Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Stabilizing trust and reputation for self-stabilizing efficient hosts in spite of byzantine guests

This work presents a general and complete method to protect a system against possible malicious programs. We provide concepts for building a system that can automatically recover from an arbitrary state including even one in which a Byzantine execution of one or more programs repeatedly attempts to corrupt the system state. Preservation of a guest execution is guaranteed as long as the guest respects a predefined contract, while efficiency is improved by using stabilizing reputation. We augment a provable self-stabilizing host operating system implementation with a contract-enforcement framework example.
Meta-analysis of dietary restriction during fecal occult blood testing.

CONTEXT Dietary restriction is often recommended during fecal occult blood testing (FOBT) as a means of increasing test accuracy, but concern surrounds whether such restriction also reduces the chance that patients will complete the test. PURPOSE We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to determine if advice about dietary restrictions affects the rate of completion of FOBT and the rate of positive results. METHODS We searched the MEDLINE database and hand-searched the bibliographies of other systematic reviews and clinical practice guidelines to identify randomized trials of advice to perform dietary restriction during FOBT. We included only trials that reported the proportion of patients who completed the occult blood tests (completion rate). When such information was available, we also recorded the proportion of patients who had positive test results (positivity rate). RESULTS Five randomized trials met our inclusion criteria. All used guaiac-based Hemoccult tests; none reported results from rehydrated test slides. In four trials, there was little or no difference in test completion between patients assigned to dietary restriction and those with no restriction. In one small trial that used an especially restrictive diet, completion was 21 percentage points lower in the restricted group. Positivity rates were reported in four trials, none of which found a statistically significant difference between groups. Meta-analysis showed no difference in the summary positivity rate between those assigned to dietary restriction versus those not restricted (difference in positivity rate, 0%; 95% CI, -1% to 1%). CONCLUSIONS Available data suggest that advice to perform modest dietary restriction during unrehydrated FOBT does not affect the completion rate, but more severe restrictions may. Dietary restriction also does not appear to affect positivity rates. On the basis of these data, physicians do not need to advise patients to restrict their diet for nonrehydrated FOBTs.
Spatial–spectral locality constrained elastic net hypergraph for hyperspectral image clustering

ABSTRACT Hypergraph is an effective method used to represent the contextual correlation within hyperspectral imagery for clustering. Nevertheless, how to discover the closely correlated samples to form hyperedges is the key issue for constructing an informative hypergraph. In this article, a new spatial–spectral locality constrained elastic net hypergraph learning model is proposed for hyperspectral image clustering (i.e. unsupervised classification). In order to utilize the spatial–spectral correlation among the pixels in hyperspectral images, first, we construct a locality-constrained dictionary by selecting K relevant pixels within a spatial neighbourhood, which activates the most correlated atoms and suppresses the uncorrelated ones. Second, each pixel is represented as a linear combination of the atoms in the dictionary under the elastic net regularization. Third, based on the obtained representations, the pixels and their most related pixels are linked as hyperedges, which can effectively capture high–order relationships among the pixels. Finally, a hypergraph Laplacian matrix is built for unsupervised learning. Experiments have been conducted on two widely used hyperspectral images, and the results show that the proposed method can achieve a superior clustering performance when compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Vowel Fundamental and Formant Frequency Contributions to English and Mandarin Sentence Intelligibility

The current study investigated spectral components of vowels that contribute to Mandarin and English sentence intelligibility. Sentences were processed to preserve various amounts of vowel information. Processing parameters ensured similar proportions of speech preserved between the two languages. In the first experiment, speech segments, primarily containing vocalic cues, were processed to flatten fundamental frequency (F0) cues. In the second experiment, sine-wave speech synthesis was used to coarsely code speech to retain only amplitude and frequency variation associated with the first three formants. Results demonstrated remarkable similarity between Mandarin and English sentence intelligibility with flattened F0 sentences. In contrast, the intelligibility of English sentences surpassed that of Mandarin sentences for sine-wave speech. Combined with earlier reports of superior intelligibility of Mandarin sentences with full spectrum vowels, these results highlight significant contributions of Mandarin F0 information, likely related to lexical tone. In contrast, English listeners may rely more on frequency and/or amplitude variation of the formants.
Proposed new target height equations for use in Australian growth clinics

