Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Submodularity in Team Formation Problem

We consider the team formation problem where the goal is to find a team of experts for a specific project. In the past, several attempts have been made to formulate this problem and each formulation focuses only on a subset of design criteria such as skill coverage, social compatibility, economy, skill redundancy, etc. In this paper, for the first time, we show that most of the important design criteria for this problem can be fully modeled within one single formulation as an unconstrained submodular function maximization problem. In our formulation, the submodular function turns out to be non-negative and non-monotone. The maximization of this class of submodular function is much less explored than its monotone constrained counterpart. A few recent works [7] [4] have come up with a simulated annealing based randomized approximation scheme for this problem with an approximation ratio of 0.41. In this paper, we customize this algorithm to our formulation and conduct an extensive set of experiments to show its efficacy. Our proposed formulation offers several advantageous features over the existing formulations including skill cover softening, better team communication, and connectivity relaxation. Unlike previous formulations, the skill cover softening feature allows a designer to specify Must Have and Should Have skills. Similarly, through better team communication, we avoid the restriction that all the communication among team members should pass through only the team members and not the outsiders. Finally, connectivity relaxation feature alleviates the constraint of whole team being connected and thereby, lowering the cost.
Clinical Presentation of Staphylococcus epidermidis Septic Arthritis Following Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction

Purpose This study evaluated the clinical presentations of Staphylococcus epidermidis (S. epidermidis) septic arthritis after arthroscopic anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR). Materials and Methods Between September 2006 and February 2008, S. epidermidis septic arthritis developed in six patients following arthroscopic ACLR. We reviewed the medical records retrospectively and interviewed the patients. Results The average interval between ACLR and symptom onset was 4.7 days (range, 2 to 8 days). Local warmth, swelling limited knee motion and general malaise were observed in varying degrees in all the patients. The fever was generally slight with an intermittent spiking pattern. Postoperative erythrocyte sedimentation rate and C-reactive protein were elevated. After the development of infection, the joint was aspirated in all cases. The white blood cell count was at least 22,400, with the presence of 80 to 90% of polymorphonuclear cells. All the patients had a few Gram-positive cocci and positive cultures for S. epidermidis. Conclusions The symptoms, signs and laboratory findings of S. epidermidis septic arthritis following ACLR are nonspecific with various clinical presentations. So the diagnosis is often delayed. Positive gram staining can be used to confirm septic arthritis. Careful observation for septic arthritis is advised in case of presence of any abnormality after ACLR.
Metric Ranking of Invariant Networks with Belief Propagation

The management of large-scale distributed information systems relies on the effective use and modeling of monitoring data collected at various points in the distributed information systems. A promising approach is to discover invariant relationships among the monitoring data and generate invariant networks, where a node is a monitoring data source (metric) and a link indicates an invariant relationship between two monitoring data. Such an invariant network representation can help system experts to localize and diagnose the system faults by examining those broken invariant relationships and their related metrics, because system faults usually propagate among the monitoring data and eventually lead to some broken invariant relationships. However, at one time, there are usually a lot of broken links (invariant relationships) within an invariant network. Without proper guidance, it is difficult for system experts to manually inspect this large number of broken links. Thus, a critical challenge is how to effectively and efficiently rank metrics (nodes) of invariant networks according to the anomaly levels of metrics. The ranked list of metrics will provide system experts with useful guidance for them to localize and diagnose the system faults. To this end, we propose to model the nodes and the broken links as a Markov Random Field (MRF), and develop an iteration algorithm to infer the anomaly of each node based on belief propagation (BP). Finally, we validate the proposed algorithm on both real-world and synthetic data sets to illustrate its effectiveness.
Allied Agreement with Threshold Cryptography

Ally is a framework for building distributed services in a federated architecture. In a federation, nodes may occupy multiple, independent administrative domains, with complex trust relationships, connected by an asynchronous, wide-area network. We present a library that implements Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement, a critical building-block service in robust distributed systems, targeted at the federation model; threshold cryptography improves the basic agreement protocol with proactive, verifiable security and improved resilience to continuous attack.
A phase assignment method for virtual-wire-based hardware emulation

In a hardware emulator consisting of multiple field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), the utilization of the FPGA logic resource is usually very low due to the limitation on the number of I/O pins. Virtual wire technology not only increases the inter-FPGA communication capability, but it also increases the logic resource utilization by means of time division multiplexing (TDM). TDM allows one physical wire to be shared by multiple logical wires. For TDM to be effective, each transportation of an inter-FPGA signal must be carefully assigned to a slot of the time division. In this note, we show that the phase assignment problem is exactly same as the resource-constrained operation scheduling problem. We adopt the static-list scheduling heuristic for the task, and present some experimental results on a set of benchmark circuits from the MCNC. The experiments show that the proposed method can increase the number of effective I/O pins as many as ten times.
ALGAL BIOFUELS: ENHANCING ENERGY YIELD, NUTRIENT SUPPLY FROM WASTE AND NUTRIENT RECYCLING FROM ALGAL RESIDUES

