Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Physical-Layer Algebraic Network Coding and Superposition Coding for the Multi-Source Cooperation Aided Uplink

In this paper, we consider coding schemes designed for energy efficient multi-source cooperation. More explicitly, we propose both a powerful superposition coding scheme and a physical-layer algebraic network coding scheme. The concept of generalised network coding is introduced and the relation between superposition coding and network coding is revealed. Our simulation results demonstrate that both of the proposed schemes are capable of performing close to the outage probability bound at the lower end of the target transmit power range. Moreover, compared to the superposition coding scheme considered, the proposed algebraic network coding arrangement imposes a lower complexity at the cost of a slight performance degradation, while maintaining the same throughput and delay.
Role of Mobility and Health Disparities on the Transmission Dynamics of Tuberculosis

The transmission dynamics of Tuberculosis (TB) involve complex epidemiological and socio-economical interactions between individuals living in highly distinct regional conditions. The level of exogenous reinfection and first time infection rates within high-incidence settings may influence the impact of control programs on TB prevalence. This study aims at enhancing the understanding of TB dynamics via the study of scenarios, within {\it simplified}, two patch, risk-defined environments, in the presence of short term mobility and variations in reinfection and infection rates. The modeling framework captures the role of individuals' `daily' dynamics within and between places of residency, work or business via the proportion of time spent in residence and as visitors to TB-risk environments (patches). As a result, the {\it effective population size} of Patch $i$ (home of $i$-residents) at time $t$ must account for visitors and residents of Patch $i$, at time $t$. The impact that {\it effective population size} and the distribution of {\it individuals' residence times} in different patches have on TB transmission and control are studied using selected scenarios where risk is defined by the estimated or perceive first time infection and/or exogenous re-infection rates. Our results suggest that, under certain conditions, allowing infected individuals to move from high to low TB prevalence areas (for example via the sharing of treatment and isolation facilities) may lead to a reduction in the total TB prevalence in the overall, here two-patch, population.
Evaluating the glucose tolerance test in mice.

The objective of this study was to determine the optimal conditions under which to assess glucose tolerance in chow- and high-fat-fed C57BL/6J mice. Mice were fed either chow or high-fat diet for 8 wk. Variables tested were fasting duration (0-, 3-, 6-, and 24-h and overnight fasting), route of administration (intraperitoneal vs. oral) load of glucose given (2, 1, or 0.5 g/kg and fixed 50-mg dose), and state of consciousness. Basal glucose concentrations were increased in high-fat- compared with chow-fed mice following 6 h of fasting (9.1 +/- 0.3 vs. 7.9 +/- 0.4 mmol/l P = 0.01). Glucose tolerance was most different and therefore significant (P = 0.001) in high-fat-fed mice after 6 h of fasting (1,973 +/- 96 vs. 1,248 +/- 83 mmol.l(-1). 120 min(-1)). The difference in glucose tolerance was greater following an OGTT (142%), in contrast to an IPGTT, with a 127% difference between high fat and chow. We also found that administering 2 g/kg of glucose resulted in a greater level of significance (P = 0.0008) in glucose intolerance in high-fat- compared with chow-fed mice. A fixed dose of 50 mg glucose regardless of body weight was enough to show glucose intolerance in high-fat- vs. chow-fed mice. Finally, high-fat-fed mice showed glucose intolerance compared with their chow-fed counterparts whether they were tested under conscious or anesthetized conditions. We conclude that 2 g/kg glucose administered orally following 6 h of fasting is best to assess glucose tolerance in mice under these conditions.
Testing Incremental Adaptation

A robot system operating in an environment in which there is uncertainty and change needs to combine the ability to react with the ability to plan ahead. In a previous paper we proposed a solution to the problems of integrating planning and reaction: cast planning as adaptation of a reactive system. In this paper, we present our first experimental results from the planner-reactor architecture, and compare the approach with other work in the planning and learning literatures.
ReviewAre Bigger Brains Better ?

Attempts to relate brain size to behaviour and cognition have rarely integrated information from insects with that from vertebrates. Many insects, however, demonstrate that highly differentiated motor repertoires, extensive social structures and cognition are possible with very small brains, emphasising that we need to understand the neural circuits, not just the size of brain regions, which underlie these feats. Neural network analyses show that cognitive features found in insects, such as numerosity, attention and categorisation-like processes, may require only very limited neuron numbers. Thus, brain size may have less of a relationship with behavioural repertoire and cognitive capacity than generally assumed, prompting the question of what large brains are for. Larger brains are, at least partly, a consequence of larger neurons that are necessary in large animals due to basic biophysical constraints. They also contain greater replication of neuronal circuits, adding precision to sensory processes, detail to perception, more parallel processing and enlarged storage capacity. Yet, these advantages are unlikely to produce the qualitative shifts in behaviour that are often assumed to accompany increased brain size. Instead, modularity and interconnectivity may be more important.
Towards Quantitative Measures of Evaluating Song Segmentation

