Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Numerical Wing/Store Interaction Analysis of a Parametric F16 Wing

A new numerical methodology to examine fluid-structure interaction of a wing/pylon/store system has been developed. The aeroelastic equation of motion of the complete system is solved iteratively in the time domain using a two-entity numerical code comprised of ABAQUS/Standard and the Unsteady-Vortex-Lattice Method. Both codes communicate through an iterative handshake procedure during which displacements and air loads are updated. For each increment in time the force/displacement equilibrium is found in this manner. The wing, pylon, and store data considered in this analysis are based on an F16 configuration that was identified to induce flutter in flight at subsonic speeds. The wing structure is modeled as an elastic plate and pylon and store are rigid bodies. The store body is connected to the pylon through an elastic joint exercising pitch and yaw degrees of freedom. Vortex-Lattice theory featuring closed ring-vortices and continuous vortex shedding to form the wakes is employed to model the aerodynamics of wing, store, and pylon. The methodology was validated against published data demonstrating excellent agreement with documented key phenomena of fluid-structure iteration. The model correctly predicts the effects of the pylon induced lateral flow disruption as well as wing-tip-vortex effects. It can identify the presence of aerodynamic interference between the store, pylon, and wing wakes and examine its significance with respect to the pressure and lift forces on the participating bodies. An elementary flutter study was undertaken to examine the dynamic characteristics of a stiff production pylon at near-critical airspeeds versus those of a soft-in-pitch pylon. The simulation reproduced the stabilizing effect of the stiffness reduction in the pitch motion. This idea is based on the concept of the decoupler pylon, introduced by Reed and Foughner in 1978 and flight tested in the early 1980's. Dedication To my wife, Melissa. iii Acknowledgments Upon graduating with a Master of Science from the Teschnische Universität Darmstadt in Germany, I came to Virginia Tech in December of 1993 to work on a three month research project under Dr. Daniel J. Inman. It was my first trip to the United States — back then I could not have possibly imagined the turn my life was about to take. Almost six years have gone by since then, during which I have experienced many of the profoundest moments of my life. Now, as this exciting chapter of my life is coming to closure and a new one is about to begin, I would …
Optimal spatial filtering for the steady state visual evoked potential: BCI application

Focusing of attention on a repetitive visual stimulation (RVS) at a constant frequency, elicits the so called steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP). This effect can be advantageously utilized in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). SSVEP based BCIs can offer higher bitrates and require shorter training time as compared to other BCI modalities. Detection of the SSVEP from the EEG can be facilitated through spatial filtering (linear combination of the signals recorded at several electrodes). Literature offers several options to perform this. In this paper we propose a taxonomy to categorize these methods and we extensively evaluate them using 22 stimulation frequencies. We suggest improvements to existing methods to increase the SSVEP detection performance. We also consider practical aspects in the discussion of results.
A Histogram-Based Similarity Measure for Quantitative Magnetic Resonance Imaging: Application in Acute Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

Objectives The most commonly used summary metric in neuroimaging is the mean value, but this pays little attention to the shape of the data distribution and can therefore be insensitive to subtle changes that alter the data distribution. Methods We propose a distributional-based metric called the normalized histogram similarity measure (HSM) for characterization of quantitative images. We applied HSM to quantitative magnetic resonance imaging T1 relaxation data of 44 patients with mild traumatic brain injury and compared with data of 43 age-matched controls. Results Significant differences were found between the patients and the controls in 8 gray matter regions using the HSM whereas in only 1 gray matter region based on the mean values. Conclusions Our results show that HSM is more sensitive than the standard mean values in detecting brain tissue changes. Future studies on brain tissue properties using quantitative magnetic resonance imaging should consider the use of HSM to properly capture any tissue changes.
Beamlet Migration Using Gabor-Daubechies Frame Propagator