Eighteen microalgae, including two local isolates, were evaluated for their ability to grow and remove nutrients from unsterilized primary or secondary wastewater effluents as well as diluted anaerobic digester centrate (ADC). While most of the tested species were unable to grow steadily in the unsterilized wastewater, several strains of Chlorella sorokiniana, Scenedesmus acutus f.alternance, and a local isolate, identified as C.sorokiniana through phylogenetic analysis, exhibited robust growth in wastewater. The maximum algal biomass density and specific growth rates in these bacterial-contaminated cultures were in the range of 250-350 mg L and 0.8-1 d, respectively. ADC supplementation was especially helpful to biologically treated secondary effluent with its lower initial macroand micronutrient content. As a result of algal growth, total nitrogen and orthophosphate levels were reduced by as much as 90% and 70%, respectively. Biological assimilation was estimated to be the main mechanism of nitrogen removal in primary and secondary effluents with ammonia volatilization and bacterial nitrification-denitrification contributing for cultures supplemented with ADC. Assimilation by algae served as the principal mechanism of orthophosphate remediation in secondary wastewater cultures, while chemical precipitation appeared to be also important for orthophosphate removal in primary wastewater. Overall, cultivation of microalgae in primary and primary + 5%ADC may be more favorable from an economical and sustainability perspective due to 2 Bohutskyi P, Liu K, Nasr LK, Byers N, Rosenberg JN, Oyler JA, Betenbaugh MJ, Bouwer EJ (under review) Microalgal bioprospecting for integrated biofuel feedstock production and phytoremediation of unsterilized municipal wastewater. Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology. 196 elimination of costly and energy-intensive biological treatment step. These findings demonstrate that unsterilized wastewater can serve as a critical nutrient source for generation of microalgal biomass and that robust microalgae can be potent players in wastewater phytoremediation.
Experimenting Text Summarization on Multimodal Aggregation

Nowadays, Web is characterized by a growing availability of multimedia data together with a strong need for integrating different media and modalities of interaction. Hence, the main goal is to bring into the Web data thought and produced for different media, such as TV or radio content. In this scenario, we focus on multimodal news aggregation retrieval and fusion. In particular, we present preliminary experiments aimed at automatically suggesting keywords to news and news aggregations. The proposed solution is based on the adoption of extraction-based text summarization techniques. Experiments are aimed at comparing the selected text summarization techniques with respect to a simple technique based on part-ofspeech tagging. Results show that the proposed solution performs better than the baseline solution in terms of precision, recall, and F1.
The other's perception of a streamflow sample: From a bottle of water to a data point

In scientific communication, ambiguities in term usage can go unnoticed due not only to the distance between reader and writer but also to the existence of highly specialized scientific subcommunities. This commentary therefore aims at raising awareness about the use of terms that have different meanings within different hydrological subcommunities such as field hydrology, hydrological modelling, or statistical hydrology. To do so, we discuss the use of the following commonly used hydrological terms: sample, runoff, discharge, and streamflow. We performed three types of analyses to provide evidence of term usage and understanding, including both qualitative and quantitative approaches: a drawing exercise, a survey, and a literature corpus analysis. These analyses allow for a comparison of spontaneous definitions and the actual use of these terms in scientific publications. Our various information sources revealed that the dialogue between hydrologists within and across subdisciplines is substantially influenced by personal conceptualizations of terms that are not always shared across conversational partners. The terms discussed and illustrated in this commentary have to be seen as a small sample used to demonstrate the need for a thoughtful use of hydrological terms when communicating research, not only to a general audience but even across subdisciplines within hydrology.
Enhancement in statistical and image analysis for in situ µSXRF studies of elemental distribution and co-localization, using Dioscorea balcanica

Synchrotron-radiation-based X-ray microfluorescence has been used for in situ investigation of the distribution of micronutrient and macronutrient elements in an unstained cross section of a stem of monocotyledonous liana plant Dioscorea balcanica Košanin. The elemental allocation has been quantified and the grouping/co-localization in straight and twisted stem internodes has been analysed.
Aspects of automatic ontology extension: adapting and regeneralizing dynamic updates

