Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The throughput of slotted aloha with diversity

In this paper, a simple variation of classical Slotted Aloha is introduced and analyzed. The enhancement relies on adding multiple receivers that gather different observations of the packets transmitted by a user population in one slot. For each observation, the packets transmitted in one slot are assumed to be subject to independent on-off fading, so that each of them is either completely faded, and then does not bring any power or interference at the receiver, or it arrives unfaded, and then may or may not, collide with other unfaded transmissions. With this model, a novel type of diversity is introduced to the conventional SA scheme, leading to relevant throughput gains already for moderate number of receivers. The analytical framework that we introduce allows to derive closed-form expression of both throughput and packet loss rate an arbitrary number of receivers, providing interesting hints on the key trade-offs that characterize the system. We then focus on the problem of having receivers forward the full set of collected packets to a final gateway using the minimum possible amount of resources, i.e., avoiding delivery of duplicate packets, without allowing any exchange of information among them. We derive what is the minimum amount of resources needed and propose a scheme based on random linear network coding that achieves asymptotically this bound without the need for the receivers to coordinate among them.
A Novel Multiresolution Spatiotemporal Saliency Detection Model and Its Applications in Image and Video Compression

Salient areas in natural scenes are generally regarded as areas which the human eye will typically focus on, and finding these areas is the key step in object detection. In computer vision, many models have been proposed to simulate the behavior of eyes such as SaliencyToolBox (STB), Neuromorphic Vision Toolkit (NVT), and others, but they demand high computational cost and computing useful results mostly relies on their choice of parameters. Although some region-based approaches were proposed to reduce the computational complexity of feature maps, these approaches still were not able to work in real time. Recently, a simple and fast approach called spectral residual (SR) was proposed, which uses the SR of the amplitude spectrum to calculate the image's saliency map. However, in our previous work, we pointed out that it is the phase spectrum, not the amplitude spectrum, of an image's Fourier transform that is key to calculating the location of salient areas, and proposed the phase spectrum of Fourier transform (PFT) model. In this paper, we present a quaternion representation of an image which is composed of intensity, color, and motion features. Based on the principle of PFT, a novel multiresolution spatiotemporal saliency detection model called phase spectrum of quaternion Fourier transform (PQFT) is proposed in this paper to calculate the spatiotemporal saliency map of an image by its quaternion representation. Distinct from other models, the added motion dimension allows the phase spectrum to represent spatiotemporal saliency in order to perform attention selection not only for images but also for videos. In addition, the PQFT model can compute the saliency map of an image under various resolutions from coarse to fine. Therefore, the hierarchical selectivity (HS) framework based on the PQFT model is introduced here to construct the tree structure representation of an image. With the help of HS, a model called multiresolution wavelet domain foveation (MWDF) is proposed in this paper to improve coding efficiency in image and video compression. Extensive tests of videos, natural images, and psychological patterns show that the proposed PQFT model is more effective in saliency detection and can predict eye fixations better than other state-of-the-art models in previous literature. Moreover, our model requires low computational cost and, therefore, can work in real time. Additional experiments on image and video compression show that the HS-MWDF model can achieve higher compression rate than the traditional model.
Modelling of multi-wall CNT devices by self-consistent analysis of multichannel transport

We present a generalization of the self-consistent analysis of carbon nanotube (CNT) field effect transistors (FETs) to the case of multi-wall/multi-band coherent carrier transport. The contribution to charge diffusion, due to different walls and sub-bands of a multi-wall (mw) CNT is shown to be non-negligible, especially for high applied external voltages and ‘large’ diameters. The transmission line formalism is used in order to solve the Schrödinger equation for carrier propagation, coupled to the Poisson equation describing the spatial voltage distribution throughout the device. We provide detailed numerical results for semiconducting mw-nanotubes of different diameters and lengths, such as current–voltage characteristics and frequency responses.
Real-time pedestrian recognition at night based on far infrared image sensor

The damage of the accident between a pedestrian and a vehicle is most serious in the kind of traffic accidents. According to the statistics, 38% of road fatalities occur in an accident between a pedestrian and a vehicle, and the night accident is accounted for 64% in that number. This paper proposes pedestrian recognition algorithm with the far-infrared image sensor mounted vehicle at night time. We propose recognition algorithm with noble features which are Local Binary Pattern Haar-like (LBP-Haar_like), Advanced Histogram Oriented Gradient-Local Binary Pattern_histogram (adv_HOG- LBP _histogram) features. The features are extracted from big database (DB) using Adaptive Boosting (ada-boost) classification. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can detect and track pedestrian with 97% accuracy at average 20 frames per second.
A dynamic partial reconfiguration design for camera systems

