Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Spatial analysis and simulation tools for groundwater management: the FREEWAT platform

FREEWAT is an HORIZON 2020 project financed by the EU Commission under the call WATER INNOVATION: BOOSTING ITS VALUE FOR EUROPE. FREEWAT main result is an open source and public domain GIS-integrated modeling environment for the simulation of groundwater quantity and quality, with an integrated water management and planning module. FREEWAT aims at promoting water resource management by simplifying the application of the Water Framework Directive and other EU water-related Directives. To this scope, the FREEWAT platform results from the integration in the QGIS Desktop of spatially distributed and physically-based codes (mostly belonging to the USGS MODFLOW family), which allow to get a deep insight in groundwater dynamics, taking into account the space and time variability of stresses which control the hydrological cycle. This is attempted in a unique GIS environment, where large spatial datasets can be managed and visualized. In this paper, a review of the tools/modules integrated in FREEWAT for data pre-processing and model implementation is provided. FREEWAT applicability was demonstrated through running 14 case studies, in the general framework of an innovative participatory approach, which consists in involving technical staff and relevant stakeholders (in primis policy and decision makers) during modeling activities, thus creating a common environment to enhance science and evidence-based decision making in water resource management.
On prophesying online gamer departure

The ability to predict a gamer's departure is coveted by the MMORPG industry as it allows the game operators to target their resources on keeping subscribers motivated and to benefit from these loyal customers, not only financially, but also in terms of the improvement of current games and the design of future ones. To this end, we hope that our scheme will prove helpful to operators, as well as gamers who may enjoy a better gaming environment because of it.
Feature Article

and structural degrees of freedom, which makes a treatment based on standard perturbation theory unfeasible in general. This review focuses on various methodological approaches to which the authors have strongly contributed. The advantage of these approaches relies on an efﬁcient combination of accurate electronic structure calculations, classical molecular dynamics, and charge transport approaches, to describe charge migration in complex (bio)molecular systems.
An Algorithm Research for Distributed Association Rules Mining with Constraints Based on Sampling

An algorithm for distributed mining association rules with constraints called DMCASE is presented using Sampling and constraint-based Eclat algorithm. At each database site, sampling algorithm and constraint-based Eclat algorithm are implemented. And the local frequent itemsets satisfying constraints are developed. They then are combined to global frequent itemsets satisfying constraints based on inductive learning method. DMCASE algorithm scans the whole database only once. It is also an algorithm with high efficiency. Results from our experiments show that the algorithm is an effective way to resolve the problem of distributed mining association rules with constraints
Variation in urinary flow according to voiding position in normal males

Our objective was to study whether the urinary flow rate would vary according to voiding position. Twenty‐one normal healthy male volunteers aged 24 to 40 years (mean, 29 years) were studied. The bed used was designed so that a hole could be opened at its center for voiding, and the bed could be bent at two points so that the subject could void in various positions. Urinary flow was measured with a portable uroflowmeter (P‐Flow), which permits measuring urinary flow rate. Each subject assumed five voiding positions (standing, sitting, lateral, supine, and prone) in random order. Urinary flow was measured at least twice in each position to record a stable voiding. For voiding in the lateral position, subjects were instructed to void while bending the upper leg to keep an open angle between the legs. All subjects were also instructed to void without increasing abdominal pressure. Maximum flow rate was 20.7 ± 6.59 mL/sec with voided volume of 262 ± 77.8 mL in the lateral, 22.1 ± 7.05 mLl/sec with voided volume of 309 ± 130 mL in the supine, 25.0 ± 8.25 mL/sec with voided volume of 287 ± 122 mL in sitting, 27.1 ± 8.89 mL/sec with voided volume of 263 ± 102 mL in the standing, and 28.7 ± 10.6 mL/sec with voided volume of 303 ± 98 mL (mean ± SD) in the prone positions. The maximum and mean urinary flow rates were greatest in the prone position. With regard to these parameters, significant differences were noted between the prone and lateral positions and between the prone and supine positions. In conclusions, the maximum urinary flow rate was highest in the prone position, followed by the standing, sitting, supine, and finally the lateral positions in normal males. Neurourol. Urodynam. 18:553–557, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Intimin Types Determined by Heteroduplex Mobility Assay of Intimin Gene (eae)-Positive Escherichia coli Strains