Ontologies are widely used in text technology and artificial intelligence. The need to develop large ontologies for real-life applications provokes researchers to automatize ontology extension procedures. Automatic updates without the control of a human expert can generate potential conflicts between original and new knowledge. As a consequence the resulting ontology can contain inconsistencies. On the other hand, even if the information extracted from the external sources automatically is consistent with the original ontology it can be generalized unsystematically and conceptually wrong. This in turn can lead to mistakes in applications of the extended ontology. We propose an algorithm that models the process of the adaptation of an ontology to new information and regeneralizes the resulting ontology in a more intuitive way inserting additional knowledge where this is possible.
The Benefits of Synchronous Collaborative Information Visualization: Evidence from an Experimental Evaluation

A great corpus of studies reports empirical evidence of how information visualization supports comprehension and analysis of data. The benefits of visualization for synchronous group knowledge work, however, have not been addressed extensively. Anecdotal evidence and use cases illustrate the benefits of synchronous collaborative information visualization, but very few empirical studies have rigorously examined the impact of visualization on group knowledge work. We have consequently designed and conducted an experiment in which we have analyzed the impact of visualization on knowledge sharing in situated work groups. Our experimental study consists of evaluating the performance of 131 subjects (all experienced managers) in groups of 5 (for a total of 26 groups), working together on a real-life knowledge sharing task. We compare (1) the control condition (no visualization provided), with two visualization supports: (2) optimal and (3) suboptimal visualization (based on a previous survey). The facilitator of each group was asked to populate the provided interactive visual template with insights from the group, and to organize the contributions according to the group consensus. We have evaluated the results through both objective and subjective measures. Our statistical analysis clearly shows that interactive visualization has a statistically significant, objective and positive impact on the outcomes of knowledge sharing, but that the subjects seem not to be aware of this. In particular, groups supported by visualization achieved higher productivity, higher quality of outcome and greater knowledge gains. No statistically significant results could be found between an optimal and a suboptimal visualization though (as classified by the pre-experiment survey). Subjects also did not seem to be aware of the benefits that the visualizations provided as no difference between the visualization and the control conditions was found for the self-reported measures of satisfaction and participation. An implication of our study for information visualization applications is to extend them by using real-time group annotation functionalities that aid in the group sense making process of the represented data.
Design and acquisition of a telephone spontaneous speech dialogue corpus in Spanish: DIHANA

In the framework of the DIHANA project, we present the acquisitionprocess of a spontaneous speech dialogue corpus in Spanish. Theselected application consists of information retrieval by telephone for nationwide trains. A total of 900 dialogues from 225 users were acquired using the Wizard of Oz technique. In this work, we present the design and planning of the dialogue scenes and the wizard strategy used for the acquisition of the corpus. Then, we also present the acquisition tools and a description of the acquisition process.
Channel dependent types for higher-order mobile processes

This paper introduces a new expressive theory of types for the higher-order π-calculus and demonstrates its applicability via two security analyses for higher-order code mobility. The new theory significantly improves our previous one presented in [55] by the use of channel dependent/existential types. New dependent types control dynamic change of process accessibility via channel passing, while existential types guarantee safe scope-extrusion in higher-order process passing. This solves an open issue in [55], leading to significant enlargement of original typability. The resulting typing system is coherently integrated with the linear/affine typing disciplines as well as state, concurrency and distribution [53, 5, 56, 22], allowing precise analysis of software behaviour with higher-order mobility. As illustration of the usage of the typed calculus, two basic security concerns for mobile computation, secrecy for data confidentiality and rôle-based access control for authorised resources, are analysed in a uniform type-based framework, leading to the noninterference theorem and authority-error freedom in the presence of higher-order code mobility.
Enhanced speech in noisy multiple speaker environment

Noisy environments seriously degrade the performance of speech recognition systems. Here we implement a high performance speech enhancement algorithm. Data from speech separation challenge were used to evaluate the method. It was observed that the enhanced speech significantly improved the recognition performance. In 2 out of 4 SNR cases, over 100% relative percentage improvements were achieved. Standalone software prototype has been developed and evaluated.
Workload-Aware Provisioning in Public Clouds

Public cloud services rely on virtualization to support multitenancy--that is, allowing customers from different organizations to share the datacenter infrastructure. Unfortunately, today's public clouds fail to provide sufficient isolation. Hardware resources are often multiplexed between virtual machines belonging to different customers, which can cause performance interference. This article characterizes interference on the network latency between virtual machines, and shows that the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) suffers from a long-tail latency problem due to coscheduling of CPU-bound and latency-sensitive tasks. The Bobtail system allows cloud customers to proactively detect and avoid these bad neighboring virtual machines without help from cloud service providers.
KDEIR at CLEF eHealth 2016: Health Documents Re-ranking Based on Query Variations

