Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of noise-reduction on neural function approximation

Noise disturbance in training data prevents a good approxi- mation of a function by neural networks. To achieve better approximation results we combine neural networks with noise reduction algorithms. We compare dierent methods to distinguish between samples with high noise level (outliers) in a dataset and samples with low noise level. Drawbacks of common outlier detection approaches are analysed and a new approach is defined which increases the quality of network function approximation. We demonstrate the eects of noise reduction on artificial datasets and on real data from the process control domain. aetarget / aenoise 1.0 / 0 1.0 / 0.05 1.0 / 0.2 1.0 / 0.5 1.0 /1.0 MSEQ50 0.0002 0.0005 0.0039 0.0198 0.0630
An architecture for incremental information fusion of cross-modal representations

We present an architecture for natural language processing that parses an input sentence incrementally and merges information about its structure with a representation of visual input, thereby changing the results of parsing. At each step of incremental processing, the elements in the context representation are judged whether they match the content of the sentence fragment up to that step. The information contained in the best matching subset then influences the result of parsing the subsentence. As processing progresses and the sentence is extended by adding new words, new information is searched in the context to concur with the expanded language input. This incremental approach to information fusion is highly adaptable with regard to the integration of dynamic knowledge extracted from a constantly changing environment.
Structural Insights into the Mechanism of the Allosteric Transitions of Mycobacterium tuberculosis cAMP Receptor Protein*

The cAMP receptor protein (CRP) from Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a cAMP-responsive global transcriptional regulator, responsible for the regulation of a multitude of diverse proteins. We have determined the crystal structures of the CRP·cAMP and CRP·N6-cAMP derivative-bound forms of the enzyme to 2.2- and 2.3 Å-resolution, respectively, to investigate cAMP-mediated conformational and structural changes. The allosteric switch from the open, inactive conformation to the closed, active conformation begins with a number of changes in the ligand-binding cavity upon cAMP binding. These subtle structural changes and numerous non-bonding interactions between cAMP, the N-domain residues, and the C-domain helices demonstrate that the N-domain hairpin loop acts as a structural mediator of the allosteric switch. Based on the CRP·N6-cAMP crystal structure, binding of N6-cAMP with a bulkier methylphenylethyl extension from the N6 atom stabilizes the cAMP-binding domain, N-domain hairpin, and C-terminal domain in a similar manner as that of the CRP·cAMP structure, maintaining structural integrity within the subunits. However, the bulkier N6 extension of N6-cAMP (in R conformation) is accommodated only in subunit A with minor changes, whereas in subunit B, the N6 extension is in the S conformation hindering the hinge region of the central helix. As a result, the entire N-domain and the C-domain of subunit B integrated by the cAMP portion of this ligand, together tilt away (∼7° tilt) from central helix C, positioning the helix-turn-helix motif in an unfavorable position for the DNA substrate, asymmetrically. Together, these crystal structures demonstrate the mechanism of action of the cAMP molecule and its role in integrating the active CRP structure.
Focused attention, open monitoring and loving kindness meditation: effects on attention, conflict monitoring, and creativity – A review

Meditation is becoming increasingly popular as a topic for scientific research and theories on meditation are becoming ever more specific. We distinguish between what is called focused Attention meditation, open Monitoring meditation, and loving kindness (or compassion) meditation. Research suggests that these meditations have differential, dissociable effects on a wide range of cognitive (control) processes, such as attentional selection, conflict monitoring, divergent, and convergent thinking. Although research on exactly how the various meditations operate on these processes is still missing, different kinds of meditations are associated with different neural structures and different patterns of electroencephalographic activity. In this review we discuss recent findings on meditation and suggest how the different meditations may affect cognitive processes, and we give suggestions for directions of future research.
An Overview of the Extended Static Checking System

