Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DBSCAN Revisited: Mis-Claim, Un-Fixability, and Approximation

DBSCAN is a popular method for clustering multi-dimensional objects. Just as notable as the method's vast success is the research community's quest for its efficient computation. The original KDD'96 paper claimed an algorithm with O(n log n) running time, where n is the number of objects. Unfortunately, this is a mis-claim; and that algorithm actually requires O(n2) time. There has been a fix in 2D space, where a genuine O(n log n)-time algorithm has been found. Looking for a fix for dimensionality d ≥ 3 is currently an important open problem. In this paper, we prove that for d ≥ 3, the DBSCAN problem requires Ω(n4/3) time to solve, unless very significant breakthroughs---ones widely believed to be impossible---could be made in theoretical computer science. This (i) explains why the community's search for fixing the aforementioned mis-claim has been futile for d ≥ 3, and (ii) indicates (sadly) that all DBSCAN algorithms must be intolerably slow even on moderately large n in practice. Surprisingly, we show that the running time can be dramatically brought down to O(n) in expectation regardless of the dimensionality d, as soon as slight inaccuracy in the clustering results is permitted. We formalize our findings into the new notion of ρ-approximate DBSCAN, which we believe should replace DBSCAN on big data due to the latter's computational intractability.
Low-Complexity Voice Detector for Mobile Environments

Provisioning of mobile audio and video services is a difficult challenge since in the mobile environment, bandwidth and processing resources are limited. Audio content is normally present in most multimedia services, however, the user expectation of perceived audio quality differs for speech and nonspeech content. Therefore, automatic voice or speech detection is needed in order to maximize perceived audio quality and reduce bandwidth and processing costs. The aim of this work is to find a low-complexity speech detector, suitable for detection of speech in a highly-compressed multimedia stream whose audio track may consist of speech, music, broadcast news, or other audio content. Finally, two methods for speech/non-speech detection are proposed and compared.
MonetDB/X100: Hyper-Pipelining Query Execution

Database systems tend to achieve only low IPC (instructions-per-cycle) eciency on modern CPUs in compute-intensive application areas like decision support, OLAP and multimedia retrieval. This paper starts with an in-depth investigation to the reason why this happens, focusing on the TPC-H benchmark. Our analysis of various relational systems and MonetDB leads us to a new set of guidelines for designing a query processor. The second part of the paper describes the architecture of our new X100 query engine for the MonetDB system that follows these guidelines. On the surface, it resembles a classical Volcano-style engine, but the crucial dierence to base all execution on the concept of vector processing makes it highly CPU ecien t. We evaluate the power of MonetDB/X100 on the 100GB version of TPC-H, showing its raw execution power to be between one and two orders of magnitude higher than previous technology.
Unsupervised Spectral Sparse Regression Feature Selection using Social Media Datasets

Recent innovations in the social media sites such as Google Plus, Face book, Thomas cook, Twitter and Flickr have increased more and more subscribers to participate in social online events just as connecting with friends, families and other like-minded subscribers, posting statuses and blogs, sharing and communicating information etc. As a result usage of social media by the users has increased and generated unprecedented volume of social data such as linked, labeled and unlabeled data. Mining the data produced by the social media has its ability to dig out actionable patterns that could be valuable for government, business, users, and consumers. However, Social media documents are vast, dynamic, high dimensional, unstructured and forcible thereby open to new challenges. At present, in data mining Supervised Feature Selection method outperforms effectively in manipulating labeled and high dimensional data thereby providing an effectual mechanism for learning. However, there is no single method proven to be effective for mining the high volume of data produced by social media. An Unsupervised Feature Selection method employing spectral analysis taking social media dataset have been proposed. This paper also aims at conducting experiments with the data sets from different social media to evaluate its accuracy and performance.
Biomolecular Feedback Systems

The aim of synthetic biology is to build engineering devices using biological processes. Potential applications of such systems range from the production of specific materials (such as biofuels and drugs), through biological sensing and diagnostics (chemical detection, medical diagnostics) to the design of biological machines. The book under review provides an introduction to the principles and tools required for modelling and analysing bimolecular systems. In particular, it illustrates the use of feedback and control to ensure the correct operating behaviour of more complex devices obtained by connecting simple systems.
Linking microfilaments to intracellular membranes: the actin‐binding and vesicle‐associated protein comitin exhibits a mannose‐specific lectin activity.