Automatic music structure analysis or song segmentation has immediate applications in the field of music information retrieval. Among these applications is active music navigation, automatic generation of audio summaries, automatic music analysis, etc. One of the important aspects of a song segmentation task is its evaluation. Commonly, that implies comparing the automatically estimated segmentation with a ground-truth, annotated by human experts. The automatic evaluation of segmentation algorithms provides the quantitative measure that reflects how well the estimated segmentation matches the annotated ground-truth. In this paper we present a novel evaluation measure based on informationtheoretic conditional entropy. The principal advantage of the proposed approach lies in the applied normalization, which enables the comparison of the automatic evaluation results, obtained for songs with a different amount of states. We discuss and compare the evaluation scores commonly used for evaluating song segmentation at present. We provide several examples illustrating the behavior of different evaluation measures and weigh the benefits of the presented metric against the others.
A Study of the Influence of the Type of Land Use on the Enzymatic Activity of Soils in Southwestern China

Although soil enzyme activity can act as an effective indicator of soil nutrient status, there is some uncertainty about its accuracy within soil depth across different land uses. To assess the effects of different land uses on the interactions between soil enzyme activity and nutrient status within different soil horizons, in this study we examined soil total carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) concentrations, pH, and the activities of five hydrolytic (i.e., amylase, invertase, cellulase, acid phosphatase, and urease) and three oxidative enzymes (i.e., catalase, dehydrogenase, and phenol oxidase) involved in C, N, and P acquisition and evaluated their interactions within the topsoil (0–10 cm), subsoil (10–20 cm), and deeper soil layer (20–30 cm) under various land uses (i.e., rice field, cultivated land, bamboo plantation, forest land, and barren land). We found that the levels of hydrolytic enzyme activities and nutrient concentrations were higher in the topsoil than the deeper layer. The hydrolytic enzyme activities were positive correlated with soil C, N, and P concentrations, while the activities of oxidative enzymes showed strong associations with soil pH. Furthermore, the results of fuzzy comprehensive evaluation models suggest that the overall enzyme activity can serve as an indicator of soil nutrient status in the topsoil and subsoil, but not in the deeper layer. The depth-specific nature of soil enzyme–nutrient relationships may be attributed to different land-use management practices. Our study highlights the complex interactions between soil nutrients, pH, and enzyme activities within soil profiles, and soil enzyme activity as an indicator of soil nutrient status is depth-dependent across the different land uses. The specific functional groups of enzymes and the gradients of resources and environmental conditions within the soil profile that is partly mediated by land use play crucial roles in shaping these relationships. Our results can also provide some new insights into sustainable soil management practices under the background of intense anthropogenic activities and global change.
Polynomial LPV synthesis applied to turbofan engines

Abstract Results on polynomial fixed-order controller design are extended to SISO gain-scheduling with guaranteed stability and H ∞ performance over the whole scheduling parameter range. Salient features of the approach are: (a) the use of polynomials as modeling objects; (b) the use of flexible linear matrix inequalities (LMI) conditions allowing polynomial dependence of the open-loop system and controller transfer functions in the scheduling parameters; and (c) the decoupling in the LMI conditions between the Lyapunov variables and the controller variables, allowing both parameter-dependent Lyapunov functions and fixed-order controller design. The synthesis procedure is integrated into the ATOL framework developed by the manufacturer of aircraft and space engines Snecma to systematically design reduced complexity gain-scheduled control laws for aircraft turbofan engines.
Local alignment for query by humming

Query by humming (QBH) allows users to retrieve songs by humming a clip. In the previous work, the query has been regarded as a fragment of the music, so the task of QBH is considered to find a subsequence, which is most similar to the whole query, from the database. Taking into account humming errors, especially at the beginning or ending of the query, we assume that only part of the query is a subsequence of the music. Based on this assumption, we propose a local alignment framework which searches for the best match common subsequence between the query and database music. To verify the effectiveness of local alignment, two popular match algorithms, i.e. Linear Scaling and Dynamic Time Warping, are extended to identify the common subsequence. Experimental results on the 2010 MIREX-QBH corpus show that the new algorithms improve the retrieval accuracy significantly.
Effects of hydrogen peroxide on mucociliary transport in human airway epithelial cells

