Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
WS-VLAM: towards a scalable workflow system on the grid

Large scale scientific applications require extensive support from middleware and frameworks that provide the capabilities for distributed execution in the Grid environment. In particular, one of the examples of such frameworks is a Grid-enabled workflow management system. In this paper we present WS-VLAM workflow management system, describe its current design and the developments targeting to support efficient and scalable execution of large workflow applications on the Grid.
“Money Makes the World Go ‘Round”: Digital Stories Telling Depicting the Historical Course of Numismatics from the Tetradrachm to Bitcoin for Vocational Education and Training

The primary research topic of this article is to create and synchronize an updated “digital storytelling” experience using various web-based digital tools in Vocational Education lessons. We organize various digital tools, such as a virtual map-construction of web timelines-virtual exhibition with the “artstep” tool, and a website with the busts of many statues of Piraeus, depicting the evolution of the “numismatics” from Antiquity (from the “Tetradrachm”), until today (to “Bitcoin”). From the point of view of education, the target of this research is supporting teaching and learning for the Sector of “Financial and Administrative Services”–B’ class, and the four (4) specialties of Vocational Education and Training: “Administrative and Financial Services Officer”, “Warehouse and Supply Systems Clerk”, “Marketing and Advertising Officer”, and finally “Tourism Business Employee” C’ class. As a method, we used an interdisciplinary approach, the directions of the research concern all levels of education, from primary to secondary and up to Vocational Training Institutes. The interdisciplinarity of the subject involves the areas of History, Geography, Mathematics, Archaeology, Economic Theories, Sociology, Political Economy, and even Web and digital engineers (Engineers for Informatics and Electronic Engineers), from the point of construction view. Digital constructions will offer the educational community not only knowledge but also an occasion for discussion and analysis of the complex correlations that run through the economy of each period. The article as a result outlines the scientific framework of the constructs and concludes with proposed educational scenarios and future work of the working case.
A Context-Aware Cognitive SIMO DL Transceiver for LTE HetNet Enhanced Pico-Cell Range Expansion

Deploying small cells (pico, femto or relays) in a macro-cell network is an advantageous solution to increase system capacity. However, small cells usually transmit with a weaker power compared to macro-cells, this fact causes a serious interference problem for these former. Range Expansion technique is among the solutions proposed to overcome this problem. The idea is to bias the received signal power from pico-cells in an advantage manner so that we have more UEs offloaded from macro-cell than the real case. Many solutions were proposed in the literature to enhance Range Expansion technique performances. In this paper, we design a new single-input multiple-output (SIMO) context-aware cognitive transceiver (CTR) that is able to switch to the best performing modem in terms of link-level throughput. On the top of conventional adaptive modulation and coding (AMC), we allow the context-aware CTR to make best selection among three different pilot-utilization modes: conventional decision-aided (DA) or pilot- assisted, non-DA (NDA) or blind, and NDA with pilot which is a newly proposed hybrid version between the DA and NDA modes. We also enable the CTR to make best selection between two different channel identification schemes: conventional least-square (LS) and newly developed maximum-likelihood (ML) estimators. Depending on whether pilot symbols can be properly exploited or not at the receiver, we further enable the CTR to make best selection among two data detection modes: coherent or differential. We note that a considerable gains reaching $48\%$ and $42\%$ for $5^{th}$ percentile cell-site and average cell-site throughput respectively can be achieved by using jointly our cognitive transceiver with Range Expansion technique.
Multi-band OFDM for optical networking

In this paper, we present a novel networking technique based on optical Multi-Band Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM). We highlight the interesting features of the solution with respect to existing ones (fully opaque optical networks and transparent networks) for optical metro and core networks. We show that under certain traffic condition MB-OFDM may offer useful flexibility in the context of increasing wavelength bit rates.
Evolution of pulmonary inflammation and nutritional status in infants and young children with cystic fibrosis

