Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
EigenCFA: accelerating flow analysis with GPUs

We describe, implement and benchmark EigenCFA, an algorithm for accelerating higher-order control-flow analysis (specifically, 0CFA) with a GPU. Ultimately, our program transformations, reductions and optimizations achieve a factor of 72 speedup over an optimized CPU implementation. We began our investigation with the view that GPUs accelerate high-arithmetic, data-parallel computations with a poor tolerance for branching. Taking that perspective to its limit, we reduced Shivers's abstract-interpretive 0CFA to an algorithm synthesized from linear-algebra operations. Central to this reduction were "abstract" Church encodings, and encodings of the syntax tree and abstract domains as vectors and matrices. A straightforward (dense-matrix) implementation of EigenCFA performed slower than a fast CPU implementation. Ultimately, sparse-matrix data structures and operations turned out to be the critical accelerants. Because control-flow graphs are sparse in practice (up to 96% empty), our control-flow matrices are also sparse, giving the sparse matrix operations an overwhelming space and speed advantage. We also achieved speedups by carefully permitting data races. The monotonicity of 0CFA makes it sound to perform analysis operations in parallel, possibly using stale or even partially-updated data.
Constitutively Activated Nuclear Factor-κB, but not Induced NF-κB, Leads to TRAIL Resistance by Up-Regulation of X-Linked Inhibitor of Apoptosis Protein in Human Cancer Cells

The tumor necrosis factor–related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) is a potent inducer of apoptosis in most, but not all, cancer cells. The molecular factors regulating the sensitivity to TRAIL are still incompletely understood. The transcription factor nuclear factor-κB (NF-κB) has been implicated, but its exact role is controversial. We studied different cell lines displaying varying responses to TRAIL and found that TRAIL can activate NF-κB in all our cancer cell lines regardless of their TRAIL sensitivity. Inhibition of NF-κB via adenoviral expression of the IκB-α super-repressor only sensitized the TRAIL-resistant pancreatic cancer cell line Panc-1. Panc-1 cells harbor constitutively activated NF-κB, pointing to a possible role of preactivated NF-κB in protection from TRAIL. Furthermore, we could reduce X-linked inhibitor of apoptosis protein (XIAP) levels in Panc-1 cells by inhibition of constitutively activated NF-κB and sensitize Panc-1 cells to TRAIL by RNA interference against XIAP. These results implicate elevated XIAP levels caused by high basal NF-κB activity in TRAIL resistance and suggest that therapeutic strategies involving TRAIL can be abetted by inhibition of NF-κB and/or XIAP only in tumor cells with constitutively activated NF-κB. (Mol Cancer Res 2006;4(10):715–28)
Constructing and Exploring Composite Items Using Max-valid Bundles

Online shoppers purchase a wide variety of items ranging from books to electronics. Keeping in view of the large number of items available for online purchase, there is a need for sophisticated techniques to help users explore the available products. Composite items, which associate a central item with a set of packages formed by satellite items, can be used for this purpose. The existing approach for constructing and exploring composite items use a random walk algorithm for this purpose but has some problems. In this paper, we propose a statistically efficient algorithm to construct and explore the composite items in real time. The proposed approach considers that not only the price but also the quality of the product influences the consumer behavior. The experimental study is conducted to show that the proposed approach significantly improves the performance in terms of time, search space and the quality of the recommendation provided using the composite items over the existing method.
Factors which influence nurse practitioners ability to carry out physical examination skills in the clinical area after a degree level module--an electronic Delphi study.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES The aim of the study was to identify the factors that influence nurse practitioners ability to practice physical examination skills in the clinical area. BACKGROUND The changing health care needs of the population require new ways of working for many health professionals. Physical examination (core skills of inspection, palpation, percussion and auscultation) of patients is a fairly new role for nurses in secondary care in the United Kingdom. However, implementing new roles in the clinical area can be challenging for the practitioners involved, and several factors have been identified which are seen to help or hinder their success. DESIGN A Delphi study was undertaken using blind copy email over six weeks in 2008. METHOD The participants included a purposive sample of 21 nurses from 10 clinical areas who had completed a degree level module in physical examination as part of a nurse practitioner pathway. RESULTS This study generated valuable opinion of factors that can help or hinder the ability of nurses to practice physical examination in the clinical area. The results highlight the importance of individual self-confidence, role clarity, effective educational preparation and support from other disciplines to the nurse practitioners ability to carry out this new role. CONCLUSION Several factors reported by the participants concur and add to factors reported in previous studies of new role implementation. There appears to be a continued need for clear job descriptions, role clarity, authority and autonomy to practice for nurse practitioners undertaking physical examination. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE Physical examination knowledge and skills are part of the role of nurse practitioners. This study highlights several factors which need to be addressed to ensure practitioners are able to carry out this new role on return to the clinical area.
Frugal and Truthful Auctions for Vertex Covers, Flows and Cuts

