living cell. The proposed human–machine user's interface allows real-time realistic visual and haptic control strategies for constrained motion in image coordinates, virtual haptic rendering to constrain the path of insertion and removal in the 3-D scene or to avoid cell destruction by adequately controlling position, velocity and force parameters. Experiments showed that the virtualized reality interface acts as a tool for total guidance and assistance during microinjection tasks.
AUTOMATIC CREATION AND TRANSLATION OF CONCEPT MAPS FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE-RELATED THESES AND DISSERTATIONS

Concept maps are often used as tools to enhance student learning on new topics. We hypothesize that they also can be used as summarization tools for large documents. We hypothesize further that, because concept maps usually have short text sections (words and short phrases), it should be easier to translate concept maps than parts of documents (such as abstracts), since the text need not be natural-sounding sentences. We have selected electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) as our sample collection, since we have large numbers of these in both English and Spanish. We have adapted a tool that automatically produces semantic maps from text, called Relex, to produce concept maps of ETDs for computing documents, using an ontology of computer science. We also have developed code to automatically find translations for English phrases by using a Spanish ETD collection as a corpus.
An adaptive approach for contextual audio denoising using local Fisher information

This paper presents a novel adaptive technique for audio signal denoising based on the extension of the pointwise Wiener filter through the minimization of the local Fisher information. The solution obtained by the resulting filter can be interpreted as a tradeoff between the minimization of the local mean square error and the minimization of the local observed Fisher information, since it is a linear convex combination of the two conditions. To evaluate the performance of the denoising task we use four quantitative metrics: the Peak Signal-To-Noise Ratio (PSNR), the Improvement in Signal-To-Noise Ratio (ISNR), the Noise-Reduction Ratio (NRR) and the Signal-To-Distortion Ratio (SDR). The obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed generalized filter.
Exploiting Opportunistic Multiuser Detection in Decentralized Multiuser MIMO Systems

This paper studies the design of a decentralized multiuser MIMO system for spectrum sharing over a fixed bandwidth, where the coexisting users independently update their transmit covariance matrices for individual rate maximization via an iterative manner. This design problem was usually investigated in the literature by assuming that each user treats the co-channel interference from all the other users as additional noise at its receiver, i.e., the conventional single-user decoding (SUD) for the MIMO channel is applied. In this paper, we propose a new decoding method for the decentralized multiuser MIMO system, whereby each user opportunistically cancels the co-channel interference from some or all of the other users via applying multiuser detection techniques, thus named opportunistic multiuser detection (OMD). This paper studies the optimal transmit covariance matrix for each user to iteratively maximize transmit rate with the proposed OMD, and shows the resultant capacity gains over the conventional SUD.
Iterative refinement of range images with anisotropic error distribution

We propose a method which refines the range measurement of range finders by computing correspondences of vertices of multiple range images acquired from various viewpoints. Our method assumes that a range image acquired by a laser rangefinder has anisotropic error distribution which is parallel to the ray direction. Thus, we find the corresponding points of range images along with the ray direction. We iteratively converge range images to minimize the distance of corresponding points. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by presenting the experimental results of artificial and real range data. Also, we show that our method refines a 3D shape more accurately as opposed to that achieved by using the Gaussian filter.
Periodic motion detection with ROI-based similarity measure and extrema-based reference-frame selection

This paper presents a new algorithm for detecting and analyzing the periodic motions in video sequences. Different from the previous methods which detect periodic motions from the entire frame, we propose a convex-hull-based process to automatically determine the regions of interest (ROI) of the motions and utilize an ROI-based similarity measure to detect the motion periods. Furthermore, we also propose an extrema-based method to select the optimal reference frame for further improving the periodic detection performance. Our proposed algorithm can not only effectively detect motion periods with both constant and variable period lengths, but also have obvious advantage when handling periodic motion with slight movements. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Amino-Terminal Pro-B-Type Natriuretic Peptide Improves Discrimination for Incident Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease Beyond Ambulatory Blood Pressure in Elderly Men