P074 BEAMLET MIGRATION USING GABOR-DAUBECHIES FRAME PROPAGATOR Abstract 1 Beamlet migration using Gabor-Daubechies frame propagator with local perturbation theory is developed and tested. The method is formulated with a local background velocity and local perturbations for each window of the wave field decomposition using Gabor-Daubechies frame. The propagators and phase-correction operators are obtained by one-way operator decomposition and screen approximation. The numerical tests on point-spreading responses and the SEG-EAGE salt model poststack data demonstrate the great potential of this approach applied to seismic migration. Keywords: seismic migration wavelet transform beamlets Gabor-Daubechies frame. Introduction Steinberg (1993) Steinberg and Birman (1995) derived
System level design paradigms: Platform-based design and communication synthesis

Embedded system level design must be based on paradigms that make formal foundations and unification a cornerstone of their construction. Platform-Based designs and communication synthesis are important components of the paradigm shift we advocate.Communication synthesis is a fundamental productivity tool in a design methodology where reuse is enforced. Communication design in a reuse methodology starts with a set of functional requirements and constraints on the interaction among components and then proceeds to build protocols, topology, and physical implementations that satisfy requirements and constraints while optimizing appropriate measures of efficiency of the implementation. Maximum efficiency can be reached when the communication specifications are entered at high levels of abstraction and the design process optimizes the implementation from this specification. Unfortunately, this process is very difficult if it is not cast in a rigorous framework. Platform-Based design helps define a successive refinement process where each step can be carried out automatically and optimized appropriately. We present two cases, an on-chip and a wireless sensor network design, where the resulting methodology gave encouraging results.
Polysome Stability in Relaxed and Stringent Strains of Escherichia coli During Amino Acid Starvation

The influence of amino acid starvation on polysome content was examined in relaxed and stringent strains of Escherichia coli which were isogenic for the RC locus. No difference was observed between the polysome profiles obtained from two different sets of stringent and relaxed strains starved for the same amino acid. In both relaxed and stringent strains, starvation for amino acids other than methionine resulted in only a slight breakdown of polysomes with a concomitant increase of 70S ribosomes. However, starvation for methionine in both RC stringent and relaxed strains of E. coli resulted in a more extensive degradation of polysomes and accumulation of 70S ribosomes. The 70S ribosomes obtained as a result of methionine starvation were more sensitive to degradation to 50 and 30S subunits in 10−3m Mg2+ than 70S monomers obtained either by degradation of polysomes with ribonuclease or by starvation of cells for amino acids other than methionine. The 70S ribosomes from methionine starvation were similar (sensitivity to 10−3m Mg2+) to 70S ribosomes obtained from cells in which initiation of protein synthesis had been prevented by trimethoprim, an inhibitor of formylation. Since N-formyl-methionyl-transfer ribonucleic acid is required for initiation, the 70S ribosomes obtained in both methionine-starved and trimethoprim-treated cells must result from association of 50 and 30S subunits for reasons other than reinitiation. These results suggest that the level of ribonucleic acid synthesis does not influence the distribution of ribosomes in the polysome profile and vice versa.
Dynamics of Depolarization and Hyperpolarization in the Frontal Cortex and Saccade Goal

The frontal eye field and neighboring area 8Ar of the primate cortex are involved in programming and execution of saccades. Electrical microstimulation in these regions elicits short-latency contralateral saccades. To determine how spatiotemporal dynamics of microstimulation-evoked activity are converted into saccade plans, we used a combination of real-time optical imaging and microstimulation in behaving monkeys. Short stimulation trains evoked a rapid and widespread wave of depolarization followed by unexpected large and prolonged hyperpolarization. During this hyperpolarization saccades are almost exclusively ipsilateral, suggesting an important role for hyperpolarization in determining saccade goal.
MPI-blastn and NCBI-TaxCollector: Improving metagenomic analysis with high performance classification and wide taxonomic attachment