In this paper, we describe our participation in the CLEF eHealth 2016 task 3: Patient-Centred Information Retrieval focusing on the clinical web documents based on user queries in the health forum. In our participation, we submitted three runs in ad-hoc search and two runs in query variation search subtasks. In ad-hoc search, the main challenge is to retrieve high quality clinical documents based on user query. For ad-hoc search, we employ multiple features based unsupervised reranking method to the documents retrieved by a baseline system. During the query variation search, the main challenge is to generate a ranked list of documents covering the different variations of the query. To tackle the query variation problem, first we formulate a query and a set of information needs from the query variation. Then, we re-rank the documents retrieved for the formulated query by focusing on the set of information needs.
Hydrological Response and Complex Impact Pathways of the 2015/2016 El Niño in Eastern and Southern Africa

The 2015/2016 El Niño has been classified as one of the three most severe on record. El Niño teleconnections are commonly associated with droughts in southern Africa and high precipitation in eastern Africa. Despite their relatively frequent occurrence, evidence for their hydrological effects and impacts beyond agriculture is limited. We examine the hydrological response and impact pathways of the 2015/2016 El Niño in eastern and southern Africa, focusing on Botswana, Kenya, and Zambia. We use in situ and remotely sensed time series of precipitation, river flow, and lake levels complemented by qualitative insights from interviews with key organizations in each country about awareness, impacts, and responses. Our results show that drought conditions prevailed in large parts of southern Africa, reducing runoff and contributing to unusually low lake levels in Botswana and Zambia. Key informants characterized this El Niño through record high temperatures and water supply disruption in Botswana and through hydroelectric load shedding in Zambia. Warnings of flood risk in Kenya were pronounced, but the El Niño teleconnection did not materialize as expected in 2015/2016. Extreme precipitation was limited and caused localized impacts. The hydrological impacts in southern Africa were severe and complex, strongly exacerbated by dry antecedent conditions, recent changes in exposure and sensitivity and management decisions. Improved understanding of hydrological responses and the complexity of differing impact pathways can support design of more adaptive, region‐specific management strategies.
Novel force-sensing system for minimally invasive surgical instruments

Mastering proper force manipulation in minimally invasive surgery can take many years. Improper force control can lead to necrosis, infection, and scarring. This paper describes a novel system to measure, log, and display external forces at the distal end of minimally invasive surgical instruments in real-time. The system, comprising of a Force- Sensing Sleeve, Bluetooth electronics module, and an Android mobile application. A sensorized 5 mm minimally invasive surgical needle holder was evaluated for bending force accuracy, linearity, and repeatability in six directions. The results showed that the system responded linearly to forces at the tool-tip independent of direction with an RMS error of 0.088 N. Repeatability was affected by system noise potentially arising from temperature drift and thermal noise. Future work will include characterization of communication performance for force feedback in surgical training and assessment.
Widening of the excitable gap during pharmacological cardioversion of atrial fibrillation in the goat: effects of cibenzoline, hydroquinidine, flecainide, and d-sotalol.

BACKGROUND Previous studies suggest that the antifibrillatory action of class I and III drugs is due to prolongation of the atrial wavelength. The aim of the present study was to directly evaluate the electrophysiological action of antifibrillatory drugs in a goat model of chronic atrial fibrillation (AF). METHODS AND RESULTS Six goats were instrumented with multiple atrial electrodes, and sustained AF was induced by electrical remodeling. During sustained AF, the effects of intravenous infusion of cibenzoline, hydroquinidine, flecainide, and d-sotalol on AF cycle length (AFCL), refractory period (RP(AF)), conduction velocity (CV(AF)), pathlength (PL(AF)), wavelength (WL(AF)), temporal (AFCL-RP(AF)), and spatial (PL(AF)-WL(AF)) excitable gap were studied. The RP(AF) was measured by determining the earliest moment at which single stimuli could capture the fibrillating atria. CV(AF) was measured during regional entrainment of AF. Contrary to our expectation, cardioversion of AF could not be attributed to prolongation of WL(AF). Hydroquinidine and d-sotalol did not affect WL(AF) significantly, whereas cibenzoline and flecainide even shortened WL(AF) by 18% and 36%, respectively. PL(AF) was increased by hydroquinidine and d-sotalol by 30%, whereas cibenzoline and flecainide did not prolong PL(AF). The only parameter that correlated consistently with cardioversion of AF was a widening of the temporal excitable gap (cibenzoline 176%, hydroquinidine 105%, flecainide 86%, d-sotalol 88%). CONCLUSIONS Pharmacological cardioversion of AF cannot be explained by prolongation of WL(AF). An alternative explanation for the antifibrillatory effect of class I and III drugs may be a widening of the temporal excitable gap.