Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards intelligent VR - multi-layered semantic reflection for intelligent virtual environments

This paper introduces semantic reflection, a novel concept for a modular design of intelligent applications. SCIVE, a simulation core for intelligent Virtual Environments (IVEs), provides semantic reflection on multiple layers: SCIVE’s architecture grants semantic driven uniform access to low-level simulation core logic, to specific simulation modules’ application definitions, as well as to high-level semantic environment descriptions. It additionally provides a frame to conveniently interconnect various simulation modules, e.g., for graphics, physics, audio, haptics, or AI etc. SCIVE’s Knowledge Representation Layer’s base formalism provides the central organizing structure for the diverse modules’ data representations. It allows bidirectional knowledge driven access between the modules since their specific data structures and functions are transitively reflected by the semantic layer. Hence SCIVE preserves, integrates and provides unified access to the development paradigms of the interconnected modules, e.g., scene graph metaphors or field route concepts etc. well known from todays Virtual Reality systems. SCIVE’s semantic reflection implementation details are illustrated following a complex example application. We illustrate how semantic reflection and modularity support extensibility and maintainability of VR applications, potential for automatic system configuration and optimization, as well as the base for comprehensive knowledge driven access for IVEs.
Monolithically integrated CMOS nanophotonic segmented Mach Zehnder transmitter

We present a monolithic segmented Mach-Zehnder transmitter, fully integrated in a 90 nm CMOS process. The transmitter exhibits a link sensitivity of −14.1 dBm optical modulation amplitude (OMA) at bit error rate (BER) = 10<sup>−-12</sup> at 12.5 Gbps.
Sensitivity and specificity of measures of the insomnia experience: a comparative study of psychophysiologic insomnia, insomnia associated with mental disorder and good sleepers.

STUDY OBJECTIVES To explore proposed explanatory mechanisms in psychophysiologic insomnia by investigating the sensitivity and specificity of commonly used insomnia research tools in discriminating psychophysiologic insomnia, insomnia associated with mental disorder, and good sleepers. DESIGN Cross-sectional, between-group comparison of responses from subjects with psychophysiologic insomnia, those with insomnia associated with mental disorder, and good sleepers to psychometrically robust self-report instruments. SETTING Attendees at adult community outpatient clinics. PARTICIPANTS Fifty-four adults (36 women, 18 men; average age 40 years) across 3 groups (n = 18 per group). Participants with psychophysiologic insomnia met combined Inteernational Classification of Sleep Disorders, Revised and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition criteria and had no history of mental disorder. Participants with insomnia associated with mental disorder satisfied the same criteria for sleep disturbance and met Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV axis-I Disorders) criteria for depressive disorder. The majority had comorbid anxiety disorder. Insomnia duration in the groups with psychophysiologic insomnia and insomnia associated with mental disorder was around 10 years. Good sleepers served as a control group and included self-reported good sleepers with no history of sleep problems or psychiatric disorder. INTERVENTION N/A. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS Analyses of variance, adjusted for multiple comparisons, indicated no between-group differences on a measure of sleep-related stimulus control, and self-reported somatic arousal was higher in subjects with insomnia associated with mental disorder than in good sleepers or those with psychophysiologic insomnia. Subjects with insomnia associated with mental disorder and psychophysiologic insomnia had poorer sleep hygiene and were characterized by heightened mental arousal. Logistic regression indicated that "effortful preoccupation with sleep" discriminated subjects with both psychophysiologic insomnia (100% sensitivity, 94% specificity) and insomnia associated with mental disorder (100%, 100%) from good sleepers and that only depressive symptomatology discriminated insomnia associated with mental disorder from psychophysiologic insomnia. CONCLUSION Psychophysiologic insomnia and insomnia associated with mental disorder may be on a continuum of insomnia severity, rather than categorically distinct. Insomnia associated with mental disorder may respond to psychological intervention. Factors specifically discriminating insomniacs from good sleepers require further investigation.
Pretreatment of Cisplatin in Recipients Attenuates Post-Transplantation Pancreatitis in Murine Model