We study truthful mechanisms for hiring a team of agents in three classes of set systems: Vertex Cover auctions, k-? ow auctions, and cut auctions. For Vertex Cover auctions, the vertices are owned by selfish and rational agents, and the auctioneer wants to purchase a vertex cover from them. For k-? ow auctions, the edges are owned by the agents, and the auctioneer wants to purchase k edge-disjoint s-t paths, for given s and t. In the same setting, for cut auctions, the auctioneer wants to purchase an s-t cut. Only the agents know their costs, and the auctioneer needs to select a feasible set and payments based on bids made by the agents. We present constant-competitive truthful mechanisms for all three set systems. That is, the maximum overpayment of the mechanism is within a constant factor of the maximum overpayment of any truthful mechanism, for every set system in the class. The mechanism for Vertex Cover is based on scaling each bid by a multiplier derived from the dominant eigenvector of a certain matrix. The mechanism for k-? ows prunes the graph to be minimally (k + 1)-connected, and then applies the Vertex Cover mechanism. Similarly, the mechanism for cuts contracts the graph until all s-t paths have length exactly 2, and then applies the Vertex Cover mechanism.
Retaining sandbox containment despite bugs in privileged memory-safe code

Flaws in the standard libraries of secure sandboxes represent a major security threat to billions of devices worldwide. The standard libraries are hard to secure because they frequently need to perform low-level operations that are forbidden in untrusted application code. Existing designs have a single, large trusted computing base that contains security checks at the boundaries between trusted and untrusted code. Unfortunately, flaws in the standard library often allow an attacker to escape the security protections of the sandbox. In this work, we construct a Python-based sandbox that has a small, security-isolated kernel. Using a mechanism called a security layer, we migrate privileged functionality into memory-safe code on top of the sandbox kernel while retaining isolation. For example, significant portions of module import, file I/O, serialization, and network communication routines can be provided in security layers. By moving these routines out of the kernel, we prevent attackers from leveraging bugs in these routines to evade sandbox containment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by studying past bugs in Java's standard libraries and show that most of these bugs would likely be contained in our sandbox
Histological Grading in Breast Cancer: Interobserver Agreement, and Relation to Other Prognostic Factors Including Ploidy

Summary Sections of neoplasms from 76 female patients with primary operable carcinoma of the breast were independently assessed by 2 pathologists for histological features and assigned a grade score. Relative disagreement rates between pathologists were estimated by use of a log‐linear model and found to be similar to those reported by many other groups, but higher than that reported by acknowledged experts. Tumor grade was related to nuclear DNA content as measured by static cytometry, inversely related to oestrogen receptor status and provided some additional prognostic information but, in this small series of patients, did not correlate with short‐term survival as closely as other prognostic indicators such as ploidy, tumor size or the extent of lymph node involvement. Patients with Grade III tumors had a particularly poor prognosis, however, there were few patients allotted to Grade III (poorly differentiated tumors), and survival differences between Grades I and II were small; in short‐term followup, used alone, grading separated out only a small proportion of patients into useful prognostic groups. This preliminary study emphasizes the need for a careful approach to the use of grading of breast carcinomas in the routine histopathology laboratory. Demonstration of higher levels of interobserver agreement, or concordance with experts in the field, will be necessary before our grading can be incorporated into a prognostic index useful for patient management.
Elastic Parity Logging for SSD RAID Arrays

Parity-based RAID poses a design trade-off issue for large-scale SSD storage systems: it improves reliability against SSD failures through redundancy, yet its parity updates incur extra I/Os and garbage collection operations, thereby degrading the endurance and performance of SSDs. We propose EPLOG, a storage layer that reduces parity traffic to SSDs, so as to provide endurance, reliability, and performance guarantees for SSD RAID arrays. EPLOG mitigates parity update overhead via elastic parity logging, which redirects parity traffic to separate log devices (to improve endurance and reliability) and eliminates the need of pre-reading data in parity computations (to improve performance). We design EPLOG as a user-level implementation that is fully compatible with commodity hardware and general erasure coding schemes. We evaluate EPLOG through reliability analysis and trace-driven testbed experiments. Compared to the Linux software RAID implementation, our experimental results show that our EPLOG prototype reduces the total write traffic to SSDs, reduces the number of garbage collection operations, and increases the I/O throughput. In addition, EPLOG significantly improves the I/O performance over the original parity logging design, and incurs low metadata overhead.
Deep quaternion neural networks for spoken language understanding