The Extended Static Checking system (henceforth ESC) is a checker aimed at statically detecting simple errors in programs; e.g., NIL dereferences, out-of-bounds array indices, or simple deadlocks or race conditions in concurrent programs. ESC attempts to achieve these fairly modest goals using a quite general program verification framework. The user annotates the program being checked with specifications; a verification condition generator transforms the program and specification into a logical formula whose validity ensures the absence of the errors being considered. This formula is passed to an automatic theorem prover (called Simplify) developed expressly for ESC. If the prover is unable to prove that the errors do not occur, it returns (roughly) an assignment of values to program variables that falsifies the formula. This information can be presented to the programmer, giving information about the error somewhat akin to what a debugger provides when examining a core file left by a runtime occurrence of the error.
An Engineering Perspective of External Cardiac Loop Recorder: A Systematic Review

External cardiac loop recorder (ELR) is a kind of ECG monitoring system that records cardiac activities of a subject continuously for a long time. When the heart palpitations are not the frequent and nonspecific character, it is difficult to diagnose the disease. In such a case, ELR is used for long-term monitoring of heart signal of the patient. But the cost of ELR is very high. Therefore, it is not prominently available in developing countries like India. Since the design of ELR includes the ECG electrodes, instrumentation amplifier, analog to digital converter, and signal processing unit, a comparative review of each part of the ELR is presented in this paper in order to design a cost effective, low power, and compact kind of ELR. This review will also give different choices available for selecting and designing each part of the ELR system. Finally, the review will suggest the better choice for designing a cost effective external cardiac loop recorder that helps to make it available even for rural people in India.
A Study of Antecedents of Customer Repurchase Behaviors in Chain Store Supermarkets

This study explores the relationship among brand equity, brand relationship and repurchase behaviors. The study uses brand equity as an independent variable to investigate the relationship between brand relationships and repurchase behaviors, taking the consumers of the top three chain store supermarkets in Taiwan as the objects of empirical analysis. The major findings of this study include: consumer’s social and economic backgrounds will influence their repurchase intentions on chain store supermarkets; the higher the brand image of a chain store supermarket is, the higher the consumer’s repurchase intention will be; the higher the consumer perceived quality and perceived value of chain store supermarket are, the higher the repurchase intention will be. Finally, this study proposes managerial implications and discussions for the purpose of being taken as references by operators in the industry for their future operation directions and strategies.
Remote sensing approach to estimating net primary productivity of temperate deciduous forest in northeast China

The application of remote sensing in the study of terrestrial ecosystem opens up an effective way for simulating terrestrial productivity. In this paper, a RUE model is established by parameterized plant photosynthesis and respiration. Photosynthetically active radiation absorbed by all surface materials (APARSFC), obtained by correcting photosynthetically active radiation observed by MODIS for the effects of surface albedo, atmospheric total transmittance, and periodical change of solar incident angle and solar hour angle during daytime, together with the ratio of PAR absorbed by the canopy to APARSFC (RPAR) and radiation use efficiency (RUE) based on a relationship between RUE and maximum rate of leaf photosynthesis (Amax) governed by its dependence on seasonal dynamics of foliage nitrogen content, are used to estimate gross photosynthesis. Plant respiration is divided into growing respiration as constant fraction of GPP, and maintenance respiration from leaf, stem, and root. The model is adapted to calculate the net primary productivity (NPP) of temperate deciduous forest in northeast China, supported by auxiliary data composed of daily MODIS data, atmosphere profile, ice-snow cover and landform of the study area in June 2003. In June 2003, daily mean APARSFC of temperate deciduous forest in the study area reaches 8.1 MJ m-2day-1, RUE varies from 0.45 to 1.09 gC MJ-1, and monthly NPP is 0.53 MgC ha-1, 0.56 MgC ha-1 for temperate deciduous coniferous forest, 0.51 MgC ha-1 for temperate deciduous broadleaved forest. Compared with the process-based model, both of them are in agreement with simulated NPP
Observations of Shelf Exchange and High‐Frequency Variability in an Alaskan Fjord