Metagenomic sequencing technologies are advancing rapidly and the size of output data from high-throughput genetic sequencing has increased substantially over the years. This brings us to a scenario where advanced computational optimizations are requested to perform a metagenomic analysis. In this paper, we describe a new parallel implementation of nucleotide BLAST (MPI-blastn) and a new tool for taxonomic attachment of Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) results that supports the NCBI taxonomy (NCBI-TaxCollector). MPI-blastn obtained a high performance when compared to the mpiBLAST and ScalaBLAST. In our best case, MPI-blastn was able to run 408 times faster in 384 cores. Our evaluations demonstrated that NCBI-TaxCollector is able to perform taxonomic attachments 125 times faster and needs 120 times less RAM than the previous TaxCollector. Through our optimizations, a multiple sequence search that currently takes 37 hours can be performed in less than 6 min and a post processing with NCBI taxonomic data attachment, which takes 48 hours, now is able to run in 23 min.
Competitive Algorithms for Online Pricing

Given a seller with m amount of items, a sequence of users {u1, u2, . } come one by one, the seller must set the unit price and assign some amount of items to each user on his/her arrival. Items can be sold fractionally. Each ui has his/her value function vi(ċ) such that vi(x) is the highest unit price ui is willing to pay for x items. The objective is to maximize the revenue by setting the price and amount of items for each user. In this paper, we have the following contributions: if the highest value h among all vi(x) is known in advance, we first show the lower bound of the competitive ratio is O(log h), then give an online algorithm with competitive ratio O(log h); if h is not known in advance, we give an online algorithm with competitive ratio O(h3 log -1/2 h).
Improving Data Cleansing Accuracy - A Model-based Approach

Research on data quality is growing in importance in both industrial and academic communities, as it aims at deriving knowledge (and then value) from data. Information Systems generate a lot of data useful for studying the dynamics of subjects' behaviours or phenomena over time, making the quality of data a crucial aspect for guaranteeing the believability of the overall knowledge discovery process. In such a scenario, data cleansing techniques, i.e., automatic methods to cleanse a dirty dataset, are paramount. However, when multiple cleansing alternatives are available a policy is required for choosing between them. The policy design task still relies on the experience of domain-experts, and this makes the automatic identification of accurate policies a significant issue. This paper extends the Universal Cleaning Process enabling the automatic generation of an accurate cleansing policy derived from the dataset to be analysed rather than the users' preferences. The proposed approach has been implemented and tested on an on-line benchmark dataset, a real-world instance of the Labour Market Domain. Our preliminary results show that our approach would represent a contribution towards the generation of data-driven policy, reducing significantly the domain-experts intervention for policy specification. Finally, the generated results have been made publicly available for downloading.
Set Reconciliation via Counting Bloom Filters

In this paper, we study the set reconciliation problem, in which each member of a node pair has a set of objects and seeks to deliver its unique objects to the other member. How could each node compute the set difference, however, is challenging in the set reconciliation problem. To address such an issue, we propose a lightweight but efficient method that only requires the pair of nodes to represent objects using a counting Bloom filter (CBF) of size $(O(d))$ and exchange with each other, where $(d)$ denotes the total size of the set differences. A receiving node then subtracts the received CBF from its local one via minus operation proposed in this paper. The resultant CBF can approximately represent the union of the set differences and thus the set difference to each node can be identified after querying the resultant CBF. In this paper, we propose a novel estimator through which each node can accurately estimate not only the value of $(d)$ but also the size of the set difference to each node. Such an estimation result can be used to optimize the parameter setting of the CBF to achieve less false positives and false negatives. Comprehensive analysis and evaluation demonstrates that our method is more efficient than prior BF-based methods in terms of achieving the same accuracy with less communication cost. Moreover, our reconciliating method needs no prior context logs and it is very useful in networking and distributed applications.
Sensitivity testing of ciprofloxacin for Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