Abstract The effects of environmental pollutants on airway clearance have not been well elucidated. This study examined mucociliary transport using different sized-fluorescent particles on polarized human airway epithelial cells which were maintained in an air–liquid interface (ALI) culture system. The effects of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) exposure on mucociliary transport were also investigated. The movement of fluorescent particles with diameters of 10–14 and 2.5–4.5 µm was observed by fluorescent microscopy as an index of the mucociliary transport. The mixture of the particles with two different sizes was propelled concentrically on the apical surface by the interaction of ciliary activity and mucus in the control condition, whereas H2O2 exposure for 24 h significantly inhibited the movement of the particles. The particle sizes did not affect their movement after the control or H2O2 exposure. These results suggest that particle tracking on polarized human airway epithelial cells is a useful experimental tool for the evaluation of the effect of environmental pollutants on mucociliary transport. In addition, reactive oxygen species may impair mucociliary transport, leading to the airway damage and exacerbation of respiratory diseases.
Scalability and performance of the Privacy-Aware Classification method GenPAC

In this work we evaluate the scalability and performance of our previously presented GenPAC method by applying it on larger datasets. The work is motivated by the necessity of meeting privacy constraints when focusing on the importance and broad application of data mining but also by the growing demand for privacy preservation in general. GenPAC, which can be used with any standard classification method, relies on clustering data to obfuscate information. The method is particularly useful in multi-party data mining scenarios where privacy is of interest. Its application has only minor impact on the classification performance of the used underlying data mining method whilst privacy preservation can be provided at the cost of a higher execution time. In this regard, empirical analysis and evaluation have been conducted. The corresponding results are presented, analyzed and discussed with respect to their classification performance and execution time showing a high scalability in regard to the size of the dataset and the number of participating parties.
Transcriptional response of Hoxb genes to retinoid signalling is regionally restricted along the neural tube rostrocaudal axis

During vertebrate neural development, positional information is largely specified by extracellular morphogens. Their distribution, however, is very dynamic due to the multiple roles played by the same signals in the developing and adult neural tissue. This suggests that neural progenitors are able to modify their competence to respond to morphogen signalling and autonomously maintain positional identities after their initial specification. In this work, we take advantage of in vitro culture systems of mouse neural stem/progenitor cells (NSPCs) to show that NSPCs isolated from rostral or caudal regions of the mouse neural tube are differentially responsive to retinoic acid (RA), a pivotal morphogen for the specification of posterior neural fates. Hoxb genes are among the best known RA direct targets in the neural tissue, yet we found that RA could promote their transcription only in caudal but not in rostral NSPCs. Correlating with these effects, key RA-responsive regulatory regions in the Hoxb cluster displayed opposite enrichment of activating or repressing histone marks in rostral and caudal NSPCs. Finally, RA was able to strengthen Hoxb chromatin activation in caudal NSPCs, but was ineffective on the repressed Hoxb chromatin of rostral NSPCs. These results suggest that the response of NSPCs to morphogen signalling across the rostrocaudal axis of the neural tube may be gated by the epigenetic configuration of target patterning genes, allowing long-term maintenance of intrinsic positional values in spite of continuously changing extrinsic signals.
A framework for data security and storage in Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing is a rising field in the history of computing. It is a way to maximise the capacity and capabilities without spending a lot to buy a new infrastructure and software. When users are online, they can get faster access to their data due to the massive storage. Although Cloud computing has many advantages due to large number of organizations moving towards it, it comes up with lots of security issues and breaches faced by both cloud service providers and users which are addressed in this paper. An efficient framework is devised for dealing with such issues. Proposed framework can protect data while transferring, sharing and storing in data centers using classification of data, Hashed Message Authentication codes and Index Building. The data is divided into three sections and accordingly the user is asked for authentication. User is provided the digital signature which can be verified with cloud directory. Using indexing, search can be made on the encrypted data.
A simulation study for the distribution law of relative moments of evolution

Nine selection-survival strategies were implemented in a genetic algorithm experiment, and differences in terms of evolution were assessed. The moments of evolution (expressed as generation numbers) were recorded in a contingency of three strategies (i.e., proportional, tournament, and deterministic) for two moments (i.e., selection for crossover and mutation and survival for replacement). The experiment was conducted for the first 20,000 generations in 46 independent runs. The relative moments of evolution (where evolution was defined as a significant increase in the determination coefficient relative to the previous generation) when any selection-survival strategy was used fit a Log-Pearson type III distribution. Moreover, when distributions were compared to one another, functional relationships were identified between the population parameters, revealing a degeneration of the Log-Pearson type III distribution in a one-parametrical distribution that can be assigned to the chosen variable—evolution strategy. The obtained theoretical population distribution allowed comparison of the selection-survival strategies that were used. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
PLDA Modeling in I-Vector and Supervector Space for Speaker Verification