Improvement of risk prediction for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) is needed. Both ambulatory blood pressure (ABP) and biomarkers amino-terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein and cystatin C improve risk prediction but they have not been evaluated in relation to each other. We analyzed whether NT-proBNP, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, or cystatin C improved risk prediction beyond traditional ASCVD risk factors combined with 24-hour systolic BP (SBP). Secondary aim was to evaluate whether ABP improved risk prediction when compared with models with the biomarkers. We followed up 907 70-year-old men, free of baseline disease, for incident ASCVD defined as fatal or nonfatal myocardial infarction or fatal or nonfatal stroke for a median of 10 years. Cox regression was used to estimate the association between variables in the models and incident ASCVD. Biomarkers were added to a model containing both traditional risk factors and ABP and the models were compared on C-statistics and net reclassification improvement. Twenty-four hour SBP improved discrimination for incident ASCVD when compared with office SBP in a traditional risk factor model (area under the receiver-operating characteristic curve, +2.4%). NT-proBNP further improved reclassification (+18.7%–19.9%; P<0.01) when added to ABP models, whereas high-sensitivity C-reactive protein and cystatin C did not. Twenty-four hour SBP significantly improved net reclassification when added to a traditional risk factor model that included NT-proBNP. The combination of 24-hour SBP and NT-proBNP improved discrimination and net reclassification for incident ASCVD when compared with office SBP in elderly men. NT-proBNP, but not high-sensitivity C-reactive protein or cystatin C, improved risk prediction and discrimination when added to a model that included ABP.
RETROSPECTIVE : Improving Data-flow Analysis with Path Profiles

This paper was motivated by the observation that “programs follow paths. ” In 1996, Thomas Ball and James Larus published an efficient algorithm for capturing the paths executed by a program and used the technique to profile the SPEC95 benchmarks [3]. The paper reported a remarkable result, that only a few thousand paths (out of billions of potential paths) execute in a typical run. Moreover, most of a program’s execution time is spent on a small handful of hot paths. At the same time that Tom and Jim did this work, Glenn Ammons had a summer internship with Vasanth Bala at Hewlett Packard Laboratories, where he worked on the precursor to Dynamo [2]. Although they used a different path profiling technique, Vasanth and Glenn came to the same conclusions as Tom and Jim. The observation was reinforced when Glenn joined Tom and Jim to extend the Ball-Larus algorithm to include metrics other than instruction counts (e.g., cache misses) and to capture calling context [1]. Since programs follow paths, we thought it made sense for compilers to follow paths too. This idea was not new—Josh Fisher had proposed trace scheduling almost two decades earlier [6]—but he lacked the profiling tools to reliably identify hot paths and only used traces to drive instruction scheduling. Because we had an accurate characterization of hot paths, we felt that we could use this information in higher-level analysis and optimization, such as constant propagation, without unduly increasing code size. The University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences Department supports a strong research program in computer architecture, and their work inspired the approach in our paper. Many Wisconsin architectural designs make a prediction, speculate that the prediction is true while performing some work, and then undo the work if the prediction turns out to be false. For example, a processor might predict that a branch will be taken; speculatively fetch and execute instructions at the target of the branch; and later, if the branch turns out not to be taken, discard the side-effects from the instructions that should not have executed. Similarly, in our paper, we predict that better data-flow results can be found along hot paths, speculatively peel off hot paths in the CFG, perform data-flow analysis on the enlarged CFG, and then “unpeel” basic blocks in which results did not improve. Although little research has followed the approach in this paper, we believe there are many opportunities to improve compilers with path-sensitive algorithms. The idea of feedback-driven analysis and optimization is alive and well in the run-time compilation (JIT) community. They have investigated low-overhead profiling techniques and used this information to focus a compiler on heav-
Stochastic Constraint Programming with And-Or Branch-and-Bound

Complex multi-stage decision making problems often involve uncertainty, for example, regarding demand or processing times. Stochastic constraint programming was proposed as a way to formulate and solve such decision problems, involving arbitrary constraints over both decision and random variables. What stochastic constraint programming currently lacks is support for the use of factorized probabilistic models that are popular in the graphical model community. We show how a state-ofthe-art probabilistic inference engine can be integrated into standard constraint solvers. The resulting approach searches over the And-Or search tree directly, and we investigate tight bounds on the expected utility objective. This significantly improves search efficiency and outperforms scenario-based methods that ground out the possible worlds.
Beyond Sharing: Engaging Students in Cooperative and Competitive Active Learning