Pancreas transplantation is the definite treatment for type 1 diabetes that enables the achievement of long-term normoglycemia and insulin independence. However Post-Transplantation Pancreatitis (PTP) due to ischemia reperfusion (IR) injury and preservation is a major complication in pancreas transplantation. Owning the potential anti-inflammatory effect of Cisplatin (Cis) in liver IR injury, we have examined if Cis could attenuate PTP using a murine model. We found that Cis is able to prevent inflammatory response in PTP. Pretreatment of Cis in recipient mice reduce the impairments of the grafts and hyperamylasimea in the recipients. We documented that the protective mechanism of Cis in PTP involves improvement of microcirculation, reduction of the mononuclear cellular infiltration and apoptosis, suppression of inflammatory cytokine-cascade and inhibition of translocation of high-motility group box protein-1 (HMGB-1) from nucleus to cytoplasm. In short, our study demonstrated that pretreatment of Cis in recipients may reduce the onset of PTP in pancreas transplantation.
Age-related lip movement repetition variability in two phrase positions

This study examined the relationship between age and lip movement variability across repetitions of an utterance. We applied functional data analysis (FDA) to lip movement data of 15-20 repetitions of a short Swedish phrase from 37 Swedish speakers (19 females, 18 males, 5-31 years) collected with three-dimensional articulography. From each utterance, three different sub-units were extracted semiautomatically by locating consistent kinetic events in the lip movement functions. Results generally showed moderate negative correlations between age and amplitude variability. The longest possible sub-unit, given consistent kinematic events, showed the strongest correlation.
A Damage Mechanics Treatment of Creep Failure in Rock Salt

Recent progress in the formulation of a constitutive model for describing coupled creep and damage development in rock salt is summarized. The constitutive model is based on the assumption that both dislocation slip and creep damage in the form of microcracks with possible wing-tips contribute to the macroscopic inelastic strain rate. The relevant kinetic equations, flow law, and damage evolution equation are presented. Evaluations are made of the coupled creep and fracture model against the measured creep response of clean salt from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) site. In addition, the development of creep damage and the rupture of WIPP salt subjected to either triaxial compression or indirect tension have been analyzed to evaluate several creep rupture criteria.
Auxin transport at cellular level: new insights supported by mathematical modelling

The molecular basis of cellular auxin transport is still not fully understood. Although a number of carriers have been identified and proved to be involved in auxin transport, their regulation and possible activity of as yet unknown transporters remain unclear. Nevertheless, using single-cell-based systems it is possible to track the course of auxin accumulation inside cells and to specify and quantify some auxin transport parameters. The synthetic auxins 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) and naphthalene-1-acetic acid (NAA) are generally considered to be suitable tools for auxin transport studies because they are transported specifically via either auxin influx or efflux carriers, respectively. Our results indicate that NAA can be metabolized rapidly in tobacco BY-2 cells. The predominant metabolite has been identified as NAA glucosyl ester and it is shown that all NAA metabolites were retained inside the cells. This implies that the transport efficiency of auxin efflux transporters is higher than previously assumed. By contrast, the metabolism of 2,4-D remained fairly weak. Moreover, using data on the accumulation of 2,4-D measured in the presence of auxin transport inhibitors, it is shown that 2,4-D is also transported by efflux carriers. These results suggest that 2,4-D is a promising tool for determining both auxin influx and efflux activities. Based on the accumulation data, a mathematical model of 2,4-D transport at a single-cell level is proposed. Optimization of the model provides estimates of crucial transport parameters and, together with its validation by successfully predicting the course of 2,4-D accumulation, it confirms the consistency of the present concept of cellular auxin transport.
Data Migration Substrate for the Load Balancing of Parallel Adaptive Unstructured Mesh Computations

