Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Illusory Increases in Font Size Improve Letter Recognition

Visual performance of human observers depends not only on the optics of the eye and early sensory encoding but also on subsequent cortical processing and representations. In two experiments, we demonstrated that motion adaptation can enhance as well as impair visual acuity. Observers who experienced an expanding motion aftereffect exhibited improved letter recognition, whereas observers who experienced a contracting motion aftereffect showed impaired letter recognition. We conclude that illusory enlargement and shrinkage of a visual stimulus can modulate visual acuity.
On the (un)predictability of a large intragenic fitness landscape

Significance The study of fitness landscapes is fundamentally concerned with understanding the relative roles of stochastic and deterministic processes in adaptive evolution. Here, the authors present a uniquely large and complete multiallelic intragenic fitness landscape of 640 systematically engineered mutations in the heat-shock protein Hsp90 in yeast. Using a combination of traditional and recently proposed theoretical approaches, they study the accessibility of the global fitness peak and the potential for predictability of the fitness landscape topography. They report local ruggedness of the landscape and the existence of epistatic hotspot mutations, which together make extrapolation and hence predictability inherently difficult if mutation-specific information is not considered. The study of fitness landscapes, which aims at mapping genotypes to fitness, is receiving ever-increasing attention. Novel experimental approaches combined with next-generation sequencing (NGS) methods enable accurate and extensive studies of the fitness effects of mutations, allowing us to test theoretical predictions and improve our understanding of the shape of the true underlying fitness landscape and its implications for the predictability and repeatability of evolution. Here, we present a uniquely large multiallelic fitness landscape comprising 640 engineered mutants that represent all possible combinations of 13 amino acid-changing mutations at 6 sites in the heat-shock protein Hsp90 in Saccharomyces cerevisiae under elevated salinity. Despite a prevalent pattern of negative epistasis in the landscape, we find that the global fitness peak is reached via four positively epistatic mutations. Combining traditional and extending recently proposed theoretical and statistical approaches, we quantify features of the global multiallelic fitness landscape. Using subsets of the data, we demonstrate that extrapolation beyond a known part of the landscape is difficult owing to both local ruggedness and amino acid-specific epistatic hotspots and that inference is additionally confounded by the nonrandom choice of mutations for experimental fitness landscapes.
Edinburgh Research Explorer Asynchronous Memory Access Chaining

In-memory databases rely on pointer-intensive data structures to quickly locate data in memory. A single lookup operation in such data structures often exhibits long-latency memory stalls due to dependent pointer dereferences. Hid-ing the memory latency by launching additional memory accesses for other lookups is an eﬀective way of improving performance of pointer-chasing codes (e.g., hash table probes, tree traversals). The ability to exploit such inter-lookup parallelism is beyond the reach of modern out-of-order cores due to the limited size of their instruction window. Instead, recent work has proposed software prefetching techniques that exploit inter-lookup parallelism by arranging a set of independent lookups into a group or a pipeline, and navigate their respective pointer chains in a synchronized fashion. While these techniques work well for highly regular access patterns, they break down in the face of irregularity across lookups. Such irregularity includes variable-length pointer chains, early exit, and read/write dependencies. This work introduces Asynchronous Memory Access Chaining (AMAC), a new approach for exploiting inter-lookup parallelism to hide the memory access latency. AMAC achieves high dynamism in dealing with irregularity across lookups by maintaining the state of each lookup separately from that of other lookups. This feature enables AMAC to initiate a new lookup as soon as any of the in-ﬂight lookups complete. In contrast, the static arrangement of lookups into a group or pipeline in existing techniques precludes such adaptivity. Our results show that AMAC matches or outperforms state-of-the-art prefetching techniques on regular access patterns, while delivering up to 2.3x higher performance under irregular data structure lookups. AMAC fully utilizes the available micro-architectural resources, generating the maximum number of memory accesses allowed by hardware in both single-and multi-threaded execution modes.
How to tolerate half less one Byzantine nodes in practical distributed systems

The application of dependability concepts and techniques to the design of secure distributed systems is raising a considerable amount of interest in both communities under the designation of intrusion tolerance. However, practical intrusion-tolerant replicated systems based on the state machine approach (SMA) can handle at most f Byzantine components out of a total of n = 3f + 1, which is the maximum resilience in asynchronous systems. This paper extends the normal asynchronous system with a special distributed oracle called TTCB. Using this extended system we manage to implement an intrusion-tolerant service based on the SMA with only 2f + 1 replicas. Albeit a few other papers in the literature present intrusion-tolerant services with this approach, this is the first time the number of replicas is reduced from 3f + 1 to 2f + 1. Another interesting characteristic of the described service is a low time complexity.
End-to-end measurement based admission control for VoIP networks