The image-processing pipeline is the core part of any camera system including digital still cameras, camcorders, camera phones and video surveillance equipments. The image-processing pipeline consists of a number of processing stages that enhance the image or remove any effects that are caused by surrounding conditions. These stages are computationally intensive and need special requirements to meet the real time processing. This paper discusses the pipeline parts and presents a high-performance and cost-effective implementation of the pipeline on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) using Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) feature to exploit the FPGA resources over time and space. The paper shows that the implemented system adds much of flexibility to camera systems by using a reconfigurable region. The system can use an unlimited number of image processing pipeline stages to process the images without the need of huge number of logic resources to fit all the stages. Moreover, the stages are not fixed in this system, they can be changed upon the user's decision. The architecture is designed to process still images of size 1920×1080. Each stage could process a full frame within 7.25 ms. A fast configuration engine is designed and deployed in the system. The engine shows that it can outperform the engine provided with zynq SoC by three times. The overall throughput of the system reaches 250 Megapixel/s.
Identifying characteristics of Java methods that may influence branch coverage: An exploratory study on open source projects

Software testing is an important activity to assure the quality of software. Testing techniques and criteria have been created over time to help testers to devise high quality test suites. However, duly and systematically testing a software to reach high coverage on criteria, such as branch coverage, requires much effort. In this context, identifying characteristics of a software that may influence branch coverage is important to create software easier to test since the beginning. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to present an investigation conducted by us to identify the differences between methods whose branches were fully covered and the methods that have been partially covered. This investigation has been conducted on 39 open source Java projects.
A CMOS Ku-Band 4x Subharmonic Mixer

In this work, the design and measurement of a new 4x subharmonic mixer circuit is presented using CMOS 0.18 m technology. With an RF input signal at 12.1 GHz, and an LO signal at 3.0 GHz, an intermediate frequency of 100 MHz is produced (fIF = fRF - 4fLO). The mixer uses a modified Gilbert-cell topology with octet-phase LO switching transistors to perform the quadruple subharmonic mixing. Included in the design is an active balun for the RF signal and a circuit that generates an octet-phase LO signals from a differential input. The mixer has a conversion gain of approximately 6 dB, 1-dB compression point of -12 dBm, IIP3 of -2 dBm, and IIP2 of 17 dBm. The circuit also exhibits excellent isolation between its ports (e.g. LO-RF: 71 dB, 4LO-RF: 59 dB).
MIMO Truncated Shannon Bound for system level capacity evaluation of wireless networks

We outline a general method for modelling the capacity of a MIMO link within a wireless, assuming that capacity of a link is a random function of SNR and signal to interference ratio (SIR), since the maximum link throughput depends on the random channel of both the user's signal and the interference. We show how a look-up table for the CDF of this random function can be obtained by link-level simulation in the presence of interference having the same characteristics as the interference found in the target network. We also exploit the Truncated Shannon Bound (TSB) to estimate the resulting capacity obtained in practice in a system using adaptive modulation and coding on the link level.
Membership Privacy in MicroRNA-based Studies

The continuous decrease in cost of molecular profiling tests is revolutionizing medical research and practice, but it also raises new privacy concerns. One of the first attacks against privacy of biological data, proposed by Homer et al. in 2008, showed that, by knowing parts of the genome of a given individual and summary statistics of a genome-based study, it is possible to detect if this individual participated in the study. Since then, a lot of work has been carried out to further study the theoretical limits and to counter the genome-based membership inference attack. However, genomic data are by no means the only or the most influential biological data threatening personal privacy. For instance, whereas the genome informs us about the risk of developing some diseases in the future, epigenetic biomarkers, such as microRNAs, are directly and deterministically affected by our health condition including most common severe diseases. In this paper, we show that the membership inference attack also threatens the privacy of individuals contributing their microRNA expressions to scientific studies. Our results on real and public microRNA expression data demonstrate that disease-specific datasets are especially prone to membership detection, offering a true-positive rate of up to 77% at a false-negative rate of less than 1%. We present two attacks: one relying on the L_1 distance and the other based on the likelihood-ratio test. We show that the likelihood-ratio test provides the highest adversarial success and we derive a theoretical limit on this success. In order to mitigate the membership inference, we propose and evaluate both a differentially private mechanism and a hiding mechanism. We also consider two types of adversarial prior knowledge for the differentially private mechanism and show that, for relatively large datasets, this mechanism can protect the privacy of participants in miRNA-based studies against strong adversaries without degrading the data utility too much. Based on our findings and given the current number of miRNAs, we recommend to only release summary statistics of datasets containing at least a couple of hundred individuals.
LRU Stack Processing

Stack processing, and in particular stack processing for the least recently used replacement algorithms, may present computational problems when it is applied to a sequence of page references with many different pages. This paper describes a new technique for LRU stack processing that permits efficient processing of these sequences. An analysis of the algorithm and a comparison of its running times with those of the conventional stack processing algorithms are presented. Finally we discuss a multipass implementation, which was found necessary to process trace data from a large data base system.
Diet alters probiotic Lactobacillus persistence and function in the intestine.