ABSTRACT We developed a quick genetic approach to screen variants of the intimin gene (eae) by using a heteroduplex mobility assay (HMA) that targets the 5′ conserved region of eae. The eae variants were categorized into 4 major HMA types and 10 minor subtypes.
GABA Modulates Presynaptic Signalling Mediated by Dinucleotides on Rat Synaptic Terminals

Diadenosine pentaphosphate (Ap5A) elicits Ca2+ transients in isolated rat midbrain synaptic terminals acting through specific ionotropic dinucleotide receptors. The activation of GABAB receptors by baclofen changes the sigmoidal concentration-response curve for Ap5A (EC50 = 44 μM) into biphasic curves. Thus, when GABAB receptors are activated, the curve shows a high-affinity component in the picomolar range (EC50 = 77 pM) and a low-affinity component in the micromolar range (EC50 = 17 μM). In addition, in the presence of GABA or baclofen, Ap5A calcium responses are increased up to 50% over the control values. Saclofen, a specific antagonist of GABAB receptors, blocks the potentiatory effect of baclofen. As occurs with Ap5A, GABAB receptors are also capable to modulate diguanosine pentaphosphate (Gp5G)-induced calcium responses. The combination of immunocytochemical and microfluorimetric techniques carried out on single synaptic terminals have shown that in the presence of baclofen, 64% of the terminals responding to 100 μM Ap5A are also able to respond to 100 nM Ap5A. This value is close to the percentage of synaptic terminals responding to Ap5A and labeled with the anti-GABAB receptor antibody (69%). The activity of cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) seems to be involved in the potentiatory effect of GABAB receptors on Ap5A calcium responses, because PKA activation by forskolin or dibutiryl cyclic AMP blocks the potentiatory effect of baclofen, whereas PKA inhibition facilitates calcium signaling mediated by Ap5A. These results demonstrate that the activation of presynaptic GABAB receptors is able to modulate dinucleotide responses in synaptic terminals.
Intraseasonal to decadal variability of the Greater Horn of Africa

The Greater Horn of Africa (GHA) study area is comprised of ten countries: Burundi, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, and Tanzania. During the OND season, most of the region experiences seasonal rainfall due to the passage of the Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). The GHA region experiences large interannual rainfall fluctuations which adversely affects the socio-economic and health sectors, including rain-fed agriculture, hydro-electric power, and tourism. A large percentage of the interannual rainfall variability of GHA is believed to be associated with the global oceans, in particular Pacific driven El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Many previous studies have examined atmospheric and oceanic anomalies over the Pacific and the corresponding rainfall anomalies over the GHA region. Ogallo (1988) found negative correlation between the OND rainfall and Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) with highest correlations along the Kenyan coast. Farmer (1988) found similar SOI results with highest peak correlation in November. Beltrando and Camberlin (1993) illustrated a positive correlation between rainfall over southern Somalia and Pacific SSTs with negative correlations in September. Similarly, Phillips and McIntrye (2000) have found positive correlation between rainfall over Uganda and Pacific SST during November and December and negative correlations in August and September. The majority of previous studies confirm ENSO’s importance in the development of the regional anomalous rainfall, but limited effort has been made to ascertain the relative roles of the
Multispectral aerial image processing system for precision agriculture

Cuban agriculture has the growing need to increase its productivity. To achieve this, precision agriculture can play a fundamental role. It is necessary to develop an image processing system able to process all the crops information and calculate vegetation indexes in a satisfactory way. This will entail in accurate measurements of the nitrogen lack, the hydric stress, and the vegetal strength, among other aspects, seeking to improve the accuracy in the care of these aspects. This document reports the results of an investigation pointed to develop a procedure for capturing and processing multispectral aerial images obtained from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles [UAV]. This procedure searched to measure the vegetation indexes of sugarcane crops that may be correlated with the level of vegetal strength, the number of stems, and the foliar mass per lot. We used a USENSE-X8 UAV together with a Sequoia multispectral sensor and the QGIS processing software. The procedure was experimentally validated.
Aerosol climatology: on the discrimination of aerosol types over four AERONET sites