Introduction Improved nutrition is the major proven benefit of newborn screening programmes for cystic fibrosis (CF) and is associated with better clinical outcomes. It was hypothesised that early pulmonary inflammation and infection in infants with CF is associated with worse nutrition. Methods Weight, height and pulmonary inflammation and infection in bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) were assessed shortly after diagnosis in infants with CF and again at 1, 2 and 3 years of age. Body mass index (BMI) was expressed as z-scores. Inflammatory cells and cytokines (interleukin 1β (IL-1β), IL-6, IL-8 and tumour necrosis factor α (TNFα)), free neutrophil elastase activity and myeloperoxidase were measured in BAL. Mixed effects modelling was used to assess longitudinal associations between pulmonary inflammation, pulmonary infection (Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa) and BMI z-score after adjusting for potential confounding factors. Results Forty-two infants were studied (16 (38%) male; 39 (93%) pancreatic insufficient); 36 were diagnosed by newborn screening (at median age 4 weeks) and six by early clinical diagnosis (meconium ileus). Thirty-one (74%) received antistaphylococcal antibiotics. More than two-thirds were asymptomatic at each assessment. Mean BMI z-scores were −1.5 at diagnosis and 0.5, −0.2 and −0.1 at 1, 2 and 3 years, respectively. Neutrophil elastase and infection with S aureus were associated with lower BMI, whereas age (p=0.01) and antistaphylococcal antibiotics (p=0.013) were associated with increased BMI. On average, each log10 increase in free neutrophil elastase activity was associated with a 0.43 (95% CI 0.06 to 0.79) reduction in BMI z-score. Discussion Early nutritional status is associated with the underlying pulmonary pathophysiology in CF, and better understanding of these relationships is required. Studies are required to assess whether interventions can decrease pulmonary inflammation and improve nutrition. Early surveillance will enable such targeted interventions with the aim of improving these important clinical outcomes.
Convergence Theorems for Generalized Alternating Minimization Procedures

The EM algorithm is widely used to develop iterative parameter estimation procedures for statistical models. In cases where these procedures strictly follow the EM formulation, the convergence properties of the estimation procedures are well understood. In some instances there are practical reasons to develop procedures that do not strictly fall within the EM framework. We study EM variants in which the E-step is not performed exactly, either to obtain improved rates of convergence, or due to approximations needed to compute statistics under a model family over which E-steps cannot be realized. Since these variants are not EM procedures, the standard (G)EM convergence results do not apply to them. We present an information geometric framework for describing such algorithms and analyzing their convergence properties. We apply this framework to analyze the convergence properties of incremental EM and variational EM. For incremental EM, we discuss conditions under these algorithms converge in likelihood. For variational EM, we show how the E-step approximation prevents convergence to local maxima in likelihood.
Quality of Drinking-water at Source and Point-of-consumption—Drinking Cup As a High Potential Recontamination Risk: A Field Study in Bolivia

In-house contamination of drinking-water is a persistent problem in developing countries. This study aimed at identifying critical points of contamination and determining the extent of recontamination after water treatment. In total, 81 households were visited, and 347 water samples from their current sources of water, transport vessels, treated water, and drinking vessels were analyzed. The quality of water was assessed using Escherichia coli as an indicator for faecal contamination. The concentration of E. coli increased significantly from the water source [median=0 colony-forming unit (CFU)/100 mL, interquartile range (IQR: 0–13)] to the drinking cup (median=8 CFU/100 mL; IQR: 0–550; n=81, z=−3.7, p<0.001). About two-thirds (34/52) of drinking vessels were contaminated with E. coli. Although boiling and solar disinfection of water (SODIS) improved the quality of drinking-water (median=0 CFU/100 mL; IQR: 0–0.05), recontamination at the point-of-consumption significantly reduced the quality of water in the cups (median=8, IQR: 0–500; n=45, z=−2.4, p=0.015). Home-based interventions in disinfection of water may not guarantee health benefits without complementary hygiene education due to the risk of post-treatment contamination.
A MicroRNA Signature of Hypoxia