This paper proposes enhanced end-to-end measurement based admission control mechanisms for VoIP networks. In this architecture, active measurement is used for call admission control to maintain packet loss rate for voice flows below a pre-determined value under various network conditions. This paper presents several new concepts, including constant probing instead of conventional on-demand probing and automatic adjustment of admission threshold based on feedback control. Simulation is used to evaluate the network performance such as blocking probabilities and packet loss rate. It is shown that the proposed admission control mechanisms work well to control packet loss rate under various network conditions.
Semantically Decomposing the Latent Spaces of Generative Adversarial Networks

We propose a new algorithm for training generative adversarial networks that jointly learns latent codes for both identities (e.g. individual humans) and observations (e.g. specific photographs). By fixing the identity portion of the latent codes, we can generate diverse images of the same subject, and by fixing the observation portion, we can traverse the manifold of subjects while maintaining contingent aspects such as lighting and pose. Our algorithm features a pairwise training scheme in which each sample from the generator consists of two images with a common identity code. Corresponding samples from the real dataset consist of two distinct photographs of the same subject. In order to fool the discriminator, the generator must produce pairs that are photorealistic, distinct, and appear to depict the same individual. We augment both the DCGAN and BEGAN approaches with Siamese discriminators to facilitate pairwise training. Experiments with human judges and an off-the-shelf face verification system demonstrate our algorithm's ability to generate convincing, identity-matched photographs.
Constant-Size Dynamic $k$ -Times Anonymous Authentication

Dynamic <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$k$</tex></formula>-times anonymous authentication (<formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$k$</tex></formula>-TAA) schemes allow members of a group to be authenticated anonymously by application providers for a bounded number of times, where application providers can independently and dynamically grant or revoke access right to members in their own group. In this paper, we construct a dynamic <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$k$</tex></formula>-TAA scheme with space and time complexities of <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$O(\log (k))$</tex></formula> and a variant, in which the authentication protocol only requires constant time and space complexities at the cost of <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$O(k)$</tex> </formula>-sized public key. We also describe some tradeoff issues between different system characteristics. We detail all the zero-knowledge proof-of-knowledge protocols involved and show that our construction is secure in the random oracle model under the <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$q$</tex></formula>-strong Diffie–Hellman assumption and <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$q$</tex></formula>-decisional Diffie–Hellman inversion assumption. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation, experiment on its performance, and show that our scheme is practical.
Geometry-based block partitioning for efficient intra prediction in depth video coding

In 3D video system including depth information, once a depth video is coded by the state-of-the-art video compression tools such as H.264/AVC, depth errors around the boundaries of objects can be intensified, and these can significantly affect the quality of rendered virtual view later. Despite this drawback of depth video coding, its compression is essential because of the enormous amount of input data in 3D video system. In this paper, we propose a line-based partitioned intra prediction method which exploits geometric redundancy of depth video for an efficient compression without significant errors around boundaries. The proposed algorithm can efficiently divide the current coded block into two partitioned regions, and the algorithm independently predicts each region with previously coded neighbor pixel information. Finally, the generated prediction mode adaptively alternates the conventional DC intra prediction mode. To evaluate the intra prediction performances, we have implemented the proposed method into H.264/AVC intra prediction scheme. Experimental results have demonstrated that our proposed method provides higher coding performance. The coding performance for depth video compression itself was up to 3.71% bit-saving or 0.309dB on maximum peak signalto- noise ratio (PSNR) gain among proper depth sequences which contain line-like boundaries.
Phosphorylation of GTP Cyclohydrolase I and Modulation of Its Activity in Rodent Mast Cells

GTP cyclohydrolase I controls the de novo pathway for the synthesis of tetrahydrobiopterin, which is the essential cofactor for tryptophan 5-monooxygenase and thus, for serotonin production. In mouse bone marrow-derived mast cells, the kit ligand selectively up-regulates GTP cyclohydrolase I activity (Ziegler, I., Hültner, L., Egger, D., Kempkes, B., Mailhammer, R., Gillis, S., and Rödl, W. (1993) J. Biol. Chem. 268, 12544–12551). Immunoblot analysis now confirms that this long term enhancement is caused by increased expression of the enzyme. Furthermore we show that GTP cyclohydrolase I is subject to modification at the post-translational level. In vivolabeling with [32P]orthophosphate demonstrates that in primary mast cells and in transfected RBL-2H3 cells overexpressing GTP cyclohydrolase I, the enzyme exists in a phosphorylated form. Antigen binding to the high affinity receptor for IgE triggers an additional and transient phosphorylation of GTP cyclohydrolase I with a concomitant rise in its activity, and in consequence, cellular tetrahydrobiopterin levels increase. These events culminate 8 min after stimulation and can be mimicked by phorbol ester. The hyperphosphorylation is greatly reduced by the protein kinase C inhibitor Ro-31-8220. In vitro phosphorylation studies indicate that GTP cyclohydrolase I is a substrate for both casein kinase II and protein kinase C.
Fully homomorphic encryption using ideal lattices