Providing adequate software support for unstructured grid generation codes is challenging even for sequential implementations. In parallel implementations, program complexity increases by an order of magnitude due to dynamic, data{dependent, irregular computation and communication requirements. Even more challenging is the implementation of parallel methods that maintain the same quality guarantees as their sequential counterparts. In this paper we present a data migration run{time system, the Mobile Object Layer, for implementing load balancing heuristics for parallel adaptive unstructured mesh computations. We also argue that the Mobile Object Layer (MOL) simpli es this formidable task. We present preliminary performance data from a parallel mesh generator, based on the Constrained Delaunay Triangulation (CDT), which suggest that the exibility and general nature of our data{migration approach does not cause undue overhead. In Proc. of the 6 Intl. Conf. on Numerical Grid Generation in Computational Field Simulation, July 6-9, 1998, University of Greenwich, London, UK. This work supported by NSF grant #9726388 and JPL award #961097 Supported by NSF grant #9726388 Chris Hawblitzel was supported by an NSF fellowship for a portion of this work.
FPGA-based Acceleration of the Lattice Boltzmann Method

FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays) are becoming more attractive to high-performance scientific computing. FPGAs are high volume, off-the-shelf semiconductor devices containing programmable logic components, embedded arithmetic units, embedded memories and their programmable interconnection network. FPGAs have remarkably increased their potential for high-performance computing by integrating much more programmable hardware resources and increasing their operating frequency, and therefore recent leading-edge FPGAs can have peak floating-point computation performance surpassing that of typical microprocessors [1]. By designing a custom computing machine (CCM) on FPGAs, the properties, e.g., parallelism, regularity and homogeneity, of a specific application can be efficiently exploited by customized data-paths, customized arithmetic units and customized memory systems. Although FPGAs are programmable, programming FPGAs requires designing hardware. Therefore, it is very difficult for software programmers to implement CCMs for specific applications on FPGAs without knowledge of hardware design. Recently, A Stream Compiler (ASC) [2] solves this designing problem for FPGAs. By automating the production of CCMs that process streamed data, ASC allows users to write code with statements similar to the C language [2][3]. ASC also supports floating-point computations with flexible precisions, which are very suitable for efficient resource utilization on FPGAs. We consider which application is suitable for FPGAs, and how to make it work. This paper shows that the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is suitable for stream processing; an FPGA-based stream accelerator only at 67MHz, implemented with the x1 transfer rate of PCI-Express, achieves 1.15 times faster LBM computation than a 2.2GHz Opteron processor. We estimate the speedup of an FPGA-based stream accelerator with the x8 transfer rate at 7.68. LBM computes fluid flow by tracking fictive particles on a gird. Although relatively large data-sets are necessary to define multiple particle distribution functions on each grid-point, the algorithm for LBM has simplicity and parallelism among grid-points. These properties are appropriate for direct hardware implementation. With a state-of-the-art FPGA, we design and implement a stream accelerator for 2D LBM computation. In the following sections, we describe the stream-based LBM computation and its efficient implementation on an FPGA. Related work has shown that FPGAs have significant potential for computational fluid dynamics. For instance, a single FPGA implementation of a 3D lattice gas model [4] can run 200 times faster than a software version on a 1.8GHz Athlon processor. It has also been reported that FPGA-based accelerators for computational fluid dynamics [5] promise large improvement in sustained performance at better price-performance ratios with lower overall power consumption than conventional processors.
Eecient Similarity S E a R C H in Sequence Databases

We propose an indexing method for time sequences for processing similarity queries. We use the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) to map time sequences to the frequency domain, the crucial observation being that, for most sequences of practical interest, only the rst few frequencies are strong. Another important observation is Parseval's theorem, which speci es that the Fourier transform preserves the Euclidean distance in the time or frequency domain. Having thus mapped sequences to a lower-dimensionality space by using only the rst few Fourier coe cients, we use R -trees to index the sequences and e ciently answer similarity queries. We provide experimental results which show that our method is superior to search based on sequential scanning. Our experiments show that a few coe cients (1-3) are adequate to provide good performance. The performance gain of our method increases with the number and length of sequences.
SimSmoke model evaluation of the effect of tobacco control policies in Korea: the unknown success story.