We investigated the effects of host diet on the intestinal persistence and gene expression of Lactobacillus plantarum WCFS1 in healthy and health-compromised, 2,4,6-trinitrobenzene sulfonic acid (TNBS)-treated mice. Mice fed either a low-fat chow diet (CD) or high fat and sucrose Western diet (WD) received 10(9) L. plantarum WCFS1 cells for five consecutive days. Lactobacillus plantarum persistence was 10- to 100-fold greater in the intestines of WD-fed compared with CD-fed mice. TNBS, an intestinal irritant that induces the development of inflammatory bowel disease-like symptoms, resulted in up to a 10(4) -fold increase in L. plantarum survival in the digestive tract relative to healthy animals. Expression levels of 12 metabolic and gut-inducible L. plantarum genes were differentially affected by diet and TNBS administration. Pyrosequencing of 16S rRNA transcripts from the indigenous intestinal microbiota showed that WD resulted in significant reductions in proportions of metabolically active indigenous Lactobacillus species and increases in the Desulfovibrionaceae family. Feeding L. plantarum WCFS1 resulted in lower levels of colitis and higher concentrations of colonic IL-10 and IL-12 in WD and not CD-fed mice. Interactions between probiotics, nutritional components and the intestinal bacteria should be considered when examining for probiotic-mediated effects and elucidating mechanisms of probiotic function in the mammalian gut.
Binding Partners for the UL11 Tegument Protein of Herpes Simplex Virus Type 1

ABSTRACT The product of the UL11 gene of herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) is a 96-amino-acid tegument protein that accumulates on the cytoplasmic face of internal membranes. Although it is thought to be important for nucleocapsid envelopment and egress, the actual function of this protein is unknown. Previous studies focused on the characterization of sequence elements within the UL11 protein that function in membrane binding and trafficking to the Golgi apparatus. Binding was found to be mediated by two fatty acyl groups (myristate and palmitate), while an acidic cluster and a dileucine motif were identified as being important for the recycling of UL11 from the plasma membrane to the Golgi apparatus. The goal of the experiments described here was to identify and characterize binding partners (viral or cellular) of UL11. Using both immunoprecipitation and glutathione S-transferase (GST) pull-down assays, we identified a 40-kDa protein that specifically associates with UL11 from infected Vero cells. Mutational analyses revealed that the acidic cluster and the dileucine motif are required for this association, whereas the entire second half of UL11 is not. In addition, UL11 homologs from pseudorabies and Marek's disease herpesviruses were also found to be capable of binding to the 40-kDa protein from HSV-1-infected cells, suggesting that the interaction is conserved among alphaherpesviruses. Purification and analysis of the 40-kDa protein by mass spectrometry revealed that it is the product of the UL16 gene, a virion protein reported to be involved in nucleocapsid assembly. Cells transfected with a UL16-green fluorescent protein expression vector produced a protein that was of the expected size, could be pulled down with GST-UL11, and accumulated in a Golgi-like compartment only when coexpressed with UL11, indicating that the interaction does not require any other viral products. These data represent the first steps toward elucidating the network of tegument proteins that UL11 links to membranes.
Floorplan management: incremental placement for gate sizing and buffer insertion

Incremental physical design is an important methodology towards achieving design closure for high-performance large-scale circuits. Placement tools must accommodate incremental changes to the layout and netlist due to physical synthesis techniques without perturbing the original metrics. We present an incremental placement approach using floorplan sizing to manage the resources and demands of the whole chip region in order to accommodate the changes due to gate sizing and buffer insertion. The experimental results show that this approach can accommodate a wide range of incremental changes without a loss in wirelength and mutability. Most important, it also maintains the stability of a placement such that the convergence of physical synthesis iterations can be greatly enhanced.
Emotional and cognitive processing of narratives and individual appraisal styles: recruitment of cognitive control networks vs. modulation of deactivations