Equations for target height estimation designed for easy use in the Australian growth clinics are presented that are based on the standard deviation score method of Hermanussen and Cole. These equations are superior to the commonly used corrected midparental height method as they account for assortative mating and regression to the mean. Simulations using different mating types were performed to compare different methods of target height estimation. While the equations relate directly to growth charts used in Australia, it is noted that neither account for the secular increase in height observed from generation to generation.
Complete Genome Sequence of a Virulent Isolate of Streptococcus pneumoniae

The 2,160,837–base pair genome sequence of an isolate of Streptococcus pneumoniae, a Gram-positive pathogen that causes pneumonia, bacteremia, meningitis, and otitis media, contains 2236 predicted coding regions; of these, 1440 (64%) were assigned a biological role. Approximately 5% of the genome is composed of insertion sequences that may contribute to genome rearrangements through uptake of foreign DNA. Extracellular enzyme systems for the metabolism of polysaccharides and hexosamines provide a substantial source of carbon and nitrogen for S. pneumoniae and also damage host tissues and facilitate colonization. A motif identified within the signal peptide of proteins is potentially involved in targeting these proteins to the cell surface of low–guanine/cytosine (GC) Gram-positive species. Several surface-exposed proteins that may serve as potential vaccine candidates were identified. Comparative genome hybridization with DNA arrays revealed strain differences inS. pneumoniae that could contribute to differences in virulence and antigenicity.
CLIP at TREC 2015: Microblog and LiveQA

The Computational Linguistics and Information Processing lab at the University of Maryland participated in two TREC tracks this year. The Microblog Real-Time Filtering and the LiveQA tasks both involve information processing in real time. We submitted nine runs in total, achieving relatively good results. This paper describes the architecture and configuration of the systems behind those runs.
High‐resolution in vivo imaging of microglia using a versatile nongenetically encoded marker

Microglial cells are the innate immune cells of the CNS, whose main role is to monitor the integrity of and to react to any disturbances of brain homeostasis. As such, microglial cells are involved in a large number of CNS insults (e.g. acute CNS injury, brain tumors, apoptosis, infection, ischemia, neurodegenerative diseases) and their engagement can be either neurotoxic or neuroprotective [1,2]. Despite their critical role in ameliorating or exacerbating disease progression, little is known about the in vivo functional properties of these cells. So far high resolution in vivo studies of microglial function were conducted in mice with genetically labeled microglia [3,4]. These analyses revealed the surveillance function of microglia in the healthy brain [5,6], and its involvement in the remodeling of synaptic circuits during ischemia and sensory deprivation [7]. However, because of the lack of fractalkine receptor (CX3CR1 mice) or low expression levels of GFP (Iba1-GFP mice), these mouse lines are less suitable for studying the role of microglia under pathological conditions [2,8–10]. Therefore, there is a need for a nongenetically encoded, easy to use microglial marker, enabling highquality staining of microglia (similar to the quality obtained in GFP-expressing mice), but applicable to any mouse strain at any experimental age. Here we utilize a well-known histological marker tomato lectin (from Lycopersicon esculentum [11–13]) for high resolution in vivo imaging of microglia. A brief pressure injection of tomato lectin conjugated with a fluorescent dye DyLight R © 594 (TL) into the mouse cortex resulted in robust staining of microglial cells (Fig. 1A) and blood vessels (arrowhead). The latter, however, were easily distinguished from microglia based on their morphological appearance. A single injection of TL labeled a roughly spherical tissue volume with a diameter of 80–130 μm. Multiple, equally spaced injections from the same pipette were used to increase the dimensions of the labeled area. To test the reliability of the in vivo staining protocol, we applied it to the CX3CR1GFP/+ mice previously described [3]. A total of 100% of all GFP-positive cells within the stained area were also TL positive (n = 103 cells in four mice;
Knowledge acquisition for coreference resolution