Comitin is a 24 kDa actin‐binding protein from Dictyostelium discoideum that is located primarily on Golgi and vesicle membranes. We have probed the molecular basis of comitin's interaction with both actin and membranes using a series of truncation mutants obtained by expressing the appropriate cDNA in Escherichia coli. Comitin dimerizes in solution; its principle actin‐binding activity is located between residues 90 and 135. The N‐terminal 135 ‘core’ residues of comitin contain a 3‐fold sequence repeat that is homologous to several monocotyledon lectins and which retains key residues that determine these lectins’ three‐dimensional structure and mannose binding. These repeats of comitin appear to mediate its interaction with mannose residues in glycoproteins or glycolipids on the cytoplasmic surface of membrane vesicles from D.discoideum, and comitin can be released from membranes with mannose. Our data indicate that comitin binds to vesicle membranes via mannose residues and, by way of its interaction with actin, links these membranes to the cytoskeleton.
Generation of Reactive Oxygen Species Contributes to the Development of Carbon Black Cytotoxicity to Vascular Cells

Carbon black, a particulate form of pure elemental carbon, is an industrial chemical with the high potential of occupational exposure. Although the relationship between exposure to particulate matters (PM) and cardiovascular diseases is well established, the cardiovascular risk of carbon black has not been characterized clearly. In this study, the cytotoxicity of carbon black to vascular smooth muscle and endothelial cells were examined to investigate the potential vascular toxicity of carbon black. Carbon black with distinct particle size, N330 (primary size, 28~36 nm) and N990 (250~350 nm) were treated to A-10, rat aortic smooth muscle cells and human umbilical vein endothelial cell line, ECV304, and cell viability was assessed by lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) leakage assay. Treatment of carbon black N990 resulted in the significant reduction of viability in A-10 cells at 100 μg/m/, the highest concentration tested, while N330 failed to cause cell death. Cytotoxicity to ECV304 cells was induced only by N330 at higher concentration, 200 μg/m/, suggesting that ECV304 cells were relatively resistant to carbon black. Treatment of 100 jug/m/ N990 led to the elevation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) detected by dichlorodihydrofluorescein (DCF) in A-10 cells. Pretreatment of antioxidants, N-acetylcysteine (NAC) and sulforaphane restored decreased viability of N990-treated A-10 cells, and N-acetylcysteine, but not sulforaphane, attenuated N990-induced ROS generation in A-10 cells. Taken together, present study shows that carbon black is cytotoxic to vascular cells, and the generation of reactive oxygen contributes to the development of cytotoxicity. ROS scavenging antioxidant could be a potential strategy to attenuate the toxicity induced by carbon black exposure.
The Reallocation of Workers and Jobs in Russian Industry

Gross job and worker flows in Russian industry are studied using panel data from a survey of 530 firms selected through national probability sampling. The data permit examination of several crucial measurement issues, including the timing and definition of employment and the role of reorganizations, and they contain rich information on firm characteristics. We find that new and reorganized firms display larger flows than unreorganized enterprises. Product market dispersion and managerial and dispersed outsider ownership are associated with greater worker churning, and unionization and concentrated outsider ownership with less. There is little evidence that the average firm's employment adjustments have become more responsive to adjustment costs during the transition, but private ownership and product market competition appear to increase responsiveness.
Unleashing the canine genome.

In humans, common diseases show complex modes of inheritance and, as a result, have been largely refractory to genetic analysis. Rodent systems are more tractable genetically, but the mutations typically represent induced rather than naturally arising alleles, and results are often of limited direct relevance to human disease because of profound differences in physiology. By comparison, the physiology, disease presentation, and clinical response of dogs often mimic human diseases closely. In addition, the modern dog offers key advantages over other animal systems for mapping genes relevant to human disease. In the following discussion, we highlight some of these advantages and provide specific examples where canine genetics is best suited to solve difficult problems in human genetics. In particular, we focus on the strong promise of linkagedisequilibrium (LD) mapping in dogs.
Multimodal Diaries

Time management is an important aspect of a successful professional life. In order to have a better understanding of where our time goes, we propose a system that summarizes the user's daily activity (e.g. sleeping, walking, working on the pc, talking, .) using all-day multimodal data recordings. Two main novelties are proposed: (i) a system that combines both physical and contextual awareness hardware and software. It records synchronized audio, video, body sensors, GPS and computer monitoring data. (ii) A semi-supervised temporal clustering (SSTC) algorithm that accurately and efficiently groups large amounts of multimodal data into different activities. The effectiveness and accuracy of our SSTC is demonstrated in synthetic and real examples of activity segmentation from multimodal data gathered over long periods of time.
[Comparison of right thalamus and temporal cortex metabolite levels of drug-naive first-episode psychotic and chronic schizophrenia in patients].