Aerosols have a significant regional and global effect on climate, which is about equal in magnitude but opposite in sign to that of greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, the aerosol climatic effect changes strongly with space and time because of the large variability of aerosol physical and optical properties, which is due to the variety of their sources, which are natural, and anthropogenic, and their dependence on the prevailing meteorological and atmospheric conditions. Characterization of aerosol properties is of major importance for the assessment of their role for climate. In the present study, 3-year AErosol RObotic NETwork (AERONET) data from ground-based sunphotometer measurements are used to establish climatologies of aerosol optical depth (AOD) and Angstrom exponent ? in several key locations of the world, characteristic of different atmospheric environments. Using daily mean values of AOD at 500 nm (AOD500) and Angstrom exponent at the pair of wavelengths 440 and 870 nm (? 440? 870), a discrimination of the different aerosol types occurring in each location is achieved. For this discrimination, appropriate thresholds for AOD500 and ? 440? 870 are applied. The discrimination of aerosol types in each location is made on an annual and seasonal basis. It is shown that a single aerosol type in a given location can exist only under specific conditions (e.g. intense forest fires or dust outbreaks), while the presence of well-mixed aerosols is the accustomed situation. Background clean aerosol conditions (AOD500<0.06) are mostly found over remote oceanic surfaces occurring on average in ~56.7% of total cases, while this situation is quite rare over land (occurrence of 3.8? 13.7%). Our analysis indicates that these percentages change significantly from season to season. The spectral dependence of AOD exhibits large differences between the examined locations, while it exhibits a strong annual cycle.
Draw me a storyboard: incorporating principles & techniques of comics

Storyboards are used in user-centred design (UCD) to clarify a scenario that describes the future use of a system. Although there are many styles of storyboarding, the graphical notation and language are very accessible for all team members of a multidisciplinary team. This papers describes how principles and techniques from comics can facilitate storyboarding in our COMuICSer approach and tool. COMuICSer formalises the way that storyboards are created, while preserving creative aspects of storyboarding. In combination with tool support for COMuICSer, this simplifies the relation of storyboards with other artefacts created in UCD such as structured models and UI designs and supports communication in multidisciplinary teams.
Spectral Unsupervised Parsing with Additive Tree Metrics

We propose a spectral approach for unsupervised constituent parsing that comes with theoretical guarantees on latent structure recovery. Our approach is grammarless ‐ we directly learn the bracketing structure of a given sentence without using a grammar model. The main algorithm is based on lifting the concept of additive tree metrics for structure learning of latent trees in the phylogenetic and machine learning communities to the case where the tree structure varies across examples. Although finding the “minimal” latent tree is NP-hard in general, for the case of projective trees we find that it can be found using bilexical parsing algorithms. Empirically, our algorithm performs favorably compared to the constituent context model of Klein and Manning (2002) without the need for careful initialization.
On the effectiveness of prefetching and reuse in reducing L1 data cache traffic: a case study of Snort

Reducing the number of data cache accesses improves performance, port efficiency, bandwidth and motivates the use of single ported caches instead of complex and expensive multi-ported ones. In this paper we consider an intrusion detection system as a target application and study the effectiveness of two techniques - (i) prefetching data from the cache into local buffers in the processor core and (ii) load Instruction Reuse (IR) - in reducing data cache traffic. The analysis is carried out using a microarchitecture and instruction set representative of a programmable processor with the aim of determining if the above techniques are viable for a programmable pattern matching engine found in many network processors. We find that IR is the most generic and efficient technique which reduces cache traffic by up to 60%. However, a combination of prefetching and IR with application specific tuning performs as well as and sometimes better than IR alone.
Topology Dictionary for 3D Video Understanding

This paper presents a novel approach that achieves 3D video understanding. 3D video consists of a stream of 3D models of subjects in motion. The acquisition of long sequences requires large storage space (2 GB for 1 min). Moreover, it is tedious to browse data sets and extract meaningful information. We propose the topology dictionary to encode and describe 3D video content. The model consists of a topology-based shape descriptor dictionary which can be generated from either extracted patterns or training sequences. The model relies on 1) topology description and classification using Reeb graphs, and 2) a Markov motion graph to represent topology change states. We show that the use of Reeb graphs as the high-level topology descriptor is relevant. It allows the dictionary to automatically model complex sequences, whereas other strategies would require prior knowledge on the shape and topology of the captured subjects. Our approach serves to encode 3D video sequences, and can be applied for content-based description and summarization of 3D video sequences. Furthermore, topology class labeling during a learning process enables the system to perform content-based event recognition. Experiments were carried out on various 3D videos. We showcase an application for 3D video progressive summarization using the topology dictionary.
Differences between Online and Face to Face Focus Groups, Viewed through Two Approaches