ABSTRACT Recent research has identified critical roles for microRNAs in a large number of cellular processes, including tumorigenic transformation. While significant progress has been made towards understanding the mechanisms of gene regulation by microRNAs, much less is known about factors affecting the expression of these noncoding transcripts. Here, we demonstrate for the first time a functional link between hypoxia, a well-documented tumor microenvironment factor, and microRNA expression. Microarray-based expression profiles revealed that a specific spectrum of microRNAs (including miR-23, -24, -26, -27, -103, -107, -181, -210, and -213) is induced in response to low oxygen, at least some via a hypoxia-inducible-factor-dependent mechanism. Select members of this group (miR-26, -107, and -210) decrease proapoptotic signaling in a hypoxic environment, suggesting an impact of these transcripts on tumor formation. Interestingly, the vast majority of hypoxia-induced microRNAs are also overexpressed in a variety of human tumors.
Progression of early steps of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 replication in the presence of an inhibitor of viral protease

We have evaluated a possible role for human immunodeficiency virus type 1 protease during early steps of replication. For these studies, a specific inhibitor of human immunodeficiency virus protease, Ro31-8959, was used. Synthesis of viral cDNA, its integration into cellular DNA, and its transcription were determined during a one-step, acute infection of MT-4 cells. No consistent difference in any of these parameters was noted between control-infected cultures and those treated with protease inhibitor. However, no infectious progeny virus was produced in treated cultures, and thus spread of infection was severely restricted. Our results do not support an essential activity of viral protease in early steps of replication but are in line with its established role in gag and gag-pol processing and in maturation to infectious progeny virus.
Speech Recognition System of Arabic Digits based on A Telephony Arabic Corpus

Automatic recognition of spoken digits is one of the difficult tasks in the field of computer speech recognition. Spoken digits recognition process is required in many applications such as speech based telephone dialing, airline reservation, automatic directory to retrieve or send information, etc. These applications take numbers and alphabets as input. Arabic language is a Semitic language that differs from European languages such as English. One of these differences is how to pronounce the ten digits, zero through nine. In this research, spoken Arabic digits are investigated from the speech recognition problem point of view. The system is designed to recognize an isolated whole-word speech. The Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK) is used to implement the isolated word recognizer with phoneme based HMM models. In the training and testing phase of this system, isolated digits data sets are taken from the telephony Arabic speech corpus, SAAVB. This standard corpus was developed by KACST and it is classified as a noisy speech database. A hidden Markov model based speech recognition system was designed and tested with automatic Arabic digits recognition. This recognition system achieved 93.72% overall correct rate of digit recognition.
Mixed ligand complex: Synthesis, characterization, and investigation of biomedical activity

تحضيرمركب جديد, تم تحضير معقد النحاس الجديد عن طريق تفاعل CuCl2.2H2O مع الميلاتونين وأحد الأحماض الأمينية (L-cysteine) بنسبة مولية (M:L1:L2) (1:1:1), وتم تشخيص المعقد بواسطة طرق طيفية تتضمن الأشعة تحت الحمراء (FT-IR) والرنين النووي المغناطيسي للبروتون (1H-NMR) والتحليل الحراري (TG) والامتصاص الذري اللهبي (AAS)، وتحليل العناصرالدقيق (CHNS)، وكذلك قياس درجة الانصهار (m.p) وتقديرمحتوى الكلوريد. من معطيات الطرق الطيفية المشاراليها آنفا تشيرالى أن الشكل الهندسي المقترح للمعقد هو ثماني السطوح. أظهرت قياسات التوصيل الكهربائي والمغناطيسية بأن معقد النحاس غيرالكتروليتي وذي صفة بارامغناطيسية. تم فحص فعالية تركيز المعقد المحضر كعامل مضاد للبكتيريا من نوع Escherichia coli (G­)و Staphylococcus aureus (G+) ومضاد للفطريات (fungus Candida) حيث اظهر المعقد فعالية افضل من الليكاندين وتم اختبارخاصيته كمضاد للسرطان.
Voltage‐gated calcium channels in developing GnRH‐1 neuronal system in the mouse