We propose a fully homomorphic encryption scheme -- i.e., a scheme that allows one to evaluate circuits over encrypted data without being able to decrypt. Our solution comes in three steps. First, we provide a general result -- that, to construct an encryption scheme that permits evaluation of arbitrary circuits, it suffices to construct an encryption scheme that can evaluate (slightly augmented versions of) its own decryption circuit; we call a scheme that can evaluate its (augmented) decryption circuit bootstrappable. Next, we describe a public key encryption scheme using ideal lattices that is almost bootstrappable. Lattice-based cryptosystems typically have decryption algorithms with low circuit complexity, often dominated by an inner product computation that is in NC1. Also, ideal lattices provide both additive and multiplicative homomorphisms (modulo a public-key ideal in a polynomial ring that is represented as a lattice), as needed to evaluate general circuits. Unfortunately, our initial scheme is not quite bootstrappable -- i.e., the depth that the scheme can correctly evaluate can be logarithmic in the lattice dimension, just like the depth of the decryption circuit, but the latter is greater than the former. In the final step, we show how to modify the scheme to reduce the depth of the decryption circuit, and thereby obtain a bootstrappable encryption scheme, without reducing the depth that the scheme can evaluate. Abstractly, we accomplish this by enabling the encrypter to start the decryption process, leaving less work for the decrypter, much like the server leaves less work for the decrypter in a server-aided cryptosystem.
An extension of the Galton-Pearson correlation coefficient to the nonlinear case

This paper addresses the problem of constructing a correlation type measure of association between a response variable Y and a covariate X (possibly vector valued) which is suitable for models where E (Y IX = x) is not linear in x and Var (Y IX = x) is not constant in x. A simple local measure is constructed by making use of Galton's ideas that led to the invention of the usual Galton-Pearson correlation coefficient. This measure is justified on several grounds and a related global measure is introduced. The local measure is illustrated on income-potato expenditure data and shows that in low income groups income and potato expenditure is positively correlated while in high income groups the correlation is negative.
Componential set-based analysis

Set-based analysis (SBA) produces good predictions about the behavior of functional and object-oriented programs. The analysis proceeds by inferring constraints that characterize the data flow relationships of the analyzed program. Experiences with MrSpidey, a static debugger based on SBA, indicate that SBA can adequately deal with programs of up to a couple of thousand lines of code. SBA fails, however, to cope with larger programs because it generates systems of constraints that are at least linear, and possibility quadratic, in the size of the analyzed program. This article presents theoretical and practical results concerning methods for reducing the size of constraint systems. The theoretical results include of proof-theoretic characterization of the observable behavior of constraint systems for program components, and a complete algorithm for deciding the observable equivalence of constraint systems. In the course of this development we establish a close connection between the observable equivalence of constraint systems and the equivalence of regular-tree grammars. We then exploit this connection to adapt a variety of algoirthms for simplifying grammars to the problem of simplifying constraint systems. Based on the resulting algorithms, we have developed componential set-based analysis, a modular and polymorphic variant of SBA. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of the simplification algorithms and the componential analysis. The simplified constraint systems are typically an order of magnitude smaller than the original systems. These reductions in size produce significant gains in the speed of the analysis.
Uniform Generation of Random Regular Graphs

We develop a new approach for uniform generation of combinatorial objects, and apply it to derive a uniform sampler REG for d-regular graphs. REG can be implemented such that each graph is generated in expected time O(nd3), provided that d = o(√n). Our result significantly improves the previously best uniform sampler, which works efficiently only when d = O(n1/3), with essentially the same running time for the same d. We also give a linear-time approximate sampler REG*, which generates a random d-regular graph whose distribution differs from the uniform by o(1) in total variation distance, when d = o(√n).
Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss With Simultaneous Positional Vertigo Showing Persistent Geotropic Direction-Changing Positional Nystagmus