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to use Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) to investigate whether patients with chronic schizophrenia have different brain metabolite levels in the temporal cortex and thalamus than drug-naive first-episode patients. METHOD We compared right-handed male first-episode patients (n=13) and chronic schizophrenic cases (n=15) with gender- and handedness-matched controls (n=10). Right temporal and right thalamic N-Acetylaspartate (NAA)/Creatine (Cre), NAA/Choline (Cho), and Cho/Cre ratios were obtained with MRS. RESULTS Right temporal NAA/Cre, NAA/Cho, and right thalamus NAA/Cre ratios were significantly lower both in the chronic and first-episode patient groups when compared to normal controls (p<. 001), suggesting decreased neuronal integrity in both patient groups. There were no significant correlations between symptom severity and functional status with MRS variables (p=.027). These results suggested that both patient groups had neural integrity problems. Duration of illness (days) in the first-episode patients was significantly correlated with right temporal NAA/Cre and NAA/Cho. CONCLUSIONS These results suggested that first-episode and chronic patients had significantly impaired neural integrity, particularly in the temporal cortex. It seems that in the acute phase of the first-episode, neural integrity impairment increased along with days elapsed without treatment.
Unifying Control in a Layered Agent Architecture

In this paper, we set up a unifying perspective of the individual control layers of the architecture InteRRaP for autonomous interacting agents. InteRRaP is a pragmatic approach to designing complex dynamic agent societies, e.g. for robotics Muller & Pischel and cooperative scheduling applications Fischer et al.94. It is based on three general functions describing how the actions an agent commits to are derived from its perception and from its mental model: belief revision and abstraction, situation recognition and goal activation, and planning and scheduling. It is argued that each InteRRaP control layer - the behaviour-based layer, the local planning layer, and the cooperative planning layer - can be described by a combination of different instantiations of these control functions. The basic structure of a control layer is defined. The individual functions and their implementation in the different layers are outlined. We demonstrate various options for the design of interacting agents within this framework by means of an interacting robots application. The performance of different agent types in a multiagent environment is empirically evaluated by a series of experiments.
Privacy Preserving Collaborative Filtering via the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Transform

Recommendation systems have become increasingly popular as a result of the significant growth in online information. However, it requires a substantial amount of historical user data to generate accurate predictions, which raises concerns over user privacy. Differential privacy is a well acknowledged privacy notion that has become an important standard for the preservation of privacy. Unfortunately, existing privacy preservation methods based on differential privacy protect user privacy at the cost of utility, aspects of which have to be sacrificed to ensure that privacy is maintained. In this paper, we propose a Johnson Lindenstrauss privacy preserving collaborative filtering (JLCF) method. The proposed method preserves users' privacy without compromising utility. It guarantees user privacy by directly perturbing the original dataset using a transfer matrix. We prove that the proposed method achieves -differential privacy. In addition, we theoretically analyse the utility of the proposed method, and our extensive experiments show that the prediction accuracy is improved.
The effect of assessor coverage and assessor accuracy on rank aggregation precision

Rank aggregation is the process of aggregating multiple rankings provided by multiple assessors, of a given set of items, into a single ranking. Each assessor, whether it be human or computer based, is a resource that we use to obtain the multiple rankings. The accuracy of the aggregated ranking depends on the accuracy of the assessor ranking and the assessor coverage of the items. Our question is, given limited assessment resources, should each assessor rank many items to obtain item coverage, spending little time on each item, or should each assessor rank only a few items, but spend more time on each item to obtain a high accuracy ranking? In this article, we take a first step towards answering this question, by developing a model, based on simulation, showing the effect of the number of items assigned to an assessor and the accuracy of the assessment on the precision of the aggregated ranking. We find that when using Binomial allocation of items to assessors, increasing the assessor accuracy provides a greater increase in aggregated rank accuracy.
G3: bootstrapping stroke gestures design with synthetic samples and built-in recognizers

Stroke gestures are becoming increasingly important with the ongoing success of touchscreen-capable devices. However, training a high-quality gesture recognizer requires providing a large number of examples to enable good performance on unseen, future data. Furthermore, recruiting participants, data collection and labeling, etc. necessary for achieving this goal are usually time-consuming and expensive. In response to this need, we introduce G3, a mobile-first web application for bootstrapping unistroke, multistroke, or multitouch gestures. The user only has to provide a gesture example once, and G3 will create a kinematic model of that gesture. Then, by introducing local and global perturbations to the model parameters, G3 will generate any number of synthetic human-like samples. In addition, the user can get a gesture recognizer together with the synthesized data. As such, the outcome of G3 can be directly incorporated into production-ready applications.
Application Research of Kakadu System Based on JPEG2000