The increasing prominence of online focus groups in market research and the complexity that the Internet environment adds to the conduct of research with focus groups has led to a certain interest in discovering how this method can be applied effectively and to which situations or purposes it is best suited. Based on an examination of the literature and on an empirical survey of the heads of qualitative research at 112 market research companies in Spain, a basic classification of focus groups is proposed, distinguishing between the European and Anglo-Saxon approaches. Within this frame of reference, a set of factors or dimensions is identified that makes it possible to compare online and face to face groups, assess whether the former can really be considered focus groups which resemble either of the two approaches and, as a result, suggest the most appropriate uses or applications.
Learning Speed-Accuracy Tradeoffs in Nondeterministic Inference Algorithms

Statistical learning has led to great advances in building models that achieve high accuracy. However, testtime inference in these models can be slow, for example in structured prediction problems. This is frequently addressed by using test-time heuristics to guide and prune the search for a good structured output. In this high-level paper, we ask: Could we explicitly train such heuristics to trade off accuracy and efficiency? And how does this relate to existing learning problems?
Ontology Development 101: A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology

1 Why develop an ontology? In recent years the development of ontologies—explicit formal specifications of the terms in the domain and relations among them (Gruber 1993)—has been moving from the realm of ArtificialIntelligence laboratories to the desktops of domain experts. Ontologies have become common on the World-Wide Web. The ontologies on the Web range from large taxonomies categorizing Web sites (such as on Yahoo! ) to categorizations of products for sale and their features (such as on Amazon.com). The WWW Consortium (W3C) is developing the Resource Description Framework (Brickley and Guha 1999), a language for encoding knowledge on Web pages to make it understandable to electronic agents searching for information. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in conjunction with the W3C, is developing DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) by extending RDF with more expressive constructs aimed at facilitating agent interaction on the Web (Hendler and McGuinness 2000). Many disciplines now develop standardized ontologies that domain experts can use to share and annotate information in their fields. Medicine, for example, has produced large, standardized, structured vocabularies such as SNOMED (Price and Spackman 2000) and the semantic network of the Unified Medical Language System (Humphreys and Lindberg 1993). Broad general-purpose ontologies are emerging as well. For example, the United Nations Development Program and Dun & Bradstreet combined their efforts to develop the UNSPSC ontology which provides terminology for products and services (www.unspsc.org). An ontology defines a common vocabulary for researchers who need to share information in a domain. It includes machine-interpretable definitions of basic concepts in the domain and relations among them. Why would someone want to develop an ontology? Some of the reasons are:
Pipeline implementation of an image watermarking using bit-plane congestion adaptivity

In many applications of image watermarking, its real-time implementation is required. Although Hardware implementation is regarded as a proper types of real-time implementation; most algorithms are too complex for hardware implementation. In this paper an adaptive watermarking and its improved is presented which uses bit-plane congestion to achieve transparency and robustness. A congestion analysis is introduced and performed in such a way that guarantees robustness and simplicity in hardware application point of view. Also an efficient and novel hardware implementation of the adaptive watermarking algorithm based on pipeline is presented. Low complexity and small area in hardware implementation of proposed watermarking method, makes it suitable for real time applications.
Seeing the talker’s face supports executive processing of speech in steady state noise

Listening to speech in noise depletes cognitive resources, affecting speech processing. The present study investigated how remaining resources or cognitive spare capacity (CSC) can be deployed by young adults with normal hearing. We administered a test of CSC (CSCT; Mishra et al., 2013) along with a battery of established cognitive tests to 20 participants with normal hearing. In the CSCT, lists of two-digit numbers were presented with and without visual cues in quiet, as well as in steady-state and speech-like noise at a high intelligibility level. In low load conditions, two numbers were recalled according to instructions inducing executive processing (updating, inhibition) and in high load conditions the participants were additionally instructed to recall one extra number, which was the always the first item in the list. In line with previous findings, results showed that CSC was sensitive to memory load and executive function but generally not related to working memory capacity (WMC). Furthermore, CSCT scores in quiet were lowered by visual cues, probably due to distraction. In steady-state noise, the presence of visual cues improved CSCT scores, probably by enabling better encoding. Contrary to our expectation, CSCT performance was disrupted more in steady-state than speech-like noise, although only without visual cues, possibly because selective attention could be used to ignore the speech-like background and provide an enriched representation of target items in working memory similar to that obtained in quiet. This interpretation is supported by a consistent association between CSCT scores and updating skills.