This thesis addresses the problem of statistical coreference resolution. Theoretical studies describe coreference as a complex linguistic phenomenon, affected by various different factors. State-of-the-art statistical approaches, on the contrary, rely on rather simple knowledge-poor modeling. This thesis aims at bridging the gap between the theory and the practice. We use insights from linguistic theory to identify relevant linguistic parameters of co-referring descriptions. We consider different types of information, from the most shallow name-matching measures to deeper syntactic, semantic, and discourse knowledge. We empirically assess the validity of the investigated theoretic predictions for the corpus data. Our data-driven evaluation experiments confirm that various linguistic parameters, suggested by theoretical studies, interact with coreference and may therefore provide valuable information for resolution systems. At the same time, our study raises several issues concerning the coverage of theoretic claims. It thus brings feedback to linguistic theory. We use the investigated knowledge sources to build a linguistically informed statistical coreference resolution engine. This framework allows us to combine the flexibility and robustness of a machine learning-based approach with wide variety of data from different levels of linguistic description. Our evaluation experiments with different machine learners show that our linguistically informed model, on the one side, outperforms algorithms, based on a single knowledge source and, on the other side, yields the best result on the MUC-7 data, reported in the literature (F-score of 65.4% with the SVM learning algorithm). The learning curves for our classifiers show no signs of convergence. This suggests that our approach makes a good basis for further experimentation: one can obtain even better results by annotating more material or by using the existing data more intelligently. Our study proves that statistical approaches to the coreference resolution task may and should benefit from linguistic theories: even imperfect knowledge, extracted from raw text data with off-the-shelf error-prone NLP modules, helps achieve significant improvements.
Message authentication by integrity with public corroboration

One of the best-known security paradigms is to use authentication as the basis for accéss control decisions. We turn this around, and instead rely on access control (or more precisely, integrity) as the basis for authentication. We propose a simple, practical means by which data origin assurances for message authentication are based on corroboration, for example by cross-checking with information made available by a known source or at a specified location (e.g., web page). The security relies on the integrity of this corroborating information, and thus on access control on the hosting (or publishing) of this information. We do not explicitly require cryptographic keys for the corroboration step, or for the protection of corroborating information (e.g., it may be publicly posted), and thus our paradigm allows message authentication without direct dependence on private or secret keys. It may be characterized as security by integrity. Message authentication applications we discuss include email source authentication, and data origin authentication for digital signatures. Our work thus has application to problems including spam and phishing (e.g., where email with spoofed source addressing is involved), and addresses theft, extraction, or other illicit determination of digital signature private keys.
Transposition Table Driven Work Scheduling in Distributed Search

This paper introduces a new scheduling algorithm for parallel single-agent search, transposition table driven work scheduling, that places the transposition table at the heart of the parallel work scheduling. The scheme results in less synchronization overhead, less processor idle time, and less redundant search effort. Measurements on a 128-processor parallel machine show that the scheme achieves nearly-optimal performance and scales well. The algorithm performs a factor of 2.0 to 13.7 times better than traditional work-stealing-based schemes.
Nonenzymatic synthesis of oligoadenylates on a polyuridylic acid template.