The authors describe their design for an Internet-based learning environment called BeyondShare in which students are encouraged to gain a deep understanding of the learning material, reflect on the quality of individual constructions through sharing and peer evaluation, and synthesize cross-unit knowledge by integrating self- and peer-produced constructions. A sharing typology may consist of basic sharing, sharing with notification, sharing with feedback, or sharing with interaction. BeyondShare distinguishes itself by combining sharing activities with task structuring and cooperation/competition to achieve active learning. A formal evaluation of BeyondShare was performed with a class of 34 college students who created concept maps for a computer programming language and who were encouraged to become active learners by exchanging roles throughout the experiment. Evaluation results indicate that the students viewed BeyondShare as an easy-to-use environment that motivated them toward comprehensive knowledge integration by sharing construction products with their peers. Potential activities and suggested modifications are discussed.
A new method for assessing motion-in-depth perception in strabismic patients

Aim: In strabismus clinics, stereoscopic depth perception is usually examined using static stimuli, but these stimuli do not necessarily allow assessment of the ability to perceive motion in depth. We assessed the ability to perceive motion-in-depth perception using a novel stereo motion test that we developed and compared with that to perceive static depth perception using a conventional stereo test in strasbismic patients. Methods: To investigate motion-in-depth perception in patients with strabismus, we developed a stereo motion test using four types of computer-generated dynamic visual stimuli. Three of them are random dot stereograms of two parallel planes moving in depth. The patient is asked to indicate the planes’ direction of rotation in depth (in the first and second types) or the presence/absence of motion-in-depth signal (in the third type). The fourth type of stimulus was a random dot stereogram of a rotating cylinder. The upper and lower parts of the cylinder rotate in opposite directions, and the patient is asked to indicate the position of the border between the two parts. Threshold disparity was defined as the disparity (relative disparity between the nearest and farthest points of the planes or the cylinder) that gives a critical level of performance with the method of limit. The conventional Titmus stereo test using static visual stimuli was used to assess static depth perception. The measurements were performed in 52 strabismic patients, aged between 4 and 38 years old, who visited Tokyo Medical University Hospital between January 2003 and July 2004. Results: The results showed a poor correlation in the threshold of individual patients between the stereo motion test and conventional Titmus stereo test. For example, the ability to perceive motion in depth (disparity threshold <500 sec of arc) was demonstrated in three of seven patients who were not able to perceive depth using static stimuli (0/9 for Titmus circle). These results suggest that the process of the dynamic element of binocular depth perception is preserved in some of the strabismic patients who lack static stereopsis. Conclusion: This study indicates the importance of testing motion-in-depth perception as well as static depth perception in assessing stereopsis in strabismic patients.
EBV Latent Membrane Proteins (LMPs) 1 and 2 as Immunotherapeutic Targets: LMP-Specific CD4+ Cytotoxic T Cell Recognition of EBV-Transformed B Cell Lines1

The EBV-latent membrane proteins (LMPs) 1 and 2 are among only three viral proteins expressed in EBV-associated Hodgkin’s lymphoma and nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Since these tumors are HLA class I and class II-positive, the LMPs could serve as both CD8+ and CD4+ T cell targets. In contrast to CD8 responses, very little is known about CD4 responses to LMPs. In this study, we describe CD4+ T cell clones defining four LMP1- and three LMP2-derived peptide epitopes and their restricting alleles. All clones produced Th1-like cytokines in response to peptide and most killed peptide-loaded target cells by perforin-mediated lysis. Although clones to different epitopes showed different functional avidities in peptide titration assays, avidity per se was a poor predictor of the ability to recognize naturally infected B lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) expressing LMPs at physiologic levels. Some epitopes, particularly within LMP1, consistently mediated strong LCL recognition detectable in cytokine release, cytotoxicity, and outgrowth inhibition assays. Using cyclosporin A to selectively block cytokine release, we found that CD4+ T cell cytotoxicity is the key effector of LCL outgrowth control. We therefore infer that cytotoxic CD4+ T cells to a subset of LMP epitopes could have therapeutic potential against LMP-expressing tumors.