JPEG2000 is a new compressed standard of static image, Kakadu is a open source system which can be higher efficiency to realize the algorithm of JPEG2000. This article introduces the codec construction and the compressed stream structure in JPEG2000, analyzes the construction of Kakadu and image compression class in Kakadu, and then carries on application experiments based on JPEG2000 in Kakadu 2.2 platform. Experiments show that the compression of interest image region has higher transfer rate and lower memory compared with the original image, and JPEG2000 has higher compression rate and better visual quality compared with JPEG.
Induced Resistance by a Long-Chain Bacterial Volatile: Elicitation of Plant Systemic Defense by a C13 Volatile Produced by Paenibacillus polymyxa

Background Some strains of plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) elicit induced systemic resistance (ISR) by emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) including short chain alcohols, acetoin, and 2,3-butanediol. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether species-specific VOCs from PGPR strain Paenibacillus polymyxa E681 can promote growth and induce resistance in Arabidopsis. Methodology/Principal Findings The efficacy of induction was strain-specific, with stronger protection against Pseudomonas syringae pv. maculicola ES4326 in plants exposed to VOCs from P. polymyxa E681 versus Arabidopsis plants exposed to VOCs from a reference strain Bacillus subtilis GB03, which was previously shown to elicit ISR and plant growth promotion. VOC emissions released from E681 primed transcriptional expression of the salicylic acid, jasmonic acid, and ethylene signaling marker genes PR1, ChiB, and VSP2, respectively. In addition, strain E681 produced more than thirty low molecular-weight VOCs, of which tridecane was only produced by E681 and not found in GB03 or IN937a volatile blends. These strain-specific VOCs induced PR1 and VSP2 genes. Conclusions/Significance These results provide new insight into the existence of a long chain VOC signaling molecule produced by P. polymyxa that can serve as a bacterial trigger of induced systemic resistance in planta.
Getting Prices Right : Mobile Phone Di ¤ usion , Market E ¢ ciency and Inequality

Abstract : In this paper, we study the impact of uneven mobile phone di¤usion on market functioning. We develop a search theoretic model with spatial arbitrage between two neighbouring marketplaces. Producers with a phone in one market can learn the prevailing price in the other market, while those without a phone cannot. In the rst stage, we assume that the penetration rates of mobile phones are exogenous. We nd that the introduction of mobile phones reduces price dispersion and yields positive externalities within markets but negative externalities across markets. Mobile phones of course bene t their users, but when the penetration rate increases in a village, farmers without phones also bene t because the average domestic price increases. In contrast, farmers in the other village (both with and without phones) are penalized as the average price in the other market decreases. These e¤ects are stronger when the original di¤erence in penetration rates is higher. Thus, non-uniform di¤usion of a new technology may reinforce existing patterns of inequality. In our second stage, we show that these results are robust to endogenizing the penetration rates. JEL:O12; D80;D82; D83;
Co-contraction of antagonist bi-articular muscles for tracking control of human limb

This paper considers muscle contraction dynamics during co-contraction of antagonist bi-articular muscles for tracking control of a human limb. Co-contraction of antagonist muscles play an important role for joint stiffness and stability and experimental results show the existence of co-contraction during volitional movements. This paper shows the role of co-contraction by using three pairs of bi-articular antagonistic muscles. It is indicated that the co-contraction is useful not only to compensate the stability of the joint, but also to control the output force direction. The main contribution is to model the co-contraction control of human limb by using three pairs of bi-articular antagonistic muscles. A robust integral of the sign of the error (RISE) controller is shown to yield semi-global asymptotic tracking. The tracking control performance and stability are verified in the simulation.
Applying transactional memory to concurrency bugs

Multithreaded programs often suffer from synchronization bugs such as atomicity violations and deadlocks. These bugs arise from complicated locking strategies and ad hoc synchronization methods to avoid the use of locks. A survey of the bug databases of major open-source applications shows that concurrency bugs often take multiple fix attempts, and that fixes often introduce yet more concurrency bugs. Transactional memory (TM) enables programmers to declare regions of code atomic without specifying a lock and has the potential to avoid these bugs. Where most previous studies have focused on using TM to write new programs from scratch, we consider its utility in fixing existing programs with concurrency bugs. We therefore investigate four methods of using TM on three concurrent programs. Overall, we find that 29% of the bugs are not fixable by transactional memory, showing that TM does not address many important types of concurrency bugs. In particular, TM works poorly with extremely long critical sections and with deadlocks involving both condition variables and I/O. Conversely, we find that for 56% of the bugs, transactional memory offers demonstrable value by simplifying the reasoning behind a fix or the effort to implement a fix, and using transactions in the first place would have avoided 71% of the bugs examined. We also find that ad hoc synchronization put in place to avoid the overhead of locking can be greatly simplified with TM, but requires hardware support to perform well.