A number of nucleosides and mononucleotides have been shown to interact with complementary polynucleotides to form ordered helices of well-defined stoichiometry.1-3 These latter are believed to have structures closely resembling those formed by corresponding pairs of polynucleotides. The condensation of preformed hexathymidylate residues to the dodecadeoxynu-cleotide in the presence of polyadenylic acid has already been reported.4 We shall show that this reaction can be extended to the monomers adenosine and adenylic acid when they are incorporated in an ordered helix with poly U.
Memory Technologies for sub-40nm Node

Memory technologies for sub-40 nm will be reviewed, especially for DRAM and NAND Flash. First, technical challenges to be overcome in sub-40 nm node will be addressed, especially patterning and device's aspects. Then, possible solutions and directions will be discussed in detail. It is expected that memory technology scaling will be continued at least down to 30 nm node and beyond by developing novel structures and aggressively adopting new materials.
Optimum Transmission Ranges in a Direct-Sequence Spread-Spectrum Multihop Packet Radio Network

The authors obtain the optimum transmission ranges to maximize throughput for a direct-sequence spread-spectrum multihop packet radio network. In the analysis, they model the network self-interference as a random variable which is equal to the sum of the interference power of all other terminals plus background noise. The model is applicable to other spread-spectrum schemes where the interference of one user appears as a noise source with constant power spectral density to the other users. The network terminals are modeled as a random Poisson field of interference power emitters. The statistics of the interference power at a receiving terminal are obtained and shown to be the stable distributions of a parameter that is dependent on the propagation power loss law. The optimum transmission range in such a network is of the form CK/sup alpha / where C is a constant, K is a function of the processing gain, the background noise power spectral density, and the degree of error-correction coding used, and alpha is related to the power loss law. The results obtained can be used in heuristics to determine optimum routing strategies in multihop networks. >
E-suicide note: A newer trend and its medico-legal implications in India

Rapid advancements of information and communication technology in the form of electronic mails, mobile phones, social networking sites, etc have an increasing impact on people's day to day life. It has been observed that these readily available applications are used frequently to express suicidal intentions. There are many studies on conventional handwritten suicide notes but suicide note in electronic format is an emerging issue and an under-researched phenomena. The authors have termed it as “E-suicide note” and discuss its medico-legal implications in India with examples from their observations.
Detection of Alzheimer Pathology In Vivo Using Both 11C-PIB and 18F-FDDNP PET

11C-Pittsburgh Compound-B (11C-PIB) and 18F-(2-(1-{6-[(2-[18F]fluoroethyl)(methyl)amino]-2-naphthyl}ethylidene) (18F-FDDNP) have been developed as PET tracers for in vivo imaging of pathology in Alzheimer's disease (AD). The purpose of this study was to directly compare these tracers in patients with AD, patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), and healthy controls. Methods: Paired 11C-PIB and 18F-FDDNP scans were acquired in 14 patients with AD, 11 patients with amnestic MCI, and 13 controls. For both tracers, parametric images of binding potential (BPND) were generated. Global cortical BPND was assessed using ANOVA. In addition, regional patterns of BPND were compared between diagnostic groups using ANOVA for repeated measures. Results: Global cortical BPND of 11C-PIB showed higher binding in patients with AD than in controls and patients with MCI. 18F-FDDNP uptake was higher in patients with AD than in controls, but MCI could not be distinguished from AD or from controls. Global BPND values of both tracers were moderately correlated (r = 0.45; P = 0.005). In MCI, BPND of 11C-PIB showed a bimodal distribution, whereas values for 18F-FDDNP were more widespread, with more MCI patients demonstrating increased uptake. Regional 11C-PIB binding showed different patterns across diagnostic groups, as AD patients showed an overall increase in binding, with the lowest binding in the medial temporal lobe. With 18F-FDDNP, patterns were similar across diagnostic groups. For all groups, highest values were observed in the medial temporal lobe. Conclusion: Differences in BPND between patients with AD, patients with MCI, and controls were more pronounced for 11C-PIB. The difference in regional binding, the moderate correlation, and the discrepant findings in MCI suggest that they measure related, but different, characteristics of the disease.
Acute inflammatory response and remodeling of airway epithelium after subspecies B1 human adenovirus infection of the mouse lower respiratory tract