Migration of gonadotropin‐releasing hormone‐1 (GnRH‐1) neurons from the nasal placode into the central nervous system occurs in all vertebrates. This study characterizes the expression of L‐ and N‐type voltage‐gated calcium channels (VGCCs) in migrating GnRH‐1 neurons in mice. Class C (L‐type) and class B (N‐type) VGCGs were detected in GnRH‐1 cells and cells in the olfactory and vomeronasal epithelium during prenatal development. This expression pattern was mimicked in a nasal explant model known to retain many characteristics of GnRH‐1 development in vivo. Using this in vitro system, perturbation studies were performed to elucidate the role of VGCCs in GnRH‐1 neuronal development. This report shows that olfactory axon outgrowth and GnRH‐1 neuronal migration are attenuated when nasal explants are grown in calcium‐free media, and that this effect is temporally restricted to an early developmental period. Blockade of either the L‐ or the N‐type channel did not alter GnRH‐1 cell number or overall olfactory axon outgrowth. However, blockade of N‐type channels altered the distribution of GnRH‐1 neurons in the periphery of the nasal explants. In these explants, more GnRH‐1 neurons were located proximal to, and fewer GnRH‐1 neurons distal to, the main tissue mass, suggesting a general decrease in the rate of GnRH‐1 neuronal migration. These results indicate that extracellular calcium is required for initiating GnRH‐1 neuronal migration and that these events are partially dependent on N‐type VGCC signals.
Component architectures for evolvable XML applications

processing applications. It rst contrasts XML with more traditional approaches to language processing. Second, the main processing paradigms for XML are brie y discussed, with a number of example applications. Several forces that in uence how XML is processed or generated are identi ed and discussed. Then a design pattern is presented that resolves these forces in a particular way. The main objective of the pattern is to realise component-based architectures: systems in which all dimensions of variability can be realised by adding or substituting components.
A method for in-depth comparative evaluation: How (dis)similar are outputs of pos taggers, dependency parsers and coreference resolvers really?

This paper proposes a generic method for the comparative evaluation of system outputs. The approach is able to quantify the pairwise differences between two outputs and to unravel in detail what the differences consist of. We apply our approach to three tasks in Computational Linguistics, i.e. POS tagging, dependency parsing, and coreference resolution. We find that system outputs are more distinct than the (often) small differences in evaluation scores seem to suggest.
Pose Invariant Face Recognition using PCA

Both face detection and recognition are very curious areas in the field of image analysis, computer vision and pattern recognition that has received a big deal of attention over the last few years. It has been widely used for the purpose of security and forensic science for identify of an individual e.g. at the place of video surveillance, airports, traffic, terrorist attacks.To analyze the information of face images: faster, robust and efficient face detection and recognition algorithms are required. This system has been facing problems in recognizing subjects of varying poses, illumination conditions, facial expressions, and face occlusions. Due to variation in pose relative to camera certain features like smile, open eyes or mouth, left side or right side of mouth or eyes, occluded mouth or eyes can’t be detected and extracted properly. It will be a critical task to detect a person with varying poses in vertical direction. In this work we present,face detection is performed by skin tone. Through PCA extract features and system is getting trained and tested. For face recognition process, Euclidean distance is measured and based on that minimum distance face is recognized.
MODELING ‘ REPEATED ’ RECORDS : COVARIANCE FUNCTIONS AND RANDOM REGRESSION MODELS TO ANALYSE ANIMAL BREEDING DATA

INTRODUCTION There is a plethora of statistical literature on modeling and analysis of repeated records, often referred to as longitudinal or growth curve data. These can be analysed fitting a linear model using (restricted) maximum likelihood (Ware 1985). This framework accommodates a wide range of assumptions about the structural form of covariance matrices (e.g. Jennrich and Schluchter 1986). Until recently data from animal breeding applications have generally being analysed invoking one of the extremes of this model, namely a simple constant variance, univariate “repeatability” model or a fully parameterised, multivariate model with unstructured covariance. A specific feature of quantitative genetic analyses, not shared by other fields, is that we want to partition the variation due to individuals into its genetic and environmental components. This paper describes how an intermediate parameterisation can be achieved by fitting a cov riance function(CF) for each source of variation, genetic and environmental, using a random regression(RR) model, and outlines Restricted Maximum Likelihood (REML) estimation of a parsimonious covariance structure.
Measuring Minimum Transmission Resources in the Internet Access Router : A Sustainable Performance / Energy Trade-Off Approach