UK clinical laboratories overestimate ciprofloxacin resistance amongst Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates, relative to the MIC breakpoint of 1 mg/L. Most tests leading to this overestimation use 1 microg discs and are by Stokes' method with the breakpoint taken as the zone radius for P. aeruginosa NCTC 10662 minus 3 mm. Aiming to reduce this error rate, we examined alternative disc breakpoints. Tests were performed for 100 P. aeruginosa isolates on three media, with breakpoints selected (i) as the zone for P. aeruginosa NCTC 10662 minus 7 mm, as recommended for ciprofloxacin by the BSAC; (ii) with reference to MIC/zone correlation lines; (iii) from natural divisions in zone distribution histograms; and (iv) so as to minimize categorization errors. Breakpoints from regression lines, and those optimized to the susceptibility distribution, reduced the proportion of susceptible organisms misreported as resistant, but the improvement was not significant (P > 0.05, chi2 test). The breakpoint of the zone radius for P. aeruginosa NCTC 10662 minus 7 mm significantly reduced (P < 0.05) the number of susceptible organisms reported as resistant, but led to 50-75% of those with low level resistance (MIC 2-4 mg/L) and 4-10% of those with high-level resistance (MIC > 4 mg/L) being classed as susceptible. Irrespective of the medium and the basis of choosing breakpoints, 5 microg ciprofloxacin discs gave a lower rate of susceptible organisms being reported as resistant than did 1 microg discs; however, the improvement was not significant (P > 0.05, chi2 test) and the 5 microg discs had the disadvantages of forming very large zones for susceptible isolates and giving some--albeit small--zones for highly resistant organisms. In conclusion, the over-reporting of resistance could be reduced by use of zone breakpoints optimized to the MIC distribution and by the use of 5 microg discs, but the case for these changes is not overwhelming; taking the breakpoint as the zone for NCTC 10662 minus 7 mm led to unacceptable numbers of resistant organisms being reported as susceptible. More fundamentally, ciprofloxacin zones and MICs are continuously distributed for P. aeruginosa isolates, so susceptibility tests cannot divide the species into discrete populations. In these circumstances, it is optimistic to expect disc and MIC categorizations to agree perfectly.
A universal BMV-based RNA recombination system—how to search for general rules in RNA recombination

At present, there is no doubt that RNA recombination is one of the major factors responsible for the generation of new RNA viruses and retroviruses. Numerous experimental systems have been created to investigate this complex phenomenon. Consequently, specific RNA structural motifs mediating recombination have been identified in several viruses. Unfortunately, up till now a unified model of genetic RNA recombination has not been formulated, mainly due to difficulties with the direct comparison of data obtained for different RNA-based viruses. To solve this problem, we have attempted to construct a universal system in which the recombination activity of various RNA sequences could be tested. To this end, we have used brome mosaic virus, a model (+)RNA virus of plants, for which the structural requirements of RNA recombination are well defined. The effectiveness of the new homomolecular system has been proven in an experiment involving two RNA sequences derived from the hepatitis C virus genome. In addition, comparison of the data obtained with the homomolecular system with those generated earlier using the heteromolecular one has provided new evidence that the mechanisms of homologous and non-homologous recombination are different and depend on the virus' mode of replication.
Cake Cutting: Envy and Truth

We study envy-free cake cutting with strategic agents, where each agent may manipulate his pri-vate information in order to receive a better allocation. We focus on piecewise constant utility functions and consider two scenarios: the general setting without any restriction on the allocations and the restricted setting where each agent has to receive a connected piece. We show that no deterministic truthful envy-free mechanism exists in the connected piece scenario, and the same impossibility result for the general setting with some additional mild assumptions on the allocations. Finally, we study a large market model where the economy is replicated and demonstrate that truth-telling converges to a Nash equilibrium.
Model-Based Outdoor Performance Capture

We propose a new model-based method to accurately reconstruct human performances captured outdoors in a multi-camera setup. Starting from a template of the actor model, we introduce a new unified implicit representation for both, articulated skeleton tracking and non-rigid surface shape refinement. Our method fits the template to unsegmented video frames in two stages - first, the coarse skeletal pose is estimated, and subsequently non-rigid surface shape and body pose are jointly refined. Particularly for surface shape refinement we propose a new combination of 3D Gaussians designed to align the projected model with likely silhouette contours without explicit segmentation or edge detection. We obtain reconstructions of much higher quality in outdoor settings than existing methods, and show that we are on par with state-of-the-art methods on indoor scenes for which they were designed.
Semantic Service Discovery in MAS Using Social Networks