High-frequency observations collected over 3 years are used to describe upper-ocean variability in Behm Canal, a nonglacial fjord in Southeast Alaska. The fjord is sheltered by surrounding topography and connected to the outer continental shelf by a 400-m-deep strait. Summer conditions are characterized by strong near-surface stratification, a sea breeze wind regime, and tidally dominated flows. In nonsummer months, baroclinic subinertial flows exceeding 0.5 m/s dominate the velocity record. The flow events represent a wind-driven response to low-pressure systems that impact the coast as they propagate across the Gulf of Alaska. The observations suggest that the storm systems generate downwelling events that propagate into the fjord with a mode-one-like vertical structure in the upper 60 m. Following the initial up-fjord current pulse lasting approximately a day, a down-fjord flow occurs lasting several days, the duration of the downwelling anomaly. These subinertial downwelling events likely are the dominant mechanism of shelf-fjord exchange, with estimated fjord-flushing times of 50 days. The downwelling events are accompanied by enhanced near-inertial shear, which exhibits downward energy propagation. Evidence for enhanced energy near the maximum buoyancy frequency in the thermocline suggests high-frequency internal wave trapping, with the primary energy source in the semidiurnal band associated with tidal and wind forcing. The observations highlight the importance of shelf-fjord coupling through meteorological forcing and the existence of internal wave energy at a range of frequencies, which have implications for mixing and transport within the fjord.
The reaction of cytochrome omicron in Escherichia coli with oxygen. Low-temperature kinetic and spectral studies.

1. The reactions of cytochrome omicron in intact cells of aerobically grown Escherichia coli with O2 and CO have been studied at low temperature. 2. Flash photolysis of CO-liganded cells in the presence of O2 and at temperatures between -79 and -102 degrees C results in the oxidation of kinetically heterogeneous beta-type cytochromes (including cytochrome omicron), but not of cytochrome d. 3. The reaction of reduced cytochrome omicron with O2 involves O2 binding to give intermediate(s) with spectral characteristics similar to that of the reduced oxidase-CO complex. Observation in the alpha-region suggests that unexplained ligand dissociation accompanies the initial O2 binding. 4. At temperatures below -98 degrees C, an 'end point' in the reaction is reached; further reaction and oxidation of cytochrome omicron occurs on raising the temperature. 5. There is a linear relationship between the rate of formation of the oxygen compound and the O2 concentration up to 0.5 mM. The second-order constant for its formation (k+1) is 0.91 M-1.S-1 at -101 degrees C. The reaction is not readily reversible, the value of k-1 being 1.4 X 10(-5) S-1 and the kd 1.5 X 10(-5) M. 6. The energy of activation for this reaction at low temperatures is 29.9kJ (7.1 kcal)/mol. 7. The reaction with O2 is distinguished from that with CO by the markedly lower velocity and high photolytic reversibility of the latter. 8. Comparisons are drawn between the intermediate(s) in the O2 reaction of cytochrome omicron in E. coli and those identified in other bacteria and in the reaction of cytochrome aa3 with O2.
Joint decoding of RAID-ECC solutions for SSDs

There are two independent layers of error correction mechanisms, i.e., error-correction codes (ECC) and redundant array of independent disks (RAID), to protect NAND-based Solid State Drives (SSDs) from serious noise/disturb. However, bit error rates of modern SSDs have increased to the point that more powerful ECCs or Maximal Distance Separate codes are only regarded as sufficient solutions. The theme of this work is to show that instead of designing new error correction mechanisms, it is possible to improve the NAND-based SSD reliability by designing a joint decoder exploring the inherent information between ECCs and RAIDs. We first show that it is possible to recover two-page failures using the inherent information with RAID 4/5; we then show that these ideas can be extended to RAID 6; finally, we conduct information theoretic study to explore how much information can be reliably stored with the help of RAID system in NAND-based SSD.
TMC647055, a Potent Nonnucleoside Hepatitis C Virus NS5B Polymerase Inhibitor with Cross-Genotypic Coverage