The intuition pursued in this paper is to allow access network nodes to adapt the switching and transmission resources to the minimum transmission resources the access node has to provide for guaranteeing the maximum performances the network as a whole can provided to the users. For this purpose this paper propose an autonomous measurement mechanism allowing an access node in the Internet to align its power consumption to either the maximum capacity the user traffic requires, or the minimum available capacity in the network path between source and destination. Indeed the access node has to discover the minimum between the above capacity values, which, in fact, represents a resource allocation trade-off that allows the access node to provide the user with the maximum QoS while minimizing the energy consumption.
Madagascine Induces Vasodilatation via Activation of AMPK

Madagascine (3-isopentenyloxyemodin) can be chemically synthesized or purified from several Rhamnus species, and it is found to have more potent biological activities than the parent compound emodin. The aim of this study is to characterize the vasodilatory effect of madagascine on vasoconstriction and sphingosylphosphorylcholine induced vasospasm in ex vivo and reveal the potential mechanisms in vitro. The effects of madagascine on vasoconstriction of rat mesenteric resistance arteries (MRAs) induced by K+, methoxamine, and endothelin-1 were, respectively, studied. The cholesterol-enriched porcine coronary vascular smooth muscle (VSM) strips were used to investigate the effects of madagascine on abnormal constriction induced by sphingosylphosphorylcholine (SPC) which has a pivotal role in vasospasm. The vasodilatory effect was induced by madagascine (0.3–100 μM) in isolated rat MRAs and the vasodilatory effect was blocked by NO synthase inhibitor L-NAME and AMPK inhibitor compound C. Madagascine (10 μM) also significantly relaxed the abnormal constriction in porcine VSM induced by SPC and the effect was abolished by compound C. Madagascine significantly increased the phosphorylation of endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS) in endothelial cells while decreasing the phosphorylation of myosin phosphatase target subunit 1 (MYPT1) in VSM cells. Madagascine-induced vasodilatation was abrogated using small interfering RNA knockdown of AMPK. In summary, madagascine exerted vasodilatation through activating AMPK, leading to the activation of eNOS in endothelium and inhibition of ROCK/MYPT1 in VSM. This study suggests the potential value of madagascine in amelioration of vasospasm related cardiovascular diseases.
Induction of Treebank-Aligned Lexical Resources

We describe the induction of lexical resources from unannotated corpora that are aligned with treebank grammars, providing a systematic correspondence between features in the lexical resource and a treebank syntactic resource. We first describe a methodology based on parsing technology for augmenting a treebank database with linguistic features. A PCFG containing these features is created from the augmented treebank. We then use a procedure based on the inside-outside algorithm to learn lexical resources aligned with the treebank PCFG from large unannotated corpora. The method has been applied in creating a feature-annotated English treebank based on the Penn Treebank. The unsupervised estimation procedure gives a substantial error reduction (up to 31.6%) on the task of learning the subcategorization preference of novel verbs that are not present in the annotated training sample.
HITSZ-ICRC at NTCIR-12 Temporal Information Access Task

This paper presents the methods HITSZ-ICRC group used to Temporalia-2 task at NTCIR-12, including subtask Temporal Intent Disambiguation (TID) and subtask Temporal Diversified Retrieval (TDR). In the TID subtask, we merged results of rule based method and word temporal intent classes vector based method to estimate temporal intent classes distribution on English queries and Chinese queries. The rule based method was improved from the method we used in Temporalia-1. The word temporal intent classes vector based method estimated temporal intent classes distribution by normalizing the sum of temporal intent classes vectors of all words in the query. In the TDR subtask, for the temporal information retrieval, we used TIR system in Temporal-1 to get ranked documents list for each temporal subtopic; for the temporally diversified ranking, we used all documents in result lists of the four temporal subtopics as candidate documents set for a query topic, and ranked each document in the candidate set based on: the document relevant score to each subtopic, the temporal intent classes of temporal expressions in each document and the temporal information of previous ranked documents for the topic. We only tried our methods for TDR subtask on English topics.