OBJECTIVES We evaluated the effect of strict tobacco control policies, implemented beginning in 1995 in the Republic of Korea, on smoking prevalence and deaths. METHODS SimSmoke is a simulation model of the effect of tobacco control policies over time on smoking initiation and cessation. It uses standard attribution methods to estimate lives saved as a result of new policies. After validating the model against smoking prevalence, we used it to determine the Korean policies' effect on smoking prevalence. RESULTS The model predicted smoking prevalence accurately between 1995 and 2006. We estimated that 70% of the 24% relative reduction in smoking rates over that period was attributable to tobacco control policies, mainly tax increases and a strong media campaign, and that the policies will prolong 104 812 male lives by the year 2027. CONCLUSIONS Our results document Korea's success in reducing smoking prevalence and prolonging lives, which may serve as an example for other Asian nations. Further improvements may be possible with higher taxes and more comprehensive smoke-free laws, cessation policies, advertising restrictions, and health warnings.
A Fault Tolerant NoC Architecture for Reliability Improvement and Latency Reduction

With reducing feature size of transistors and increasing number of cores on a single chip, fault tolerance and reliability have become two significant challenges for IC designers. Since chip design is extremely cost-sensitive, the fault tolerance redundancy must be provided at a reasonable cost. In this paper, a fault tolerant NoC architecture with cores linked to two switches instead of one, is proposed. This architecture is able to save cores with a faulty switch. Also, to be more efficient and to compensate this redundancy, a new routing algorithm is suggested that can be dynamically reconfigured to escape faulty switches. According to evaluation of the proposed architecture, latency and reliability are improved.
University ’ s repository of research publications and other research outputs Evaluation datasets for Twitter sentiment analysis : a survey and a new dataset , the STS-Gold Conference Item

Sentiment analysis over Twitter offers organisations and individuals a fast and effective way to monitor the publics’ feelings towards them and their competitors. To assess the performance of sentiment analysis methods over Twitter a small set of evaluation datasets have been released in the last few years. In this paper we present an overview of eight publicly available and manually annotated evaluation datasets for Twitter sentiment analysis. Based on this review, we show that a common limitation of most of these datasets, when assessing sentiment analysis at target (entity) level, is the lack of distinctive sentiment annotations among the tweets and the entities contained in them. For example, the tweet “I love iPhone, but I hate iPad” can be annotated with a mixed sentiment label, but the entity iPhone within this tweet should be annotated with a positive sentiment label. Aiming to overcome this limitation, and to complement current evaluation datasets, we present STS-Gold, a new evaluation dataset where tweets and targets (entities) are annotated individually and therefore may present different sentiment labels. This paper also provides a comparative study of the various datasets along several dimensions including: total number of tweets, vocabulary size and sparsity. We also investigate the pair-wise correlation among these dimensions as well as their correlations to the sentiment classification performance on different datasets.
Y Mapping the Multiple Graded Contributions of the Anterior Temporal Lobe Representational Hub to

and Social Concepts: Evidence from Distortion-corrected fMRI Richard J. Binney1,2, Paul Hoffman1,3, and Matthew A. Lambon Ralph1 Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit (NARU), School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK, Eleanor M. Saffran Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA, and Center for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ, UK Address correspondence to Matthew A. Lambon Ralph or Richard J. Binney, Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit (NARU), School of Psychological Sciences (Zochonis Building), Brunswick Street, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL UK. Email: matt.lambon-ralph@manchester.ac. uk; richard.binney@temple.edu
Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm Based on the Fuzzy Similarity Measure