ABSTRACT Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a major global health burden and is associated with an increased risk of liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. There remains an unmet medical need for efficacious and safe direct antivirals with complementary modes of action for combination in treatment regimens to deliver a high cure rate with a short duration of treatment for HCV patients. Here we report the in vitro inhibitory activity, mode of action, binding kinetics, and resistance profile of TMC647055, a novel and potent nonnucleoside inhibitor of the HCV NS5B RNA-dependent RNA polymerase. In vitro combination studies with an HCV NS3/4A protease inhibitor demonstrated potent suppression of HCV RNA replication, confirming the potential for combination of these two classes in the treatment of chronic HCV infection. TMC647055 is a potent nonnucleoside NS5B polymerase inhibitor of HCV replication with a promising in vitro biochemical, kinetic, and virological profile that is currently undergoing clinical evaluation.
Cooperative Coding Schemes: Design and Performance Evaluation

Cooperation has been recently introduced to mitigate the impairments imposed by fading on a communication channel. A cooperative transmission, in which the destination may overhear all transmission attempts, benefits from incremental redundancy techniques, achieving a higher throughput and reducing the packet delay and the outage probability. This paper presents a theoretical framework to assess the limiting performance of efficient coding techniques in Decode-and-Forward cooperative scenarios. In this paper it is shown that suitable designed codes, such as punctured turbo codes, approach the limiting performance in all the studied scenarios. The paper also addresses the design of punctured turbo code schemes capable of performing close to the presented limiting bound. A novel Genetic Algorithm (GA) is introduced for designing incremental puncturing schemes suited to cooperative transmissions. The algorithm uses a recently proposed tri-dimensional (3D) EXtrinsic Information Transfer (EXIT) chart technique to model the decoding behavior of parallel concatenations of non-systematic periodically punctured convolutional codes. It is shown that the design algorithm allows contriving capacity approaching codes for the source and the relay. The paper further shows that the GA aided designed codes closely approach the theoretical results, outperforming previously proposed systematic incremental and complementary schemes.
Quantifying Vulnerability to Extreme Heat in Time Series Analyses: A Novel Approach Applied to Neighborhood Social Disparities under Climate Change

Objectives: We propose a novel approach to examine vulnerability in the relationship between heat and years of life lost and apply to neighborhood social disparities in Montreal and Paris. Methods: We used historical data from the summers of 1990 through 2007 for Montreal and from 2004 through 2009 for Paris to estimate daily years of life lost social disparities (DYLLD), summarizing social inequalities across groups. We used Generalized Linear Models to separately estimate relative risks (RR) for DYLLD in association with daily mean temperatures in both cities. We used 30 climate scenarios of daily mean temperature to estimate future temperature distributions (2021–2050). We performed random effect meta-analyses to assess the impact of climate change by climate scenario for each city and compared the impact of climate change for the two cities using a meta-regression analysis. Results: We show that an increase in ambient temperature leads to an increase in social disparities in daily years of life lost. The impact of climate change on DYLLD attributable to temperature was of 2.06 (95% CI: 1.90, 2.25) in Montreal and 1.77 (95% CI: 1.61, 1.94) in Paris. The city explained a difference of 0.31 (95% CI: 0.14, 0.49) on the impact of climate change. Conclusion: We propose a new analytical approach for estimating vulnerability in the relationship between heat and health. Our results suggest that in Paris and Montreal, health disparities related to heat impacts exist today and will increase in the future.
An online mechanism for dynamic virtual cluster provisioning in geo-distributed clouds