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) received a great interest from researchers due to their capability to construct robust abstract representations of heterogeneous documents in a latent subspace. Nonetheless, mere real-valued deep neural networks require an appropriate adaptation, such as the convolution process, to capture latent relations between input features. Moreover, real-valued deep neural networks reveal little in way of document internal dependencies, by only considering words or topics contained in the document as an isolate basic element. Quaternion-valued multi-layer per-ceptrons (QMLP), and autoencoders (QAE) have been introduced to capture such latent dependencies, alongside to represent multidimensional data. Nonetheless, a three-layered neural network does not benefit from the high abstraction capability of DNNs. The paper proposes first to extend the hyper-complex algebra to deep neural networks (QDNN) and, then, introduces pre-trained deep quaternion neural networks (QDNN-AE) with dedicated quaternion encoder-decoders (QAE). The experiments conduced on a theme identification task of spoken dialogues from the DECODA data set show, inter alia, that the QDNN-AE reaches a promising gain of 2.2% compared to the standard real-valued DNN-AE.
Optimistic loop optimization

Compilers use static analyses to justify program optimizations. As every optimization must preserve the semantics of the original program, static analysis typically fall-back to conservative approximations. Consequently, the set of states for which the optimization is invalid is overapproximated and potential optimization opportunities are missed. Instead of justifying the optimization statically, a compiler can also synthesize preconditions that imply the correctness of the optimizations and are checked at the runtime of the program. In this paper, we present a framework to collect, generalize, and simplify assumptions based on Presburger arithmetic. We introduce different assumptions necessary to enable a variety of complex loop transformations and derive a (close to) minimal set of preconditions to validate them at runtime. Our evaluation shows that the runtime verification introduces negligible overhead and that the assumptions we propose almost always hold true. On a large benchmark set including SPEC and NPB our technique increases the number of modeled non-trivial loop nests by a factor of 3.9x.
Robust Photo Retrieval Using World Semantics

Photos annotated with textual keywords can be thought of as resembling documents, and querying for photos by keywords is akin to the information retrieval done by search engines. A common approach to making IR more robust involves query expansion using a thesaurus or other lexical resource. The chief limitation is that keyword expansions tend to operate on a word level, and expanded keywords are generally lexically motivated rather than conceptually motivated. In our photo domain, we propose a mechanism for robust retrieval by expanding the concepts depicted in the photos, thus going beyond lexical-based expansion. Because photos often depict places, situations and events in everyday life, concepts depicted in photos such as place, event, and activity can be expanded based on our “common sense” notions of how concepts relate to each other in the real world. For example, given the concept “surfer” and our common sense knowledge that surfers can be found at the beach, we might provide the additional concepts: “beach”, “waves”, “ocean”, and “surfboard”. This paper presents a mechanism for robust photo retrieval by expanding annotations using a world semantic resource. The resource is automatically constructed from a large-scale freely available corpus of commonsense knowledge. We discuss the challenges of building a semantic resource from a noisy corpus and applying the resource appropriately to the task.
REGION CLASSIFICATION BASED IMAGE DENOISING USING SHEARLET AND WAVELET T RANSFORMS

This paper proposes a neural network based region classification technique that classifies regions in an image into two classes: textures and homogenous regions. The classification is based on training a neural network with statistical parameters belonging to the regions of interest. An application of this classification method is applied in image denoising by applying different transforms to the two different classes. Texture is denoised by shearlets while homogenous regions are denoised by wavelets. The denoised results show better performance than either of the transforms applied independently. The proposed algorithm successfully reduces the mean square error of the denoised result and provides perceptually good results.
Potential impacts of enhanced tropical cyclone activity on the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and East Asian monsoon in the mid-Piacenzian warm period

ABSTRACT Tropical cyclones (TCs) not only passively respond to climate change, but also play an important role in vertical mixing of the upper ocean and in driving oceanic heat transport. Using a fully coupled climate model, the authors investigate the potential effect of TC-induced vertical mixing on the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and East Asian monsoon in the mid-Piacenzian, during which global TCs are estimated to have been stronger. Sensitivity experiments indicate that the TC-induced oceanic mixing over global storm basins leads to additional warming over the eastern tropical Pacific and a deeper thermocline in the mid-Piacenzian, whereas it dampens the interannual variability of ENSO. Regarding the East Asian monsoon circulations, low-level (850 hPa) summer and winter winds are intensified in response to enhanced vertical mixing, with a southward/westward shift of the western North Pacific high and westerly jet in summer and a deepened East Asian trough in winter. These climatic features are largely reproduced in the experiment with enhanced vertical mixing only over the central-eastern North Pacific. These results may shed light on TC feedbacks associated with vertical mixing and advance our understanding on mid-Piacenzian climate. Graphical Abstract
Efficacy of vermiwash in the production of live fish food organisms