Service-Oriented Multi-Agent Systems are dynamic systems populated by heterogeneous agents. These agents model their functionality as services in order to allow heterogeneous agents or other entities to interact in a standardized way. Furthermore, due to the large-scale and the adaptive needs of the system, the traditional directory facilitators or middle-agents are not suitable for the management of the agents services. In this paper we present a distributed system where there is no a ce. The proposal provides a fully decentralized structure and allows agents to locate services using only local information. The system is enhanced using semantic information in the generation of the system structure and also in the search process.
The Cc Chemokine Thymus-Derived Chemotactic Agent 4 (Tca-4, Secondary Lymphoid Tissue Chemokine, 6ckine, Exodus-2) Triggers Lymphocyte Function–Associated Antigen 1–Mediated Arrest of Rolling T Lymphocytes in Peripheral Lymph Node High Endothelial Venules

T cell homing to peripheral lymph nodes (PLNs) is defined by a multistep sequence of interactions between lymphocytes and endothelial cells in high endothelial venules (HEVs). After initial tethering and rolling via L-selectin, firm adhesion of T cells requires rapid upregulation of lymphocyte function–associated antigen 1 (LFA-1) adhesiveness by a previously unknown pathway that activates a Gαi-linked receptor. Here, we used intravital microscopy of murine PLNs to study the role of thymus-derived chemotactic agent (TCA)-4 (secondary lymphoid tissue chemokine, 6Ckine, Exodus-2) in homing of adoptively transferred T cells from T-GFP mice, a transgenic strain that expresses green fluorescent protein (GFP) selectively in naive T lymphocytes (TGFP cells). TCA-4 was constitutively presented on the luminal surface of HEVs, where it was required for LFA-1 activation on rolling TGFP cells. Desensitization of the TCA-4 receptor, CC chemokine receptor 7 (CCR7), blocked TGFP cell adherence in wild-type HEVs, whereas desensitization to stromal cell–derived factor (SDF)-1α (the ligand for CXC chemokine receptor 4 [CXCR4]) did not affect TGFP cell behavior. TCA-4 protein was not detected on the luminal surface of PLN HEVs in plt/plt mice, which have a congenital defect in T cell homing to PLNs. Accordingly, TGFP cells rolled but did not arrest in plt/plt HEVs. When TCA-4 was injected intracutaneously into plt/plt mice, the chemokine entered afferent lymph vessels and accumulated in draining PLNs. 2 h after intracutaneous injection, luminal presentation of TCA-4 was detectable in a subset of HEVs, and LFA-1–mediated TGFP cell adhesion was restored in these vessels. We conclude that TCA-4 is both required and sufficient for LFA-1 activation on rolling T cells in PLN HEVs. This study also highlights a hitherto undocumented role for chemokines contained in afferent lymph, which may modulate leukocyte recruitment in draining PLNs.
Building a bilingual dictionary from movie subtitles based on inter-lingual triggers

This paper focuses on two aspects of Machine Translation: parallel corpora and translation model. First, we present a method to automatically build parallel corpora from subtitle files. We use subtitle files gathered from the Internet. This leads to useful data for Subtitling Machine Translation. Our method is based on Dynamic Time Warping. We evaluated this alignment method by comparing it with a sample aligned by hand and we obtained a precision of alignment equal to $0.92$. Second, we use the notion of inter-lingual triggers in order to build from the subtitle parallel corpora multilingual dictionaries and translation tables for machine translation. Inter-lingual triggers allow to detect couple of source and target words from parallel corpora. The Mutual Information measure used to determine inter-lingual triggers allows to hypothesize that a word in the source language is a translation of another word in the target language. We evaluate the obtained dictionary by comparing it to two existing dictionaries. Then, we integrated the obtained translation tables into an entire translation decoding process supplied by Pharaoh. We compared the translation performance using our translation tables with the performance obtained by the Giza++ tool. The results showed that the system tuned for our tables improves the Bleu value by 2.2% compared to the ones obtained by Giza++.