Research in psychotherapy has shown that the frequency of use of specific classes of words (such as terms with emotional valence) in descriptions of scenes of affective relevance is a possible indicator of psychological affective functioning. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), we investigated the neural correlates of these linguistic markers in narrative texts depicting core aspects of emotional experience in human interaction, and their modulation by individual differences in the propensity to use these markers. Emotional words activated both lateral and medial aspects of the prefrontal cortex, as in previous studies of instructed emotion regulation and in consistence with recruitment of effortful control processes. However, individual differences in the spontaneous use of emotional terms in characterizing the stimulus material were prevalently associated with modulation of the signal in the perigenual cortex, in the retrosplenial cortex and precuneus, and the anterior insula/ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Modulation of signal by the presence of these textual markers or individual differences mostly involved areas deactivated by the main task, thus further differentiating neural correlates of these appraisal styles from those associated with effortful control. These findings are discussed in the context of reports in the literature of modulations of deactivations, which suggest their importance in orienting attention and generation of response in the presence of emotional information. These findings suggest that deactivations may play a functional role in emotional appraisal and may contribute to characterizing different appraisal styles.
Estimation of the Minimum Number of Tracks for SAR Tomography

Synthetic aperture radar tomography (SARTom) is the natural extension of SAR interferometry to solve for multiple phase centers within a resolution cell and obtain the 3-D representation of a scene. This paper deals with the determination of the minimum number of tracks required to perform SARTom. Through the prolate spheroidal wave functions, the number of equivalent targets of a volumetric source is derived, and from it, the minimum number of observations required to apply subspace superresolution methods is computed. The minimum tomographic aperture length is also investigated. The results are validated on real data acquired in L-band by the experimental SAR system of the German Aerospace Center.
Consensus Seeking Over Random Weighted Directed Graphs

We examine the consensus problem for a group of agents that communicate via a stochastic information network. Communication among agents is modeled as a weighted directed random graph that switches periodically. The existence of any edge is probabilistic and independent from the existence of any other edge. We further allow each edge to be weighted differently. Sufficient conditions for asymptotic almost sure consensus are presented for the case of positive weights and for the case of arbitrary weights.
CRYSTALLIZATION OF PEPSIN FROM ALCOHOL

1. Pepsin is soluble in 65 per cent alcohol and may be readily crystallized from 20 per cent alcohol. The crystals appear as needles or plates which may be transformed into the usual hexagonal bipyramids by recrystallization from water. The different crystals are probably two crystalline forms of the same chemical substance. 2. The enzyme is quite stable in 20 per cent alcohol at pH 2.0 but is inactivated by high concentrations of alcohol. 3. The enzyme is stable for several hours in 65 per cent alcohol at pH 4.0 to 5.0 but is rapidly inactivated in more acid solution. 4. No increase in activity could be noted after treatment with hydrogen peroxide. 5. No proteolytic activity either before or after treatment with hydrogen peroxide could be found in trichloracetic acid filtrates, butyl alcohol extracts of pepsin preparations, or oxidized phenylhydrazine solutions.
A 1.12mW Continuous Healthcare Monitor Chip Integrated on a Planar Fashionable Circuit Board

A planar thin-film technology is applied directly on the fabric to fabricate a planar fashionable circuit board (P-FCB) and to introduce a direct chip-integration technique on a P-FCB. Planar technology, which has helped make the current advance of electronics technology possible, is used to fabricate P-FCBs. Planar capacitor humidity sensors, a low-power controller chip and LEDs are integrated on a P-FCB for continuous healthcare monitoring applications. The P-FCB has the same electrical and mechanical properties as the clothes and also shows a graceful degradation in performance, exactly the same way as clothes do with time and usage.
Insertional Polymorphism and Antiquity of PDR1 Retrotransposon Insertions in Pisum Species

Sequences flanking 73 insertions of the retrotransposon PDR1 have been characterized, together with an additional 270 flanking regions from one side alone, from a diverse collection of Pisum germ plasm. Most of the identified flanking sequences are repetitious DNAs but more than expected (7%) lie within nuclear gene protein-coding regions. The approximate age of 52 of the PDR1 insertions has been determined by measuring sequence divergence among LTR pairs. These data show that PDR1 transpositions occurred within the last 5 MY, with a peak at 1–2.5 MYA. The insertional polymorphism of 68 insertions has been assessed across 47 selected Pisum accessions, representing the diversity of the genus. None of the insertions are fixed, showing that PDR1 insertions can persist in a polymorphic state for millions of years in Pisum. The insertional polymorphism data have been compared with the age estimations to ask what rules control the proliferation of PDR1 insertions in Pisum. Relatively recent insertions (< ∼1.5MYA) tend to be found in small subsets of the Pisum accessions set, “middle-aged” insertions (between ∼1.5 and 2.5 MYA) vary greatly in their occurrence, and older insertions (> ∼2.5 MYA) are mostly found in small subsets of Pisum. Finally, the average age estimate for PDR1 insertions, together with an existing data set for PDR1 retrotransposon SSAP markers, has been used to derive an estimate of the effective population size for Pisum of ∼7.5 × 105.