In the present investigation, the efficacy of vermiwash was assessed for the production of live fish food organisms (zooplankton). For this purpose, studies were conducted in 56 liter static water holding using five concentration (0, 6, 8, 10 and 12%) of vermiwash. The application of vermiwash had significant effect on water quality. As such the values of dissolved oxygen and pH slightly reduced just after the application of vermiwash. However, a subsequent increase in pH and dissolved oxygen levels were seen from 7th day onwards. On the other hand, the levels of nitrate nitrogen, orthophosphate and total bacterial population increased after the treatment and subsequently decreased in all the treatments. In general the levels of different water quality parameters remained congenial for the growth and multiplication of zooplankton. The production rate of zooplankton in vermiwash treated waters was significantly high than control. Still the highest mean production (1336 Nos/l) was recorded with 10% concentration of vermiwash. The statistical analysis of variance (ANOVA) on mean zooplankton production showed that the treatments were significantly different as compared to control. Further, the Duncan’s multiple range test showed that the plankton production was significantly (p≤0.01) different in treatments except T1&T2 and T3&T4.On the basis of results of zooplankton production, a dose of 10% vermiwash is recommended.
Attendance Control System based on RFID-technology

In Kazakhstan, checking students' attendance is one of the important issues for universities, because many universities evaluate students’ attendance and while giving the final grade, professors consider their total number of appearances on classes during the whole semester. This brings to the idea of having some tool to control students’ attendance. Some universities prefer to use paper sheet for controlling attendance, whereas some universities prefer to use paper sheet for checking students' attendance and after this, fill out these information into a system manually, like Kazakh-British Technical University does. However, this is not an efficient way since there will be spent much of time for calling students names and putting marks like "presence" or "absence" if the class is a lecture class, and in this class at least 5 groups are presented. Moreover, some students may call his/her friend as "presence" even though this student is currently absent. After thinking all these issues, authors of the following research paper decided to create a system that makes easier to check students’ attendance automatically, and this system is implemented in Suleyman Demirel University, Kazakhstan. Actually, this is the first time when such kind of system is being used in educational system of Kazakhstan. The system is based on RFID technology, and in this paper, details of this system are presented.
Mediastinal paragangliomas related to SDHx gene mutations

Introduction Paragangliomas (PGLs) related to hereditary syndromes are rare mediastinal tumors. Paragangliomas are caused by mutations in genes encoding subunits of succinate dehydrogenase enzyme (SDH). Aim To evaluate clinical, anatomical and functional characteristics of mediastinal paragangliomas related to SDHx gene mutations. Material and methods Retrospective analysis of 75 patients with confirmed SDHx gene mutations (24 patients with SDHB, 5 SDHC, 46 with SDHD mutations) was performed. Patients underwent evaluation using computed tomography (CT), somatostatin receptor scintigraphy (SRS) (99mTc-[HYNIC,Tyr3]-octreotide), 123I mIBG scintigraphy and urinary excretion of total methoxycatecholamines. Results Out of 75 patients, 16 (21%) patients (1 SDHB, 15 SDHD mutations) had 17 PGLs localized in the mediastinum. Fourteen PGLs were localized in the middle mediastinum (intrapericardial) and 3 PGLs in the posterior mediastinum. The median diameter of paragangliomas measured on the axial slice was 24.3 mm (interquartile range (IQR): 14.7–36.6), and the median volume was 2.78 ml (IQR: 0.87–16.16). Twelve out of 16 patients (75%) underwent SRS, and 11 of them (92.3%) had pathological uptake of the radiotracer. Eleven (68.75%) out of 16 patients underwent 123 I mIBG, with only 3 positive results. Symptoms of catecholamine excretion were observed in 3 patients with PGLs localized in the posterior mediastinum. All PGLs were benign except in 1 patient with the SDHB mutation and PGL detected in the posterior mediastinum, who had a metastatic disease. Conclusions Most mediastinal paragangliomas were related to SDHD gene mutations. They were asymptomatic, localized in the medial mediastinum, intrapericardially.