It is common for cloud users to require clusters of inter-connected virtual machines (VMs) in a geo-distributed IaaS cloud, to run their services. Compared to isolated VMs, key challenges on dynamic virtual cluster (VC) provisioning (computation + communication resources) lie in two folds: (1) optimal placement of VCs and inter-VM traffic routing involve NP-hard problems, which are non-trivial to solve offline, not to mention if an online efficient algorithm is sought; (2) an efficient pricing mechanism is missing, which charges a market-driven price for each VC as a whole upon request, while maximizing system efficiency or provider revenue over the entire span. This paper proposes efficient online auction mechanisms to address the above challenges. We first design SWMOA, a novel online algorithm for dynamic VC provisioning and pricing, achieving truthfulness, individual rationality, computation efficiency, and (1 + 2 log μ)-competitiveness in social welfare, where μ is related to the problem size. Next, applying a randomized reduction technique, we convert the social welfare maximizing auction into a revenue maximizing online auction, PRMOA, achieving O(log μ)-competitiveness in provider revenue, as well as truthfulness, individual rationality and computation efficiency. We validate the efficacy of the mechanisms through solid theoretical analysis and trace-driven simulations.
Microprogrammable processor for object-oriented architecture

An advanced microprocessor has been developed for the high performance execution of object oriented language programs. In object oriented languages, improvement of frequent or complex operations such as dynamic type checking, procedure calls, and storage management, contributes toward the increase of overall performance. In order to improve their performance, the microprocessor adopts large on-chip register files, a large EPROM for microstore, and ingenious instruction dispatching and tag-handling mechanisms. By specially treating frequently accessed data, i.e., allocating activation records in register files, much of the data traffic can be effectively localized within the chip, and the complexity of procedure calls as well as the burden imposed on storage management can be alleviated. The tag-handling mechanisms efficiently perform dynamic type checking. As the result, the microprocessor, together with an efficient microprogram, executes object oriented language programs much faster than existing computers. Furthermore, it can efficiently execute other high-level languages by using corresponding microprograms, especially AI-languages.
Effect of joint mobilization using KEOMT and PNF on a patient with CLBP and a lumbar transitional vertebra: a case study

[Purpose] The purpose of this case study was to identify the effects of joint mobilization using Kaltenborn-Evjenth orthopedic manual therapy (KEOMT) and proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation (PNF) techniques on a patient with chronic low back pain (CLBP) and a lumbar transitional vertebra. [Methods] The intervention methods were joint mobilization using KEOMT and PNF techniques. The program consisted of 40-min sessions 3 days a week for 4 weeks. The spinal motion (thoracic and lumbar vertebrae), pain, and thickness of the multifidus were measured. [Results] The angle of spinal curvature increased, and the range of motions (ROMs) flexion and extension increased in the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae. The pain score as measured on a visual analogue scale (VAS) and the Oswestry disability index (ODI) score decreased. The thickness of the multifidus (L4) increased on the left and right sides. [Conclusion] These results suggest that joint mobilization using KEOMT and PNF techniques had a positive effect on the spinal motion, pain, and thickness of the multifidus of a patient with chronic low back pain and a lumbar transitional vertebra.
Non-Uniform Camera Shake Removal Using a Spatially-Adaptive Sparse Penalty

Typical blur from camera shake often deviates from the standard uniform convolutional assumption, in part because of problematic rotations which create greater blurring away from some unknown center point. Consequently, successful blind deconvolution for removing shake artifacts requires the estimation of a spatially-varying or non-uniform blur operator. Using ideas from Bayesian inference and convex analysis, this paper derives a simple non-uniform blind deblurring algorithm with a spatially-adaptive image penalty. Through an implicit normalization process, this penalty automatically adjust its shape based on the estimated degree of local blur and image structure such that regions with large blur or few prominent edges are discounted. Remaining regions with modest blur and revealing edges therefore dominate on average without explicitly incorporating structure-selection heuristics. The algorithm can be implemented using an optimization strategy that is virtually tuning-parameter free and simpler than existing methods, and likely can be applied in other settings such as dictionary learning. Detailed theoretical analysis and empirical comparisons on real images serve as validation.