Despite the well‐recognized role of adenoviruses of species B in the etiology of severe respiratory disease, the lack of an experimental in vivo model system has limited the understanding of the molecular pathogenesis of species B adenovirus‐induced pneumonia. Intratracheal instillation of 5 × 108 plaque‐forming units (pfu) of adenoviruses 3p and 7h resulted in a robust inflammatory response in the lungs of infected mice. A marked infiltration of neutrophils into the lung air spaces was observed at 1 and 2 days postinfection (dpi), with a concomitant increase in the levels of neutrophil chemokines MIP‐2 and KC. The overall histological severity scores were significantly higher for Ad3p‐infected mice at 2 dpi, but similar between the two viruses at other time points. Remodeling of the airway epithelia and mucous cell metaplasia were noted in the proximal airways of infected mice, indicating marked epithelial differentiation and/or injury. The proinflammatory cytokines interleukin‐β (IL‐1β), tumor necrosis factor‐α (TNF‐α), interferon‐γ (IFN‐γ• •), and interleukin‐12 (IL‐12) were induced by viral infection. Expression of the early viral immunomodulatory genes E3‐15.3K and E3gp19K mRNA was readily detectable in the lungs of infected mice by reverse transcription‐polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR) at 1 and 2 dpi, coinciding with the peak levels of TNF‐α. While the detection of gp19K mRNA declined thereafter, 15.3K mRNA was detectable up to 6 dpi. Our results indicate that human Ad3 and Ad7 cause marked pulmonary pathology, inducing similar host responses in the respiratory tract, thus validating the use of the mouse model for the study of early virus‐host interactions during lung infection by adenoviruses of subspecies B1. J. Med. Virol. 71:233–244, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Skin detection: A random forest approach

Skin detection is used in applications ranging from face detection, tracking body parts and hand gesture analysis, to retrieval and blocking objectionable content. For robust skin segmentation and detection, we investigate color classification based on random forest. A random forest is a statistical framework with a very high generalization accuracy and quick training times. The random forest approach is used with the IHLS color space for raw pixel based skin detection. We evaluate random forest based skin detection and compare it to Bayesian network, Multilayer Perceptron, SVM, AdaBoost, Naive Bayes and RBF network. Results on a database of 8991 images with manually annotated pixel-level ground truth show that with the IHLS color space, the random forest approach outperforms other approaches. We also show the effect of increasing the number of trees grown for random forest. With fewer trees we get faster training times and with 10 trees we get the highest F-score.
Latency Critical IoT Applications in 5G: Perspective on the Design of Radio Interface and Network Architecture

Next generation mobile networks not only envision enhancing the traditional MBB use case but also aim to meet the requirements of new use cases, such as the IoT. This article focuses on latency critical IoT applications and analyzes their requirements. We discuss the design challenges and propose solutions for the radio interface and network architecture to fulfill these requirements, which mainly benefit from flexibility and service-centric approaches. The article also discusses new business opportunities through IoT connectivity enabled by future networks.
Producing and Delivering a MOOC on Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture for Concurrent and Networked Software

A massive open online course (MOOC) is a web-based class environment aimed at large-scale global participation and open access via the Internet. MOOCs are also a disruptive trend changing how education is delivered and funded throughout the world. In the spring of 2013, we developed and taught Vanderbilt’s first MOOC, entitled “Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture for Concurrent and Networked Software” (known as the POSA MOOC). This ten-week MOOC was an amalgamation of several courses on software design and programming taken by ∼600 undergraduate and graduate students at Vanderbilt during the past decade. Enrollment in our POSA MOOC was more than 50 times (31,000+) that number, consisting of students with a wide range of background, interests, and expertise from scores of countries around the world. This paper describes our experiences producing and delivering the POSA MOOC. Where possible, we ground our observations in data from statistics collected via Coursera, which was the delivery platform we used for the POSA MOOC. We also discuss the broader implications of MOOCs on life-long learning and the role they play in improving the quality and productivity of software professionals in academia and industry.