Objectives To characterize the clinical features of patients who simultaneously developed ipsilateral sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL) and positional vertigo showing geotropic direction-changing positional nystagmus (DCPN) on a supine head-roll test, and to address the possible pathophysiology of the disease. Study Design Retrospective case series review. Methods We conducted a retrospective case series study in 17 patients with SSNHL and simultaneous positional vertigo showing geotropic DCPN. Results All 17 patients showed persistent geotropic DCPN without latency in the supine head-roll test. The intensity of nystagmus was stronger when the patient’s head was turned to the lesion side of SSNHL in 15 of 17 patients. We sought to identify a null plane in nine patients, and the null plane was identified on the same side as the SSNHL in all nine patients, which was thought to be caused by the “light cupula” of the lateral semicircular canal in the same ear as the SSNHL. Conclusion A light cupula mechanism may be one of the causes of positional vertigo in patients with SSNHL. In these cases, persistent geotropic DCPN is observed in the supine head-roll test and the null plane can be identified on the same side as the hearing loss.
The dihedral Lie algebras and Galois symmetries of \pi_1^l(P^1 - 0, infinity and N-th roots of unity)

We study the action of the Galois group on the pro-l-completion of the fundamental group of P^1 - {0, infinity and N-th roots of unity}. We describe the Lie algebra of the image of the Galois action and relate with the geometry of the modular varieties for GL_m for m = 1,2,3,. This story is the l-adic side of the motivic theory of multiple polylogarithms at roots of unity, which generalize the classical cyclotomy theory.
Extracellular vesicles: Exosomes, microvesicles, and friends

Cells release into the extracellular environment diverse types of membrane vesicles of endosomal and plasma membrane origin called exosomes and microvesicles, respectively. These extracellular vesicles (EVs) represent an important mode of intercellular communication by serving as vehicles for transfer between cells of membrane and cytosolic proteins, lipids, and RNA. Deficiencies in our knowledge of the molecular mechanisms for EV formation and lack of methods to interfere with the packaging of cargo or with vesicle release, however, still hamper identification of their physiological relevance in vivo. In this review, we focus on the characterization of EVs and on currently proposed mechanisms for their formation, targeting, and function.
Diving Deep into Sentiment: Understanding Fine-tuned CNNs for Visual Sentiment Prediction

Visual media are powerful means of expressing emotions and sentiments. The constant generation of new content in social networks highlights the need of automated visual sentiment analysis tools. While Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have established a new state-of-the-art in several vision problems, their application to the task of sentiment analysis is mostly unexplored and there are few studies regarding how to design CNNs for this purpose. In this work, we study the suitability of fine-tuning a CNN for visual sentiment prediction as well as explore performance boosting techniques within this deep learning setting. Finally, we provide a deep-dive analysis into a benchmark, state-of-the-art network architecture to gain insight about how to design patterns for CNNs on the task of visual sentiment prediction.
First Record of Callochiton foveolatus (Polyplacophora: callochitonidae) from Korea

The genus Callochiton Gray, 1847 is small to medium sized chiton (up to 55 × 36 mm in size) and includes approximately 30 species worldwide, most of which are found on hard substrata in subtidal zone. To date, only three species of Callochiton Gray, 1847 have been reported in Japan. In this study, we found C. foveolatus (Is. Taki, 1938) as first record of the family Callochitonidae Plate, 1901 in Korea and its morphological features were described and compared with other northwestern Pacific species. In addition, the partial fragment of mitochondrial DNA cytochrome c oxidase subunit I sequences of C. foveolatus was determined as DNA barcoding record and compared with other congeneric species.
Performance Analysis of Circular Antenna Array for Microwave Interferometric Radiometers

The microwave interferometric radiometer (MIR) is a passive sensor using synthetic aperture technique for microwave remote sensing. It uses a thinned antenna array to replace the traditional large real aperture antenna, so as to reduce the antenna size, weight, and manufacturing difficulty, and further increase the spatial resolution of the instrument. The antenna array configuration is the first concern for the MIR application. Various array configurations have been proposed. Among them the arrays with hexagonal sampling grid such as the Y-shaped and hexagonal arrays have drawn more attention because of the higher sampling efficiency. However, they do not have the best performance in radiometric sensitivity and radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation. This paper presents the detailed analysis of the circular array performance and compares it with the Y-shaped and hexagonal arrays. Based on the early developed theory about the radiometric resolution, two new factors named as sampling sensitivity factor and uncertainty factor are first introduced and defined in this paper, which can be used to quantitatively characterize the array performance. The main beam efficiency of the MIR is also redefined to prevent it being uncomfortably greater than unity but still keep a physical significance. Numerical simulations with analysis are finally implemented to verify the theoretical results and also to demonstrate the superiority of the circular array in terms of radiometric sensitivity and RFI mitigation.