In this paper, we advocate the use of uncompressed form of i-vector. We employ the probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (PLDA) to handle speaker and session variability for speaker verification task. An i-vector is a low-dimensional vector containing both speaker and channel information acquired from a speech segment. When PLDA is used on i-vector, dimension reduction is performed twice – first in the i-vector extraction process and second in the PLDA model. Keeping the full dimensionality of i-vector in the supervector space for PLDA modeling and scoring would avoid unnecessary loss of information. The drawback of using PLDA on uncompressed i-vector is the inversion of large matrices, which we show can be solved rather efficiently by portioning large matrix into smaller blocks. We also introduce the Gaussianized rank-norm, as an alternative to whitening, for feature normalization prior to PLDA modeling.
Protein Protein Interaction Network Evaluation for Identifying Potential Drug Targets

As pathogens evolve effective schemes to overcome the effect of antibiotics, the prevalent " one drug and one drug target " approach is falling behind. We propose novel strategies for identifying potential multiple-drug targets in pathogenic PPI networks with the goal of disrupting known pathways/complexes. Given a set S of pathogenic pathways/complexes, we first consider computing the minimum number of proteins (with no human orthologs) whose removal from the PPI network disrupts all pathways/complexes. Unfortunately even the best approximation algorithms for this (NP-hard) problem return too many targets to be practical. Thus we focus on computing the optimal tradeoff (i.e. maximum ratio) between the number of disrupted essential pathways/complexes and the protein targets. For this " sparsest cut " problem, we describe two polynomial time algorithms with respective approximation factors of |S| and O(√ n) (n: number of nodes). On the E.coli PPI network with 9 essential (signaling) paths from the KEGG database, our algorithms show how to disrupt 3 of them by targeting only 3 proteins (2 of them essential proteins). We also consider the case where there are no available essential pathways/complexes to guide us. In order to maximize the number of disrupted " potential " pathways/complexes we show how to compute the smallest set of proteins whose removal partitions the PPI network into two almost-equal sized subnetworks so as to maximize the number of potential pathways/complexes disrupted. This approach yields 28 potential targets (4 of them known drug targets) on the E.coli PPI network whose removal partitions it to two subnetworks with relative sizes of 1 to 5.
Heterogeneous-Reliability Memory: Exploiting Application-Level Memory Error Tolerance

1. Summary Recent studies estimate that server cost contributes to as much as 57% of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a datacenter [1]. One key contributor to this high server cost is the procurement of memory devices such as DRAMs, especially for data-intensive datacenter cloud applications that need low latency (such as web search, in-memory caching, and graph traversal). Such memory devices, however, may be prone to hardware errors that occur due to unintended bit flips during device operation [40, 33, 41, 20]. To protect against such errors, traditional systems uniformly employ devices with highquality chips and error correction techniques, both of which increase device cost. At the same time, we make the observations that 1) data-intensive applications exhibit a diverse spectrum of tolerance to memory errors, and 2) traditional one-size-fits-all memory reliability techniques are inefficient in terms of cost. Our DSN-44 paper [30] is the first to 1) understand how tolerant different data-intensive applications are to memory errors and 2) design a new memory system organization that matches hardware reliability to application tolerance in order to reduce system cost. The main idea of our approach is to classify applications based on their memory error tolerance, and map applications to heterogeneous-reliability memory system designs managed cooperatively between hardware and software to reduce system cost. Our DSN-44 paper provides the following contributions: 1. A new methodology to quantify the tolerance of applications to memory errors. Our approach measures the effect of memory errors on application correctness and quantifies an application’s ability to mask or recover from memory errors. 2. A comprehensive characterization of the memory error tolerance of three data-intensive workloads: an interactive web search application [30, 39], an in-memory key‐value store [30, 3], and a graph mining framework [30, 29]. We find that there exists an order of magnitude difference in memory error tolerance across these three applications. 3. An exploration of the design space of new memory system organizations, called heterogeneous-reliability memory, which combines a heterogeneous mix of reliability techniques that leverage application error tolerance to reduce system cost. We show that our techniques can reduce server hardware cost by 4.7%, while achieving 99.90% single server availability.
Finite state segmentation of discourse into clauses

The paper presents background and motivation for a processing model that segments discourse into units that are simple, non-nested clauses, prior to the recognition of clause internal phrasal constituents, and experimental results in support of this model. One set of results is derived from a statistical reanalysis of the Swedish empirical data in Strangert, Ejerhed and Huber 1993 concerning the linguistic structure of major prosodic units. The other set of results is derived from experiments in segmenting part of speech annotated Swedish text corpora into clauses, using a new clause segmentation algorithm. The clause segmented corpus data is taken from the Stockholm Umeå Corpus (SUC), 1 M words of Swedish texts from different genres, part of speech annotated by hand, and from the Umeå corpus DAGENS INDUSTRI 1993 (DI93), 5 M words of Swedish financial newspaper text, processed by fully automatic means consisting of tokenizing, lexical analysis, and probabilistic POS tagging. The results of these two experiments show that the proposed clause segmentation algorithm is 96% correct when applied to manually tagged text, and 91% correct when applied to probabilistically tagged text.