Evolutionary algorithm has gained a worldwide popularity among multi-objective optimization. This paper proposes a novel multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on the fuzzy similarity measure. First, the best solution of every objective among the multi-objectives is obtained and they are regarded on as the referenced vector. Second, the fuzzy similarity measure between every individual and the referenced vector is solved and the fuzzy similarity measure is acted as fitness of the individual. Moreover, the pareto optimal sets are solved by means of adaptive genetic algorithm. The variety of population is kept by means of adaptive probability of crossover and mutation. At last, the algorithm is used to optimize the design parameters of cylinder helical compression spring. Simulation examples show the effectiveness of the approach proposed.
Contract Manufacturing Relationships Can Urgun

Contract manufacturing enables intellectual property holders to enjoy scale economies, reduce labor costs and free up capital. However, in many scenarios contract manufacturing is a double-edged sword, rife with entrenchments, threats of predation or hold up. I explore these contract manufacturing problems in a non-recursive relational contract setting. These non-recursivities appear in at least two scenarios: First, a setting where there is learning by doing, but the accumulated expertise can also be used by the agent to compete against the principal. Second, a setting where there are multiple potential producers, but these contract manufacturers have prior entrenchments effecting their costs and can hold up the client. The analysis of these relations requires a novel methodological approach. A key contribution is that despite the non-recursive nature of these relationships, in both settings the principal optimal contract is characterized by a simple index rule, which does not depend on history or other agents. JEL-Classification: C73, D86, L14, L21 ∗I am grateful to Alvaro Sandroni, Niko Matouschek, Bruno Strulovici, Dan Barron, Mike Powell, Ehud Kalai and Jin Li who provided support, guidance and helpful suggestions. I am also thankful to seminar participants at Northwestern, Chicago, Princeton, UCSD, London Business School and Indiana †Princeton University, e-mail: curgun@princeton.edu
Mining and Re-ranking for Answering Biographical Queries on the Web

The rapid growth of the Web has made itself a huge and valuable knowledge base. Among them, biographical information is of great interest to society. However, there has not been an efficient and complete approach to automated biography creation by querying the web. This paper describes an automatic web-based question answering system for biographical queries. Ad-hoc improvements on pattern learning approaches are proposed for mining biographical knowledge. Using bootstrapping, our approach learns surface text patterns from the web, and applies the learned patterns to extract relevant information. To reduce human labeling cost, we propose a new IDF-inspired reranking approach and compare it with pattern's precision-based re-ranking approach. A comparative study of the two re-ranking models is conducted. The tested system produces promising results for answering biographical queries.
Sensitivity Improvement in 100 Gb/s-per-Wavelength Links Using Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers or Avalanche Photodiodes

Intra-data-center links are scaling to 100 Gb/s per wavelength using four-level pulse-amplitude modulation (4-PAM) and direct detection, but a restrictive link budget makes it difficult to support wavelength-division multiplexing or optical circuit switching. We investigate receiver sensitivity improvements achievable using semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) or avalanche photodiodes (APDs). We analyze and simulate the impact of modulator bandwidth limitations and chirp, fiber dispersion, transient SOA gain saturation, excess shot noise, and intersymbol interference caused by the APD. Using the 4-PAM and linear equalization, an SOA with 20-dB fiber-to-fiber gain and 6-dB noise figure can improve the receiver sensitivity up to 6 dB over a thermal noise-limited receiver, whereas an APD with kA = 0.18 and responsivity R = 0.74 A/W provides 4.5-dB sensitivity improvement over the same reference system. We further present a simple algorithm to optimize the intensity levels and decision thresholds for a generic non-Gaussian noise distribution, which can provide an additional sensitivity improvement of 1-2 dB. For SOAs, transient gain saturation effects cause negligible sensitivity penalties, but limit the receiver dynamic range to about 15 dB for the worst case of single-wavelength pre-amplification. For APDs, we show that the APD responsivity, impact ionization factor, low-gain bandwidth, and gain-bandwidth product are all critical parameters governing the system performance.